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Multiple Sclerosis (MS) dietary information
Part 3: A Diet for Multiple Sclerosis
The veteran, Austrian low-carbohydrate doctor, Wolfgang Lutz started to work with low-carb in 1957. After seeing the remarkable benefits in other conditions but unable to convince his colleagues of the correctness of his ideas, it seemed to him that the only way he could do so would be to prove its success in a so-far 'incurable' disease. In collaboration with neurologist, Prof. Dr. Kurt Eschel, Lutz conducted a systematic investigation of the effects of carbohydrate restriction on MS.[1]
The two doctors put the group of patients they gathered for the trial straight onto a diet very low in carbohydrates, 20-30g per day at the most. The sort of menu they suggested to these patients was approximately as follows:
- For breakfast, 2 eggs with bacon, a cup of cream and a cup of black coffee;
- For mid-morning snack, cheese with butter;
- For lunch, meat or fish (cooked with butter or lard), vegetables and sometimes, for dessert, a small helping of stewed fruit, low in sugar, or a sweet omelette with a small quantity of jam;
- In the evening, cold cuts of meat, cheese, butter, and mayonnaise.
- Patients were not allowed to eat bread or anything that contained a cereal flour.
- For drinks, patients were permitted water, unsweetened grapefruit and tomato juice, tea and coffee without sugar, soda water and a moderate amount of alcohol.
Dr Lutz told me 'apart from a transient constipation that we put down to the comparative lack of roughage in the new diet, these patients generally managed the actual dietary changeover without great difficulty and soon gained an appetite for more fat. However, response to the diet was not beneficial to all participants in terms of the course of the disease itself, for whilst there were some very encouraging results, sadly the condition of a few of the participants worsened.'
The experience taught Lutz three very important lessons. The first of these was that it could take time for the body to accomplish what is really a major change in fuel supply. When someone switches from a very high to an extremely low carbohydrate diet, this means that the body's metabolism, which has been used to obtaining a great deal of its energy from glucose, now has to get used to burning fat as its main fuel. It seems, said Lutz 'that, even in our innards, habits linger! I think I that, initially, I underestimated the nervous system's need for the carbohydrate to which it was habituated and that I overestimated its ability to switch quickly to the burning of fat.'
The second lesson he learnt was that, because it can take time for the body to switch fuel supplies, it is important not to reduce carbohydrates too fast. Some people manage the transition in a few days, for others it takes several weeks or even several months. In this trial, it was those patients who were the most ill to start with who had most difficulty adapting to the new diet and who were most likely to worsen with the changeover.
The third lesson he learnt was that, for certain people and for certain diseases as well as MS, it is important not to reduce carbohydrates below a specific amount, as this could cause unnecessary complications. In the trial, some patients with MS were fine and thrived on such a low amount of carbohydrate, but it troubled others.
Lutz, therefore, abandoned the radical approach that he had started out with, and adopted a more moderate procedure. From that point on, he says 'I never again saw any increase of spasticity in patients with multiple sclerosis that I put on the diet. Thereafter, results were consistent and, time after time, confirmed the real value of treating multiple sclerosis by carbohydrate restriction'.
In that early trial of thirty-six patients, no success was achieved with patients who'd had multoiple sclerosis longer than five years, or who were already experiencing progressive and continual decline. But the results were very positive with people who had had the disease for a shorter period. Patients who had been diagnosed with MS within the previous six months were consistently helped by the diet, as were those who had had multiple sclerosis for less than five years and whose illness came in stages: these people either gained full or almost full remission or, at the very least, they improved to how they had been before the last step down. So, amongst the thirty-six people on the diet of that time, there were a few 'miracle cures' — patients who 'took up their beds and walked', or at least put their sticks in the corner and walked. Lutz and Eckel knew of several of these patients who had kept to the diet and were still free of relapse, even years later.
