Five years ago Selena Gomez was diagnosed with lupus,
an autoimmune disease in which the body's immune system
mistakenly attacks healthy tissue in many parts of the body,
including the kidneys, joints, skin, heart, lungs and brain.
She was suffering from arthritis and kidney failure which is linked to the condition
and summer of 2017 her condition got so severe that she had to have a kidney transplant.
Her amazing friend Francia Raísa, was her kidney donor.
Her story really struck me as just recently I had read an amazing article
written by Dr Brooke Goldner a medical doctor who was diagnosed with lupus as a teenager.
When she was just 16 years old doctors told Brooke she had six months to live.
She had systemic lupus and was in stage 4 kidney failure.
It was so severe that doctors said that the best case scenario
with standard treatments was dialysis; the worst case scenario was that she would die.
For 2 years she was given Chemo to shut off her immune system,
which stabilized her enough to be able to go on with her life and eventually attend medical school.
However it was during her third year at medical school
that she suffered a mini stroke due to antibodies that were causing blood clots.
Doctors once again stabilized her and life went on.
Interestingly she described her self as a cheesatarian that ate a lot of processed food.
She eventually married and her husband, a personal trainer
decided to put her on a high raw food vegan diet.
She said her joint pain, and migraines disappeared
and four months after changing her diet her lupus tests came back negative.
Such a dramatic remission was unheard of.
She says "In all documented cases, lupus can be in long-term remission,
but the blood tests will still reflect the autoimmune condition.”
So in her case doctors couldn’t figure it out.
Today she is still healthy and eats a whole-food, plant-based diet of both cooked and raw foods.
Dr Goldner has written a book called Goodbye Lupus and has a fantastic website veganmedicaldoctor.com
With this incredible story in mind I was really interested
in what kind of diet Selena Gomez might have been eating prior to the severe deterioration in her condition.
I came across an interview given by Selena’s trainer Amy Rosoff,
I think from last year, who shared what Selena ate in a day.
For breakfast she said it’s usually "Green Juice, a breakfast burrito of scrambled eggs, chorizo, avocado, rice and beans
or a bagel and cream cheese, or full-fat Greek yogurt and granola.
Lunch is then either a Chinese chicken salad,
or a plain chicken or turkey salad,
a turkey sandwich with lettuce slaw, or tacos.
Dinner is usually salmon and vegetables, or roast chicken and pasta,
or Teriyaki bowl with Asian-marinated cucumber with salmon or chicken,
she said that Selena loves "a good plate of fried chicken" every once in a while
This really grabbed my attention so I then went on
the hunt for more stories of people who were able
to treat and reverse lupus with diet.
Is it really possible or was Dr Goldner’s story just a fluke?
and then I came across Mayra’s story...
At 13 years old she almost died due to the complications of lupus.
She was given transfusions, plasmapheresis, chemotherapy, and steroids
and managed to survive.
Her parents then decided to take her to Dr. Andrew Weil’s Clinic of Integrative Medicine
where she was advised to take olive oil, fish oil, as well as vitamins and herbal supplements.
Milk was removed from her diet but fish, shrimp, meat, and eggs were recommended in moderation.
However despite all of this her white blood cells were still falling and she had to be put back on steroids again,
and Plaquenil, an anti-malarial drug with doctors also insisting on more chemo.
Her father then discovered Dr John Mcdougall. and decided to put
Mayra on Dr Mcdougall’s plant based diet and stopped all the supplements and herbs.
They said the results of the diet change were immediate.
The next month’s test showed a normal white blood cell count,
and so did the next, and the next. Three whole months, with no steroids.
for two of those months she was still on Plaquenil, but for the third month she was without that drug.
They said “As we followed the diet more strictly everything became better.
Her white blood cell count is now normal, 4.8.
Almost one year after starting the McDougall diet she is still drug free and healthy.
Then I came across another story about Vanessa, who was diagnosed with lupus nephritis
and straight after diagnosis doctors did a kidney biopsy.
Kidney tissue disease has 5 categories.
Vanessa’s biopsy was categorized as 4, one category before dialysis.
Two months after her diagnosis her mother was then given Dr McDougall’s book
Mcdougall’s Medicine a Challenging Second Opinion
and she put Vanessa immediately on his diet alongside medication.
4 months later her second biopsy showed her kidneys had improved to be between a category one and two.
her doctor had never seen this happen so dramatically.
she is now completely off all medication with no signs of lupus.
Vanessa says she will never eat anything other than low-fat vegan the rest of her life.
Now there aren’t many studies on plant based diets and lupus
with most only being animal studies and as of yet no large-scale studies.
However the prestigious medical journal the lancet did report on the case of a 16-year-old girl
with lupus who changed to a pure vegetarian diet with no animal foods
and stopped her steroids without her doctor’s permission.
After starting the diet her antibody titers which are a reflection of disease activity
fell to normal and her kidney disease improved.
Dr Mcdougall has found that Lupus tends to be a disease
of people living in Western countries and it’s rare in places like rural Africa
He believes Lupus may be caused by food proteins, usually animal proteins
entering the bloodstream through a “leaky gut.”
and the body makes antibodies to these foods proteins.
However the antibodies do two things that cause problems:
1) antibody-antigen complexes are formed that persist
and become stuck in the skin, joints, and/or kidneys, and cause an inflammatory reaction.
and 2) antibodies are made to these foreign food proteins that also attack the person’s own tissues
including skin, joints, kidneys etc
By both mechanisms the tissues become inflamed, eventually die, and are replaced by non-functioning scar tissues
Traditional medical treatments fail to arrest this disease.
However a whole food plant based diet can dramatically benefit and even cure people of this disease.
Now of course I know that each person’s situation is different and we don’t know the
ins and outs of someone’s medical condition
and I also recognize that a plant based diet is not a cure all
but you do have to wonder what might have happened if Selena Gomez had tried a whole food plant based diet.