Meri Pekkanen: Occupational therapy, nutrition and other hot health stuff

Eat your way to symptom free Multiple Sclerosis

September 12, 2010 at 12:57 3 comments

As an occupational therapist I’m quite often working with people who have multiple sclerosis, also known as MS. This inflammatory disease is a progressive on its nature. Hence the level of function will usually diminish year after year, usually in bursts. Sometimes the disease may “stay still” for a long time but then there will be another episode of getting weaker.

Due to my interest in nutrition I’ve continuously bumped into a phenomenon, in which people having MS have ditched all DAIRY and GLUTEN in their diet and therefore managed to live symptom free. A domestic example of this are two people speaking in public about this: Olli Posti and Saila Saarelainen. They both eat mainly raw vegetarian/vegan food but as I’ve gathered from the lessons from the former research biochemist and an expert in paleolithic nutrition Robb Wolf as well as Nora Gedgaudas, an expert in diet and nutrition and well as neurofeedback practitioner, THE ESSENTIAL CHANGE for living symptom free is not going raw but AVOIDING GLUTEN AND CASEIN (a protein found in dairy).

So if you have MS or you know someone who does and want to facilitate symptom free life as well as better overall health, please try a diet rich in vegetables, (organic) meat and fat (butter, coconut oil) in the expense of mentioned grains and dairy products. Give it some time: you’re almost certain to see some result quite soon but only after six months it’ll be inevitable.

In practice this means avoiding all bread, cereal, buns, donuts, cheese, quark, milk, yoghurt, pasta, porridge to name a few. Yes, even rye bread. Even though oat is said not to contain gluten I’d add that to the list of the food to be avoided due to it’s high content of anti-nutrients. Same applies to buckwheat and other gluten-free grains. Grains are not for human, especially if you’re having an inflammatory disease.

If you want to read more about the connection between diet and MS, here’s some:

• The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf (Youtube video)
• The Paleo Diet and Multiple Sclerosis (a Youtube video by Prof. Loren Cordain)
• The MS Recovery Diet (they’re talking more about avoiding grains than casein but interesting stuff still)
• Multiple Sclerosis and the diet alternative
• Olli Posti selätti ruokavaliomuutoksella astman ja MS-taudin

Entry filed under: diet, Neurological illnesses, Nutrition. Tags: diet, inflammation, MS, paleo.