Carbonfiberboy 

As a proud Alaskan I can tell you that remark is not OK. You have no clue.

elcruxio

Ooh ooh oooh! Can I try? I have diabetes, is it due to my diet?

Syke! It's type 1. But thanks for playing anyways

On a more serious note, here are the nordic nutrition recommendationsa.
You can tell these are good since it's not a picture but comprehensive 600 page book /science article.
You access it with the READ- button near the pdf and epub buttons

Machka 

He would have you believe you developed Type 1 diabetes because your mother ate a piece of bread while she was pregnant with you.

Same as my genetic predisposition toward blood clots and kidney stones. Both of which go way back through both my mother's and father's lines, and both often occuring in the same family members. He'd want me to believe that some ancestor from way back ground some wheat-like stuff into a flour-like substance and baked it ... and that was the start of it all. Everything went downhill after that.

elcruxio

Ah yes i've heard of this. Apparently you eat bad genes in bad foods and then the bad genes somehow affect your genes and stuff happens. It's all very complicated

tmac100

Yup we speculate BUT will never know for sure why... Bad genes? Whatzat? Bad food? Whatzat? Most food is processed to keep in the "goodness". Advertisements have said so for years and years.... YMMV and

Rowan

RR3, I am having a little trouble reconciling your comments here about carbohydrates being the cause of all illness and your comments in this thread in the Long Distance forum, where you recommend potatoes, and even worse, dehydrated meals...

Either you are arguing for the sake of arguing, or you don't practise what you preach.

Sixty Fiver

Epigentics.

Dr. Terry Wahls speaks to this quite well and her success in reversing and overcoming her own MS and successfully treating others with a multimodal approach that has a high focus on a healthy diet, exercise, and stress reduction.

One of her best pieces of advice is to eliminate added sugar and to limit grains, and to eat a lot more vegetables and healthy cuts of meat including organ meats and fats to provide essential nutrients.

Local, fresh, and in season is good advice as well.

elcruxio

Cool stuff

A few things which bother me however (I didn't watch the whole video, because I got all snake oily...)
1) couldn't the essential nutrients be ingested in supplement form rather than with a complicated restrictive diet? I mean this is kinda what medicine does. Instead of chewing willow bark you take aspirin...

2) As I didn't watch the whole video, just skipped through, I'm not completely sure about this, but she does seem to give little emphasis on the NMES she used. I mean she 'cured' herself with diet sure, but she also used Neuro Muscular Electrical stimulation. As she apparently has not conducted a clinical study, we really don't know whether it was the diet or the NMES which had the significant effect, as there has been no controls etc.

3) Which brings me to my third point. Why hasn't she conducted clinical studies? If I were to find a life changing treatment for a serious chronic disease I'd be studying it through like crazy so I would have something concrete. Also, fame and money and all that cool stuff. Although she did cash it by selling a book, but still no studies... Makes you wonder...

4) I hear medical marijuana is the bomb when dealing with MS. I wonder why she hasn't mentioned it. Combined with the diet, NMES, supplementation and exercise I'd imagine you could cure it for everyone. But we'd need clinical trials first...

Sixty Fiver

I believe that she has been studying this intensively and you should watch the whole video, her knowledge is vast and she has been applying this treatment or protocol to her patients with what appears to be very good results.

She is also fairly humble and admits we still don't know as much as we should, it is scientists like her that are pushing this type of research which goes against the medical establishment that is always pretty quick to prescribe a pill.

My GP and neurologist are also very focussed on lifestyle and diet when it comes to treating chronic health issues and are reluctant to prescribe medications if a holistic approach could yield better results.

I will probably be getting coverage for medical marijuana to see if that offers more benefits, many of the symptoms I experience are akin to those with MS because of the neurological aspects.

I use a TENS unit to alleviate pain and to maintain muscle tone in my back and hip where the signals are all messed up, this is part of many multi modal approaches where the muscle deterioration has reached a point where exercise becomes impossible.

My wife battled vitamin deficiencies for decades after cancer, supplements did very little to alleviate those while certain foods have done wonders... she did not eat much liver until we met and now that and other organ meats are a staple in our diet.

