Diet for MS pt 2

My wife has followed two main diets over the years. Swank's MS Diet and the Breaking the Vicious Cycle diet. She followed Swank's MS diet to the letter for 10 years, and only stopped due to a career change that impeded cooking regularly. Dr. Swank always told us that when she quit the diet, she would begin to have issues within two years. He was right, and after the two years were up, she began to have issues regularly. After a few years of these issues, she had the worst attack of her MS and became numb from her chest down. That is when we first saw a Naturopath and began the "Breaking The Vicious Cycle" diet.

In Swank's diet, my wife was limited to 15 saturated fat grams per day. This meant following very strict guidelines and made it very difficult to dine at a restaurant. With the Vicious Cycle diet, she cut out all wheat and sugar. There is much more to the diet, but these two things created the most issues. Cutting wheat out of your diet is extremely difficult, since it is found in so many foods that you don't think it is in. Sugar is also difficult to cut out. As difficult as it is, both of these diets have proven themselves to help.

In my last post, I referred to parasites, fungus and other things in my wife's blood. After seeing these critters and problems, we realized that our diet could feed them or kill them. We learned quickly that sugar feeds so many parasites and other bacteria in your system and that one way to kill them is to starve them. Our gut is full of bacteria, some good and some bad. We were very aggressive with re-establishing good bacteria and killing the bad bacteria. Using a combination of diet, antibiotics, probiotics and supplements we were able to re-establish the good bacteria.

Through stool testing, we were able to establish a base line and see the progress through this treatment. If you research the links from digestion to other issues in your body, it is overwhelming. When your digestive track is not functioning properly, it affects hormones and nutrition to just name a few things. In the beginning of this, my wife would have days where she felt like she had the flu with aching and a general bad feeling. Once we had her digestive track working properly, we could tell a marked difference in her energy level, overall mood and overall health. We were also able to see the results directly in her blood, stool tests and hormone panels.

These diets are hard, but for us, they are a foundation we have used to build health. We know that it is only a matter of time for my wife to get ill when we are off of the diets. In a world of fast food, fried food and nutrient deficient food, we have to be even more aware of what we are putting into our bodies. Multiple Sclerosis has shown to be affected by diet over and over, and my wife's health has shown that we can use diet to help control the disease.