Treating Multiple Sclerosis with the Swank MS Diet

Michael Greger M.D. FACLM · September 25, 2013 · Volume 15

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A plant-based diet may not only be the safest treatment for multiple sclerosis; it may also be the most effective.

Discuss

Transcript

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

Multiple sclerosis is an “unpredictable and frightening” degenerative autoimmune inflammatory disease of the central nervous system in which our body attacks our own nerves. It often strikes in the prime of life, and can cause symptoms in the brain—cognitive impairment, in the eye—painful loss of vision, tremor, weakness, loss of bladder control, pain, and fatigue.

The most frequently prescribed drug for multiple sclerosis is beta interferon, which can make you feel lousy, and cost $30,000 a year, but hey—it might be worthwhile, if it actually worked. We learned last year that it doesn’t seem to prevent or delay long-term disability.

That leaves chemo drugs, like mitoxantrone, that causes irreversible heart damage in one out of every eight people who go on the drug, and treatment-related acute leukemia. It causes leukemia in nearly 1% of people who take it. But hey, MS is no walk in the park. If only there was a cheap, simple, safe, side-effect free solution that also just so happened to be the most effective treatment for MS ever described.

Dr. Roy Swank, who we lost at age 99, was a distinguished neurologist whose research culminated in over 170 scientific papers. Let’s look at a few.

As far back as 1950, we knew that there were areas in the world that had a lot of MS (North America, Europe), and other places (Africa and Asia) that hardly had any. And now, we have all these migration studies showing that if you move from a high-risk area to a low-risk area, your risk drops, and vice versa. So, it seemed less genetics, and more lifestyle.

Dr. Swank had an idea, as he recounts in an interview with Dr. John McDougall, at the ripe young age of 84: “It seems possible to me that this could be a matter of food, because the further north you go the less vegetarian a life is led, and the more people are carnivores, you might say; they spend a lot more time eating meat.”

After looking at the multiple sclerosis data from World War II in occupied countries where meat and dairy were rationed, and his famous study in ’52 finding “the frequency of MS…directly related to the amount of saturated animal fat consumed daily in different areas” of Norway, he concluded it might be the animal fat. So, he decided to put it to the test, by restricting people’s intake of saturated animal fat.

Here’s his first 47 patients, before cutting out about 90% of the saturated fat from their diet. And, here’s after, showing a decrease in both the frequency and severity of MS attacks. Normally, you’re lucky if you get people to stick to a diet for six months. And so, that’s why most dietary trials last a year, at the most. This is reporting results from the first three-and-a-half years.

Then came the five-and-a-half year follow-up; he adds another hundred patients. Then, the seven-year follow-up, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Then, the 20-year follow-up; the 34-year follow-up.

How did they do? If you can get people early in their disease, when they’re only mildly disabled, and restrict their saturated fat intake, Dr. Swank showed he could stop their disease, in 95% of cases—no further disability, 34 years later. But, if they started slacking on their diet—even years in, their disease could become reactivated. They felt so great they were like, hey, I can cheat a little bit; I got this disease under control. But, eating just eight grams of saturated fat more a day was accompanied by a striking increase in disability, and nearly tripling of the death rate.

How about a 50-year follow-up? They were able to track down 15 of the original patients that stuck to the diet, now in their 70s and 80s, with multiple sclerosis for over 50 years, and 13 out of 15 were walking around normal in all respects. They were active and, evidently, unusually youthful-looking. Conclusion: “This study indicated that, in all probability, MS is caused largely by consumption of saturated animal fat.”

He thought it was the sludging of the blood, caused by even a single meal of saturated fats, that can clog tiny capillaries that feed our nervous system. See, diets rich in saturated fat and cholesterol can thicken the blood, and make our red cells sticky. A single meal of sausage and eggs can stick our blood cells together like rolls of quarters. And, this kind of hyperaggregation can lead to a reduction in blood flow and oxygenation of our tissues.

If you put someone’s blood through a machine that sucks out about 90% of the cholesterol in their blood, you can demonstrate an immediate improvement in microcirculation in the heart muscle. But, what about the brain?

Eyes are the windows to your brain. You can visualize, in real-time, changes in blood vessel function in the retina at the back of the eye—which gives you a sense of what’s happening further back in the brain. And, if you lower the cholesterol level in the blood, you can immediately get a significant improvement in vasodilation; the little veins open wider, and let the blood flow.

