Originally Posted by
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.
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.