"Treating Multiple Sclerosis with the Swank MS Diet"
Multiple sclerosis is an unpredictable and frightening
degenerative autoimmune inflammatory disease
of the central nervous system
in which our body attacks our own nerves.
It often strikes in the prime of life
and can cause symptoms in the brain--cognitive impairment,
in the eye--painful loss of vision,
tremor, weakness, loss of bladder control, pain, and fatigue.
The most frequently prescribed drug,
for multiple sclerosis is beta interferon,
which can make you feel lousy
and cost $30,000 a year.
But hey--it might be worthwhile IF... it actually worked.
We learned last year that it doesn't
seem to prevent or delay long-term disability.
That leaves chemo drugs like Mitoxantrone
that causes irreversible heart damage
in 1 out of every 8 people who go on the drug
and treatment-related acute leukemia.
It causes leukemia in nearly 1% of people who take it.
But hey, MS is no walk in the park.
If only there was a cheap, simple, safe,
side effect free solution that also just so happened
to be the most effective treatment for MS ever described.
Dr. Roy Swank, who we lost at age 99
was a distinguished neurologist whose research
culminated in over 170 scientific papers.
Let's look at a few.
As far back as 1950, we knew that there were
areas in the world that had a lot of MS:
North America, Europe—
—and other places: Africa and Asia—
that hardly had any.
And now we have all these migration studies
showing that if you move from a high risk area
to a low risk area your risk drops, and vice versa.
So it seemed less genetics, and more lifestyle.
Dr. Swank had an idea,
as he recounts in an interview with Dr. John McDougall,
at the ripe young age of 84:
"It seems possible to me that this could be a matter of food,"
"because the further north you go"
"the less vegetarian a life is led"
"and the more people are carnivores you might say,"
"they spend a lot more time eating meat."
After looking at the multiple sclerosis data
from World War II in occupied countries
where meat and dairy were rationed,
and his famous study in '52 finding the frequency of MS
directly related to the amount of saturated animal fat
consumed daily in different areas of Norway,
he concluded it might be the animal fat.
So he decided to put it to the test,
by restricting people's intake of saturated animal fat.
Here's his first 47 patients before cutting out
about 90% of the saturated fat from their diet,
and here's after… showing a decrease
in both the frequency and severity of MS attacks.
Normally, you're lucky if you can get people
to stick to a diet for 6 months,
and so that's why most dietary trials last a year at the most.
This is reporting results from the first 3 1/2 years.
Then came the 5 1/2-year follow-up—
he adds about another 100 patients.
Then the 7-year follow-up,
published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Then the 20-year follow-up, the 34-year follow-up.
How did they do?
If you can get people early in their disease,
when they're only mildly disabled,
and restrict their saturated fat intake,
Dr. Swank showed he could stop their disease
in 95% of cases—no further disability 34 years later.
But if they started slacking on their diet—
even years in, their disease could become reactivated.
They felt so great they were like,
hey, I can cheat a little bit,
I got this disease under control.
But eating just 8 grams of saturated fat more a day
was accompanied by a striking increase in disability
and nearly tripling the death rate.
How about a 50-year follow-up?
They were able to track down 15 of the original patients
that stuck to the diet,
now in their 70's and 80's,
with multiple sclerosis for over 50 years,
and 13 out of 15,
were walking around normal in all respects.
They were active and, evidently,
unusually youthful looking.
Conclusion: "This study indicated that,"
"in all probability, MS is caused largely"
"by consumption of saturated animal fat."
He thought it was the sludging of the blood
caused by even a single meal of saturated fats
that can clog tiny capillaries
that feed our nervous system.
See, diets rich in saturated fat and cholesterol
can thicken the blood, and make our red cells sticky.
A single meal of sausage and eggs
can stick our blood cells together like rolls of quarters.
And this kind of hyperaggregation
can lead to a reduction of blood flow
and oxygenation of our tissues.
If you put someone's blood through a machine
that sucks out about 90% of the cholesterol in their blood,
you can demonstrate an immediate improvement
in microcirculation in the heart muscle.
But what about the brain?
The eyes are the windows… to your brain.
You can visualize— in real-time—
changes in blood vessel function in the retina
at the back of the eye,
which gives you a sense of what's happening
further back in the brain.
And if you lower the cholesterol level in the blood,
you can immediately get a significant improvement in vasodilation,
the little veins open wider and let the blood flow.
So yes, it could be the saturated fat
leading to clogging of our capillaries,
but now we know animal fats can have all sorts
of other deleterious effects such as inflammation,
so who knows what the actual mechanism
may be by which cutting animal fat can cut MS progression.
Regardless, patients with MS that follow a diet
with no more than 10 or 15 grams of saturated fat
can expect to survive and thrive to a ripe old age.
Of course, cutting out saturated fat completely
might be better, given that heart disease
is our number one killer.
The bottom line is that the results
Dr. Swank published remain THE most effective
treatment of multiple sclerosis EVER reported
in the peer reviewed medical literature.
In patients with early stage MS,
95% were without progression of their disease
34 years later after adopting
his low saturated fat dietary program.
"Even patients with initially advanced disease"
"showed significant benefit."
"To date, no medication or invasive procedure"
"has ever even come close, to demonstrating such success."
Doesn't cost $30,000 dollars;
doesn't give you leukemia— and works, better!
Of course, this all begs one big obvious question:
"If Dr. Swank's results are so stunningly impressive,"
"why haven’t other physicians, neurologists,"
"or centers adopted this method of treatment?"
Good question!
One reason may be that MRI machines
weren't invented until the 1970s.
MRIs are how we track the progress of MS today.
We don't have to rely on patients’ subjective reports
or doctor's clinical judgements.
We can see the disease get better or worse
right there in black and white.
It's like in the 1970's
when Nathan Pritikin appeared to reverse heart disease
by the thousands but no one took him seriously
until angiography was invented
and the likes of Ornish and Esselstyn,
could hold up images like this,
proving conclusively that a plant-based diet
could literally open up arteries,
right there in black and white.
So what we need is someone to repeat
Swank's experiment today,
with MRI scans every step of the way…
and, I'm happy to report that exact experiment
was just completed, by Dr. John McDougall.
Dr. Swank was one of Dr. McDougall's medical mentors,
and Dr. McDougall is one of mine.
Study enrollment was completed last year
and we should have the results sometime soon.