Those deficiencies have vanished as she is able to absorb those essential nutrients from food far better than she ever could with supplements... she is about as well informed as anyone and has been teaching our physician about thyroid cancer, it's long term effects, and effective treatment.

Her new thyroid medication is also bio-identical (dessicated pig thyroid)... this change has been remarkable in so many respects and particularly in how much better she absorbs nutrients.

Mind you, she still lost most of the extra (post surgical) weight before she changed her thyroid medication and this was due to abandoning carbs... she stays under 30 grams a day and she is hard to keep up with as her energy levels have soared.

As for me... leaning more heavily toward the lower carb model has been working really well.

Carbonfiberboy 

More quackery. There's a good reason for this on-screen message from TED: they are in danger of losing control of their brand due to videos of quackery like this being made with TED symbols present. See: https://hbr.org/2013/04/when-ted-los...-of-its-crowd/

MS is a disease with many forms and many forms of remission. I know many people with MS who are in remission and do not eat any special diet, though most take some modern medication.

For a quick refresher on how to tell quackery from science, from Forbes of all places: 10 Questions To Distinguish Real From Fake Science - Forbes

In this case, #8 and #9 are particularly relevant.

My mother-in-law died from MS 14 years ago. There were quack MS diets back then too, and no medicinal help at all. Back in the 50s, My stepfather paid a "doctor" to inject gold into his veins in the hope of getting relief from his rheumatoid arthritis. The wish to believe in something magical that can cure or help you will never go away.

Sixty Fiver

A good number of TED talks should come with a warning...

So the advice to practice a healthy diet that is free of additives and added amounts of sugar could alleviate the symptoms of a disease is quackery ?

If the body is deficient one cannot expect it to put up a 100% fight against diseases, reducing or eliminating the foods that aggravate the condition is also sound advice.

Dr Wahls also states that she continues to take prescribed medications, albeit in far lower dosages and sometimes not at all as part of a multi modal approach to treating a disease that should have her confined to a wheelchair.

If you have arthritis then focusing on and eliminating inflammatory foods is one of the first steps one takes.

Carbonfiberboy 

The implication that diet can restore the myelin sheath is quackery. There is no evidence presented that anything she is doing, including taking her meds, is affecting the progress of her disease. As there should not be, HIPA being a real thing. That's the reason doctors who are involved in research use anonymous subjects in blind trials and publish the evidence of efficacy or the lack there of. They don't use "personal narrative," nor do they profit from their research other than to draw a salary for their work. The implication that otherwise she would be in a wheelchair is simply false. It's a lie and she profits from that lie. There is no way to know what the progress of her disease would have been had she not altered her diet. She sucks in the gullible for her own profit, just like the doctor with the gold injections. This is reprehensible.

Of course it's a good idea to eat a good diet. However the contention that certain foods aggravate this disease is quackery unless supported by evidence of clinical trials. Which, BTW, she is not about to use. Instead, she is "researching" by using research subjects in this multi-modal approach, thus purposely obfuscating any possible relation between treatment and disease.

AFAIK, there has never been a large randomized clinical trial which showed a relationship between diet and the progress of MS. The only study I know of is old, somewhat flawed, and might have shown that MS patients did better on very low fat diets, particularly very low saturated fat, though with what little fat there was being high in omega 3. Nothing to do with sugar, wheat, additives, etc. There might be evidence that supplementing with vitamin D is helpful.

GeorgeBMac

Good points...
But quackery and chicanery are not limited to quacks...

Our tobacco companies, fast food companies, processed food companies and pharmaceutical companies have all resorted to chicanery and quackery in order to sell more of their particular product -- and all of them claim that their science is the only valid science. Often they design an RCT to come up with a certain outcome favoring their product and then hide behind the belief that RCTs are the gold standard of reliability.

... Yes, be careful. Be cynical. But also be open minded...

Lifestyle medicine (diet, exercise & stress management modalities) have been scorned by medical professionals for decades in favor of medicines and medical procedures. Yet, a few brave souls still manage to stand up and point out that they provide more benefit than all the pills and procedures. But then, we don't know which (if any) of those brave souls are telling us the truth either.