So, yes, it could be the animal fat leading to clogging of our capillaries. But, now we know animal fats can have all sorts of other deleterious effects, such as inflammation. So, who knows what the actual mechanism may be by which cutting animal fat can cut MS progression. Regardless, patients with MS that follow a diet with no more than 10 or 15 grams of saturated fat can expect to survive, and thrive, to a ripe old age. Of course, cutting out saturated fat completely might be better, given that, you know, heart disease is our #1 killer.

The bottom line is that the results Dr. Swank published “remain the most effective treatment of multiple sclerosis ever reported in the peer review [medical] literature. In patients with early stage MS, 95% were without progression of their disease 34 years later after adopting his low-saturated fat dietary program. Even patients with initially advanced disease showed significant benefit. To date, no medication or invasive procedure has ever [even] come close to demonstrating such success.”

Doesn’t cost $30,000 dollars; doesn’t give you leukemia—and, works, better!

Of course, this all begs one big, obvious question. If Dr. Swank’s “results are so stunningly impressive, why haven’t other physicians, neurologists, or centers adopted this method of treatment?” Good question.

One reason may be that MRI machines weren’t invented until the 1970s. MRIs are how we track the progress of MS today. We don’t have to rely on patients’ subjective reports, or doctors’ clinical judgments. We can see the disease get better or worse, right there in black and white.

It’s like in the 1970s, when Nathan Pritikin appeared to reverse heart disease by the thousands, but no one took him seriously, until angiography was invented, and the likes of Ornish and Esselstyn could hold up images like this—proving conclusively that a plant-based diet could literally open up arteries, right there in black and white.

So, what we need is someone to repeat Swank’s experiments today, with MRI scans every step of the way. And, I’m happy to report that exact experiment was just completed, by Dr. John McDougall. Dr. Swank was one of Dr. McDougall’s medical mentors, and Dr. McDougall is one of mine. Study enrollment was completed last year, and we should have the results sometime soon.

Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.

Sources

Acknowledgements

Image thanks to kenjisekine via flickr

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

Multiple sclerosis is an “unpredictable and frightening” degenerative autoimmune inflammatory disease of the central nervous system in which our body attacks our own nerves. It often strikes in the prime of life, and can cause symptoms in the brain—cognitive impairment, in the eye—painful loss of vision, tremor, weakness, loss of bladder control, pain, and fatigue.

The most frequently prescribed drug for multiple sclerosis is beta interferon, which can make you feel lousy, and cost $30,000 a year, but hey—it might be worthwhile, if it actually worked. We learned last year that it doesn’t seem to prevent or delay long-term disability.

That leaves chemo drugs, like mitoxantrone, that causes irreversible heart damage in one out of every eight people who go on the drug, and treatment-related acute leukemia. It causes leukemia in nearly 1% of people who take it. But hey, MS is no walk in the park. If only there was a cheap, simple, safe, side-effect free solution that also just so happened to be the most effective treatment for MS ever described.

Dr. Roy Swank, who we lost at age 99, was a distinguished neurologist whose research culminated in over 170 scientific papers. Let’s look at a few.

As far back as 1950, we knew that there were areas in the world that had a lot of MS (North America, Europe), and other places (Africa and Asia) that hardly had any. And now, we have all these migration studies showing that if you move from a high-risk area to a low-risk area, your risk drops, and vice versa. So, it seemed less genetics, and more lifestyle.

Dr. Swank had an idea, as he recounts in an interview with Dr. John McDougall, at the ripe young age of 84: “It seems possible to me that this could be a matter of food, because the further north you go the less vegetarian a life is led, and the more people are carnivores, you might say; they spend a lot more time eating meat.”

After looking at the multiple sclerosis data from World War II in occupied countries where meat and dairy were rationed, and his famous study in ’52 finding “the frequency of MS…directly related to the amount of saturated animal fat consumed daily in different areas” of Norway, he concluded it might be the animal fat. So, he decided to put it to the test, by restricting people’s intake of saturated animal fat.

Here’s his first 47 patients, before cutting out about 90% of the saturated fat from their diet. And, here’s after, showing a decrease in both the frequency and severity of MS attacks. Normally, you’re lucky if you get people to stick to a diet for six months. And so, that’s why most dietary trials last a year, at the most. This is reporting results from the first three-and-a-half years.

Then came the five-and-a-half year follow-up; he adds another hundred patients. Then, the seven-year follow-up, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Then, the 20-year follow-up; the 34-year follow-up.

