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This episode review is one of my podcasting highlights!

If you want to be as healthy as possible or lose weight, you will have to opt-out of the “normal” matrix. This is why I’m sharing more about the cultural conditioning that prevents agency around everything from your depression to weight loss.

Agency is independent choice. If you don’t know your choices, you can’t have agency. It’s not just what you know that needs examining; it’s also an entire mindset around power that must go under the microscope.

Take Dr. Terry Wahls. Before she was a Ted talk superstar (almost 3 million views), she was a Multiple Sclerosis patient. She turned to food after conventional treatments, including chemotherapy, left her wheelchair bound.

In our interview, we discuss how she had to leave her vegetarian diet behind to heal and how as a conventionally trained doctor, she is bringing around the U.S. medical establishment to the powerful results from nutrition and lifestyle changes. I got her secrets to being a renegade!

We also discuss how Monsanto, one of the most powerful U.S. companies (power based on money and influence, not results), is a corporate Ted sponsor. I asked her if that’s why Ted has a warning label on her talk, which promotes organic vegetables and food?

Yes, we now have warning labels on people who encourage you to eat vegetables.

This warning label is a symptom of cultural norms that encourages us to take the choices offered by conventional diets and doctors who base their views on outdated science models that view the body as a widget. This mindset creates scientific beliefs like “eat less, move more” or that disease symptoms need to be suppressed not addressed.

It’s quite painful and difficult to be mainstream these days.

I’m beyond grateful for people like Dr. Wahls. We need conventional physicians, near the top of the medical pyramid, to plant the seeds of a new story about nutrition, healing and our individual capacities. She’s leading the way with her evidence-based protocol that is supporting people with MS, Lupus, Parkinson’s and many other autoimmune conditions.

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Terry Wahls on:

• Her dramatic reversal of MS after eight years of decline on conventional drugs (including how she had to leave her 20 year vegetarian diet behind to get well)
• How her VA clients taught her how to eat healthy on limited resources, including incredible results without being organic
• How Dr. Wahls learned to bring the medical and MS community skeptics along with her pioneering discoveries that apply to MS, Lupus, other autoimmune issues and even neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. She shares her incredible story of going from odd person out to visionary.

More about Dr. Terry Wahls

Dr. Terry Wahls is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa where she conducts clinical trials. The focus of the research is the impact of diet and lifestyle on chronic disease with a particular focus on multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Her interest in using dietary and lifestyle interventions developed as result of her own health challenges.  She is also a patient with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, which confined her to a tilt-recline wheelchair for four years.

Dr. Wahls restored her health using a diet and lifestyle program she designed specifically for her brain and now pedals her bike to work each day. This has led to the development of a research program to understand the mechanisms that underlie her recovery.   She collaborates with other researchers to investigate how diet and lifestyle changes impact gene expression, metabolomics and the microbiome.

In addition she teaches the public about the benefits of a nutrient dense diet, stress reducing practices and increasing physical activity. She is the author of The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine, The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles (paperback), and the cookbook The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life: The Revolutionary Modern Paleo Plan to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions.

Here is Dr. Wahls famous, yet now labeled with a warning TedTalk on her healing path. We discuss in the interview the reality surrounding a label that warns you about eating vegetables.

You can learn more about her work from her website, www.terrywahls.com. She conducts clinical trials that test the effect of nutrition and lifestyle interventions to treat MS and other progressive health problems. She also teaches the public and medical community about the healing power of the Paleo diet and therapeutic lifestyle changes that restore health and vitality to our citizens. She hosts a Wahls Protocol Seminar every August where anyone can learn how to implement the Protocol with ease and success. Follow her on Facebook (Terry Wahls MD) and on Twitter at @TerryWahls.  Learn more about her MS clinical trials by reaching out to her team MSDietStudy@healthcare.uiowa.edu.

Clinical trials in which Dr. Wahls research team is participating: Nations MS Society funded research; two studies in Bastyr University that are asking patients with MS or Parkinson’s disease about whether they are following the Wahls diet.

MS papers: Randomized control trial evaluation of a modified Paleolithic dietary intervention in the treatment of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis: a pilot study; Multimodal intervention improves fatigue and quality of life in subjects with progressive multiple sclerosis: a pilot study

Publications:

1. Wahls TL, Reese D, Kaplan D, Darling WG. Rehabilitation with neuromuscular electrical stimulation leads to functional gains in ambulation in patients with secondary progressive and primary progressive multiple sclerosis: a case series report, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (New York, N.Y.). 2010 December;16(12):1343-9. PMID:21138391.

2. Wahls TL. The seventy percent solution, Journal of General Internal Medicine. 2011 October;26(10):1215-6. PMID:21253878.

3. Bisht B, Darling WG, Grossmann RE, Shivapour ET, Lutgendorf SK, Snetselaar LG, Hall MJ, Zimmerman MB, Wahls TL. A multimodal intervention for patients with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis: feasibility and effect on fatigue, J Altern Complement Med. 2014 May 1;20(5):347-55. PMID:24476345. doi: 10.1089/act.2014.20606.

4. Wahls T, Rubenstein L, Hall M, Snetselaar L. Assessment of dietary adequacy for important brain micronutrients in patients presenting to a traumatic brain injury clinic for evaluation, Nutr Neurosci. 2014 November 1;17(6):252-9. PMID:24074905. doi: 10.1179/1476830513Y.0000000088.

5. Bisht B, Darling W, Grossman R, Shivapour E, Lutgendorf S, Snetselaar L, Hall M, Zimmerman M, Wahls T. Multimodal intervention improves fatigue and quality of life of subjects with progressive multiple sclerosis: a pilot study, Journal of  Degenerative Neurological and Neuromuscular Disease. 2015 February 27;2015:5:19-35. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2147/DNND.S76523.

6. Irish A, Erickson CE, Wahls TL, Snetselaar L, Darling WR. Randomized control trial evaluation of a modified Paleolithic dietary intervention in the treatment of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis: a pilot study, Degenerative Neurological and Neuromuscular Diseases.7:1-18. doi: https://doi.org/10.2147/DNND.S116949.

7. Bisht B, Darling WG, White EC, White KA, Shivapour ET, Zimmerman MG, Wahls TL. Effects of a multimodal intervention on gait and balance of subjects with progressive multiple sclerosis: a prospective longitudinal pilot study.