Hi guys.
I'm a journalist with multiple sclerosis
on a journey into the heart of the wellness industry
to see if there are better ways to manage my condition
outside of conventional healthcare.
Healthy eating has been a big saviour,
the first thing I do is go for anti-inflammatory foods.
In the last episode I got the sense that the best place to start would be to look at my diet,
but the options on sale at the health food shop,
in my local Town, Stroud, are overwhelming
and advice is thin on the ground.
It won't actually tell me on the bottle what the benefits are.
You can't make a single medicinal claim on a food supplement product.
Fortunately I've had a tip-off there's a man down the road that might be able to help.
Is this open to the public?
If they would like to see it.
But I don't go out of my way.
Ray Hill is a health food store proprietor
and retired nature care practitioner.
He even has a personal Museum of Health Foods Through the Ages.
Do you think that they were doing something right then that we're doing wrong now?
Well we're still trying to get people to eat healthily.
You're looking at stomach and liver,
backache and kidney pills, guitar pills, neural,
blood scavenger herbs,
we can't use these words anymore.
Well I was going to say this is the thing right?
This is the problem and this is what we had.
And who stopped that the pharmaceutical industry in the medical profession.
But why did they stop that?
Presumably it's because they thought that it was damaging,
it was causing some problems,
that people were –
No, no it was interfering with their business.
Ray voices a common bone of contention in the wellness industry,
where the gold standard of safety and efficacy,
large-scale, double-blind, peer-reviewed studies,
are so expensive to conduct that only a select few pharmaceutical corporations
can afford to do them.
In reality for dietary supplements and health foods,
the available evidence is patchy and mixed.
Doesn't look very appetising does it?
Which?
Any of it.
Do you not think?
How can you say that until you've tried it?
I mean I'm just looking at the the pictures, you know,
it's all a bit Brown.
Ice cream?
No.
Meat?
No.
Beer, glass of wine?
No.
A bag of crisps?
No.
Slice of cake?
I haven't had a bag of crisps since I was a boy.
Is there any processed foods you eat?
No.
From my point of view,
75% of your diet should be fruit and vegetables,
10% protein, 10% carbohydrate and 5% fat.
That's not a lot of carbohydrates is it?
No.
I mean I eat okay I think you could always eat better –
Well alright so what did you have for breakfast?
Today I had muesli with oat milk.
And then what did you have for lunch?
Maybe like a pita bread with something in it,
some hummus.
So you've now, most of the stuff that you've eaten so far is all starchy?
Yeah.
Okay.
But you know maybe some spinach in that, add a bit of cucumber.
A satsuma?
A satsuma is all right.
Yeah, oh few.
We've got to understand nutrition ...
But not everyone does.
– in order to feed people, well that's up to the people isn't it?
Well it isn't it isn't it,
I don't think it's always necessarily a conscious decision,
I think that it's it's really hard to understand it
and to get to grips with it.
I think it requires a lot of time,
people don't have money to spend on a lot of this stuff.
There are a lot of people for whom this isn't that easy.
Yeah people have always got problems
and the money is usually the factor,
but fruit and vegetables are probably reasonably cheap.
If you don't eat the right food then ...
If you don't eat it in the right proportion,
then you've got a problem.
I don't think I want to live just eating fruit and salad though.
Then die.
I think taking advice on living a long and healthy life
from a razor sharp 89 year old might not be a bad idea,
but I wondered if like the food in his museum
Ray's prescriptive advice might be a little past its sell by date.
Something modern science has established is just how unique we all are
and with this discovery a new industry has sprung up
offering bespoke advice tailored to the individual.
Oh right, I was thinking I had to shit in a bag,
but no you just swab it.
Oh that's much less stressful.
Today's nutritionists can directly analyse your gut bacteria
to see what's there and what's missing.
I'll give it five minutes.
And while my sample is dispatched for lab analysis,
time for a quick video call to Iowa.
Not a euphemism.
Can I call you Terry?
Oh yeah, yeah how about Dr Terry?
Dr Terry, perfect.
Physician Dr Terry Wahls is a big name in MS circles.
Her TED Talk detailing her own recovery from advanced MS
is a source of inspiration for many with the condition.
She now promotes her tailored diet, 'The Wahls Protocol',
to her followers around the world.
You want me to tell my story, in about two minutes?
Yeah go for it, yeah why not.
My Physicians say because I have secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, recovery is not possible.
It's only relentless decline.
Am I doing all that I can to slow my decline?
I redesigned my paleo diet that I've been following for five years
and that's when the magic happens.
the pain stops, the mental clarity improves,
my energy improves and I begin walking,
with a cane and then without.
I think you've frozen Terry.
Very poignant freeze that was.
Are you still with us?
And then – Ah!
For the first time –
Oh no!
I look at kind of the way that your work is presented
and when it sort of speaks about sort of reversing MS and that sort of thing
Yes.
I think there is a sense that, that means a cure.