Lutz was not an Multiple Sclerosis specialist, so saw only a small number of patients with MS. However, he did have a total of fifty-three patients, all of whom he treated with a low-carb diet. He says:
'The amount of improvement one can hope for does depend on the situation at the beginning of treatment. Obviously, whatever the illness, certain things are no longer changeable. With multiple sclerosis, once the brain and bone marrow are so infiltrated with scary foci that a nerve of any length has no chance of reaching its destination without losing its isolation (and therefore its conductivity), one can only hope for limited improvement. If, before starting the diet, patients can no longer walk, if there is already paralysis of the bladder or bowels, then the hope of a return of lost functions is only slight and often the most one can hope for is to arrest decline.'
'But this arrest in further decline, in my experience, one may indeed hope for.' says Lutz. 'In all the time since I adopted a gradual approach to carbohydrate reduction with multiple sclerosis patients, I have not witnessed deterioration in the condition of a single person that kept to the diet, only improvement in so far as this was still possible. How I wish that I could convince neurologists of the value of carbohydrate restriction in the treatment of multiple sclerosis. All too often there is a general defeatism that surrounds this condition, and especially as regards diet, as the following case history illustrates:
'At a clinic in Vienna, a young girl was told that no special diet was necessary. She received all the usual therapeutic measures, but in spite of this, her condition continued to deteriorate. She came to me and I put her on my low carbohydrate diet. Almost immediately she started to show signs of considerable improvement; after six months, the patient was practically free of symptoms and all her paralysis and sensory disturbances had disappeared. Two years later she telephoned me to ask if she could go to Morocco with her boyfriend. A year later still, her mother rang to ask whether I thought pregnancy would be harmful to her daughter. I heard that after three years on the diet she had stayed well and was still doing fine.
Dr Lutz's protocol was to reduce the amount of carbohydrate in the patient's diet very gradually from their accustomed amount to a certain level, usually not less than 110g. Then, step by step, each month he would reduce the amount by about 12g, until reaching that level of carbohydrate which was required for long-term daily use: about 70g a day.
Dr Jan Kwasnieski's experiences
Dr Wolfgang Lutz is not alone in pioneering low-carb diets in MS, either in using this method of treatment or in having success with it. In Poland, Dr Jan Kwasnieski has had similar success for the past thirty years with a total of 212 patients: 131 women and 81 men. He says that someone with MS can expect the following benefits:[2]
- A full cure from the disease, which often happens provided the disease has not been of long duration. On occasion, a cure has been possible in individuals suffering for as long as 5 years.
- A halt in the progression of the disease (always).
- An improvement in the physical condition and a reduction of disease symptoms (to a varied extent).
- An elimination (practically total) of new attacks of the disease provided the optimal nutrition is continued indefinitely.
- Achievement of the highest degree of resistance to all sorts of infection.
For this disease, however, Dr Kwasnieski recommends not just a very low-carb, high-fat diet with proportions similar to those in this article, but also one that includes animal brains. He points out that good results in the USA have been achieved with sausages which incorporated brains. Unfortunately, since the BSE scares of the 1980s, brains are no longer available in Britain. A shame really, not just for the treatment of MS, but because, as a client of mine said after sampling them on holiday in France, 'they're yummy!'
Conclusion
MS is considered by conventional physicians to be incurable. It is currently treated with drugs that are mostly palliative. The evidence from both population studies and from clinical observations strongly suggests that, whatever stage the disease has reached, it can be halted with diet alone. The evidence also strongly suggests that, if it is less than five years from first diagnosis, there is a good possibility that the condition can be reversed and you can lead a normal, symptom-free life.
The treatment is the diet recommended in this article as far as proportions of carbohydrates to protein to fat are concerned, together with the removal of all products made with cereals (wheat, oats, rye, barley, rice) and liquid milk.
References
[1]. Eckel K, Lutz W. Über die Behandlung der Multiple Sklerose mittels Kohlenhydratentzuges. Wien Klin Wschr 1961; 493-5.
[2]. Kwasnieski J, Chylinski M. Homo Optimus. Wydawnictwo WGP, Warsaw, 2000, 144-8. And personal interview, September 2006
Last updated 16 November 2009
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