"Low Protein Diets for Parkinson's Disease"
Parkinson's disease is a disease of dopamine deficiency in the brain.
You can't just have people take dopamine because it can't
pass through the blood-brain barrier,
but you can give people a dopamine precursor
called levodopa, or L-dopa, which can get up into the brain
and be turned into dopamine.
However, with prolonged treatment, patients start to show a reduced
response to levodopa. After 5 years of levodopa treatment,
the benefits start wearing off before the next dose,
or don't completely contain symptoms in a substantial proportion of patients,
and represents a major source of disability, and significantly
impairs quality of life. Therefore, maximizing the therapeutic efficiency
of levodopa is an important goal, and that's where
protein-restricted diets come in.
Wait, what does protein have to do with Parkinson's?
Certain amino acids in proteins have been proven to impair
the therapeutic effect of levodopa by reducing its absorption
and influx into the brain, because they use
the same transporter so can crowd each other out.
Here's a before-and-after PET scan showing levodopa activity
in the brain before and after protein loading.
That's why protein-restricted diets can improve the efficacy of levodopa.
There are three ways to do that: an overall low-protein diet,
a so-called protein-redistribution diet, or a combination of the two.
As a dietary strategy, a low-protein diet is nice because
it's not only effective, but also simple to understand and follow.
And by low protein, we're just talking about sticking to the recommended
amount of protein, 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight.
As I've covered before, most people are eating excess protein
and suffering because of it.
0.8 grams per KG is equivalent to about 0.36 grams per pound.
So you take your weight in pounds, multiply times 0.36,
and get how many grams in protein you should eat in a day.
So if you weigh 140 pounds,
you should eat about 50 grams of protein a day.
The positive effect of limiting dietary protein can be noticed within
one week, even in patients no longer responding to the manipulation
of levodopa's medication schedule or to other anti-Parkinson drugs.
Protein-redistribution diets have been investigated most thoroughly,
and have been confirmed
to be effective with a remarkable 60 to 100% response rate.
We know about the deleterious influence of dietary protein
and the benefit of a low-protein diet; however, it's not only
the total amount of daily protein but also how it's distributed
over the day. If we eat only protein-rich foods at night,
staying under a total of 10 grams a day for breakfast and lunch,
then we eliminate the amino acid surges during the day,
and who cares if they surge after we go to bed?
Parkinson's is a movement disorder, and so if the drugs
are not going to work,
then it might as well be when you're sleeping.
Fiber is another way to get levodopa to work better.
Significant improvements in L-dopa blood levels and
Parkinson's symptoms starting as early as 30 to 60 minutes
after eating a diet rich
in insoluble fiber, like the kind found concentrated in whole grains.
Well, if fiber helps, then how about a plant-based diet
for the management of Parkinson's disease?
You don't know until you put it to the test.
They looked at a normal protein amount redistributed plant-based diet,
and Parkinson's patients saw a significant improvement in symptoms
and performance, making it a convenient way to conjugate
the positive effects of non-excess protein intake
and a high fiber intake without limiting total food amount.
Planning such a diet is rather simple, centering around unprocessed
plant foods, but reserving protein-rich plants like beans, split peas,
chickpeas, lentils, and peanuts to the evening meal.
And voila --- the clinical improvement hit all the major motor signs:
the rigidity, the tremor, and slowness of movement,
the things that really matter to Parkinson's patients,
in particular the tremor, the shaking, which often does not respond
to drugs but was highly positively affected by the plant-based diet.
So plants may be preferable for Parkinson's,
but you don't know how well it will work for you until you give it a try.