There just are no magic formulas to knowing what is true and what is not...
... There is just too much bias and self interest distorting the so called "science".

Carbonfiberboy: I think you have it right: when you hear a claim, you often go back and read the original research and determine if it is valid research and conclusions -- or not. Unfortunately, few people have the resources to be able to do that and instead rely on the claims of quacks of all kinds...

wolfchild

Speaking of quackery, I believe most supplements and "so-called health foods" are just snake oil, marketed by clever quacks and sold at inflated prices as super foods...Out of thousands of different supplements and health foods out there , there are only a handful which may actually work and have a positive effect on human health, most are a complete waste of your money, most don't even contain any beneficial substances and may even be harmful...Supplement industry is worse then processed food industry...So how does a person distinguish between what is good and bad ??

Rowan

Cue... RR3!

Carbonfiberboy 

That's a downside of the "information wants to be free" thing. When climate change first got to be a big thing, I estimate that if one googled "global warming," one would get 100 climate denier websites for every website that offered scientific data. However that's not true now. It takes a while for truth to win out over chicanery, but it usually does. I think everyone knows now that cigarettes are bad for your health, though some choose to accept the risk. But we don't really want to get into P&R, where the problem really lies.

Carbonfiberboy 

Unfortunately we mostly have to do it ourselves, though there are websites which are helpful. I've used Independent Analysis on Supplements & Nutrition | Examine.com.

The downside of doing personal trials is that one can't get a handle on the long-term effects until it may be too late. OTOH, many supplements only work over the long term so a quick trial frequently isn't informative. I've found that there are a lot more supplements that work than you may think. OTOH, reading reviews on Amazon can be quite amusing. Yep, if you bought it, it works. Kind of like one has never met a man who didn't like his new car. I forget the word for that bias. Must be age.

MZilliox

We are human. We are animal. eat food, it grows form the earth. its that easy. don't eat non-food calorie subs. why must we be told how to eat? every other animal has a profound understanding of how to eat, but us smart humans overthink eating. if it grows in the ground or feeds from things that grow in the ground, eat it. if it requires a label listing ingredients you don't know, don't eat it. if it has shelf life over a month, don't eat it.

calories are not calories, and so many people try to argue otherwise. 3k calories of salad does not equal 3k calories of big mac, no matter what you try to argue. counting calories is a waste of time.

nutrient density is far more important than calories. nutrient density is best illustrated by colors. if your food is grown in the ground and is colorful, you are doing great!

science knows nothing about nutrition. science still puts weight on calories in and calories out. science does not understand nutrient absorption. one only has to eat nutrient dense food for a small amount of time to observe positive changes, science is not necessary.

Oh the sad state of food. no wonder the health care system is screwed.

MZilliox

supplement indicates your diet is insufficient right? so if your diet is good, what good are supplements? often times they are not even in a form our body can absorb. haha. snake oil indeed sir.

Carbonfiberboy 

I carelessly forgot to include my cites in my MS piece in post 137. Here they are:
That a diet low in saturated fat may be beneficial:
MS Diet | Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis

That vitamin D may help prevent and ameliorate MS:
Vitamin D and MS: Is there any connection? - Mayo Clinic

Carbonfiberboy 

The NYT happened to have a piece on this very problem today:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/op...ce-frauds.html

The intended take-away is that there are no bad people, only bad incentives. I tend to agree with that sentiment.

Carbonfiberboy 

Spoken like a person who has never tried coffee, dark chocolate, or beer: three of our oldest supplements. Nope, don't do a thing, do they?

wolfchild

After doing a lot of reading and research, about a month ago I decided to start taking a mixture of MSM/Glucosamine/Chondroitine as a preventative measure. I never experienced any joint pains yet but as we age and become older repetitive injuries add up. I want to be able to exercise and cycle for as long as possible without any serious joint problems. I hope that stuff works.

Rowan

There's a supplement for that!

I think.

Rowan

And just how many people have a healthy diet?

Heck, we can't even agree on what is a healthy diet in these forums, so what hope have the great unwashed got?