Well I suppose in one sense yes,
I surely looke cured because I'm out there biking, hiking,
having a rich and full life.
Am I fully recovered, not quite, but you know I'm very, very functional.
But if I don't maintain my self-care routine
I will go back to that dysfunction, symptoms and severe incapacitating pain.
If you have all this sort of this knowledge
and proof that it's working for so many people,
why isn't it more universally adopted?
It's certainly suggested by a lot of people but it's not kind of the go to –
Why does change happen slowly for all of us?
And that's a very interesting societal question.
I've gone from this fringe lunatic that was being condemned for my message
in 10 years to being heralded as one of the brilliant early innovators
who said that diet and lifestyle really matters.
The drugs are not going to solve this problem.
Never.
No, they could slow down,
but if you don't address diet, sleep, exercise, stress,
you will delay the onset of needing that wheelchair, but you won't stop it.
When I was first diagnosed with MS
I kind of accepted it
and I think that a lot of people don't
and they really get on it in terms of finding things that work for them and solutions
and I kind of felt at the time that my acceptance was a good thing,
was was like a strength,
because it meant that I didn't have kind of a big sort of existential crisis about it,
which a lot of people do, I think it's a,
it's as much a physical issue as a mental issue in some ways.
But because of that and because of that acceptance
perhaps I've been slower to kind of do some of these things that other people might have done.
Well ...
We all have our own journeys.
For some people
they're going to have to get fairly disabled
before they want to say shit, drugs are not going to be enough for me,
I have to do more.
And fortunately more neurologists
and more autoimmune specialists are saying yes I'm going to tell my people about drugs,
but also tell them from day one
that you're diet and self-care
will have a huge impact on your disease course.
As is the case with other diets touted for MS
Dr Terry's confidence in her work is not yet matched by the available evidence
from scientific studies.
But she's working on it.
I'm left wondering if my own hesitancy is a result of skepticism or realism.
A few weeks later and the results of my sample are in.
I'm on Harley Street London's private medicine mecca
and I'm very excited to find out if I'm eating enough broccoli.
Hello Richard.
Hi.
Welcome.
Viola Samson is a microbiome analyst
who works alongside the testing company, Biome Site,
to interpret and improve the balance of her clients stomachs.
It is important to say there is no one ideal gut microbiome.
Everyone's gut microbiome is unique but there are common structures to it
and broad principles that we can work with and that is what I do in practice.
And overall am I winning?
Simple question?
There are stuff, some stuff to celebrate here
and there is definitely stuff to work on.
Okay what we're seeing is a microbiome that's low in anti-inflammatory species,
but high in pro-inflammatory species.
So it's tilted towards that.
What we need to do is get your microbiome back
so that it's anti-inflammatory capacities is actually really working hard for you.
Viola gives me a blow-by-blow account of my gut bacteria
Using words like:
Escherichia.
And:
Rhodospirillaceae.
It's obvious I need to spend a bit of time learning how to process this information,
but what I really want to know is can I still eat cake?
So foods, I mean this is the stuff that you were particularly interested in.
I guess this is the easiest thing for most people right?
Is that if they can go to their local supermarket and instead of buying X they buy Y.
So in broad terms it's the Mediterranean diet with a few tweaks basically.
Whole food, high fibre, bright colours and strong flavours
would be relevant for most people
and I'd be very happy for you to include polyphenol rich foods in your diet.
So that's things like black olives, blueberries, dark chocolate, strawberries.
So people come to me and they expect me to go stop eating gluten,
stop eating dairy, cut all these things out
and actually from a microbiome diet
I'm actually much more looking at bringing things in.
The foods that tend to feed the more pro-inflammatory species would be ...
Meat, animal protein.
But I mean I don't eat a lot of that sort of thing,
what's my excuse for having these sort of inflammatory issues?
Who knows and I think in a way ...
Sure it can kind of be interesting to go there perhaps,
but the most interesting thing is where are you now and where can we get you to
Where does conventional science sit on a lot of this stuff
and what's it waiting for do you think?
It'll be those large-scale, double-blind clinical trials.
But are they happening?
They are, so with diet certainly,
with probiotics some of them,
but don't forget probiotics are actually food stuffs
and they're not actually backed by the kind of level of money
that the pharmaceutical industry can provide.
I think it's going to be very hard
for it to be taken in to conventional medicine as it currently exists
because it's so individualised.
It really is so complex, isn't it?
It's a complex ecosystem
and it's completely interwoven with its habitat, us
and we really are working with just the tip of the iceberg really.
This brave new world of personalised healthcare is certainly exciting
for those that can afford it.
While it feels like the future,
I'm not yet convinced it's the present.
There seems so much we don't yet understand
and I'm wary of filling in the gaps with intuition alone,
but the complexity of the microbiome
surely indicates how flawed a one-size-fits-all approach can be,
meaning the birth of this industry
may yet signal the death of the fad diets,
so at home in the wellness world.