How did they do? If you can get people early in their disease, when they’re only mildly disabled, and restrict their saturated fat intake, Dr. Swank showed he could stop their disease, in 95% of cases—no further disability, 34 years later. But, if they started slacking on their diet—even years in, their disease could become reactivated. They felt so great they were like, hey, I can cheat a little bit; I got this disease under control. But, eating just eight grams of saturated fat more a day was accompanied by a striking increase in disability, and nearly tripling of the death rate.

How about a 50-year follow-up? They were able to track down 15 of the original patients that stuck to the diet, now in their 70s and 80s, with multiple sclerosis for over 50 years, and 13 out of 15 were walking around normal in all respects. They were active and, evidently, unusually youthful-looking. Conclusion: “This study indicated that, in all probability, MS is caused largely by consumption of saturated animal fat.”

He thought it was the sludging of the blood, caused by even a single meal of saturated fats, that can clog tiny capillaries that feed our nervous system. See, diets rich in saturated fat and cholesterol can thicken the blood, and make our red cells sticky. A single meal of sausage and eggs can stick our blood cells together like rolls of quarters. And, this kind of hyperaggregation can lead to a reduction in blood flow and oxygenation of our tissues.

If you put someone’s blood through a machine that sucks out about 90% of the cholesterol in their blood, you can demonstrate an immediate improvement in microcirculation in the heart muscle. But, what about the brain?

Eyes are the windows to your brain. You can visualize, in real-time, changes in blood vessel function in the retina at the back of the eye—which gives you a sense of what’s happening further back in the brain. And, if you lower the cholesterol level in the blood, you can immediately get a significant improvement in vasodilation; the little veins open wider, and let the blood flow.

So, yes, it could be the animal fat leading to clogging of our capillaries. But, now we know animal fats can have all sorts of other deleterious effects, such as inflammation. So, who knows what the actual mechanism may be by which cutting animal fat can cut MS progression. Regardless, patients with MS that follow a diet with no more than 10 or 15 grams of saturated fat can expect to survive, and thrive, to a ripe old age. Of course, cutting out saturated fat completely might be better, given that, you know, heart disease is our #1 killer.

The bottom line is that the results Dr. Swank published “remain the most effective treatment of multiple sclerosis ever reported in the peer review [medical] literature. In patients with early stage MS, 95% were without progression of their disease 34 years later after adopting his low-saturated fat dietary program. Even patients with initially advanced disease showed significant benefit. To date, no medication or invasive procedure has ever [even] come close to demonstrating such success.”

Doesn’t cost $30,000 dollars; doesn’t give you leukemia—and, works, better!

Of course, this all begs one big, obvious question. If Dr. Swank’s “results are so stunningly impressive, why haven’t other physicians, neurologists, or centers adopted this method of treatment?” Good question.

One reason may be that MRI machines weren’t invented until the 1970s. MRIs are how we track the progress of MS today. We don’t have to rely on patients’ subjective reports, or doctors’ clinical judgments. We can see the disease get better or worse, right there in black and white.

It’s like in the 1970s, when Nathan Pritikin appeared to reverse heart disease by the thousands, but no one took him seriously, until angiography was invented, and the likes of Ornish and Esselstyn could hold up images like this—proving conclusively that a plant-based diet could literally open up arteries, right there in black and white.

So, what we need is someone to repeat Swank’s experiments today, with MRI scans every step of the way. And, I’m happy to report that exact experiment was just completed, by Dr. John McDougall. Dr. Swank was one of Dr. McDougall’s medical mentors, and Dr. McDougall is one of mine. Study enrollment was completed last year, and we should have the results sometime soon.

Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.

Image thanks to kenjisekine via flickr

Doctor's Note

I touched on this in my live 2013 year-in-review lecture, More Than an Apple a Day, but I’m excited to be able to take a deeper dive into this extraordinary story.

Those interested in supporting Dr. McDougall’s landmark study (headed by Dr. Dennis Bourdette, M.D. and under the supervision of Dr. Vijayshree Yadav) can donate to his nonprofit McDougall Research & Education Foundation. (Update: Here are the results of that study.) You can also donate to NutritionFacts.org to help keep us bringing you similarly underreported yet life-saving science, by clicking the Donate button above.

Another reason Dr. Swank’s work hasn’t been embraced may be The Tomato Effect.

Other videos on the role diet may play in neurological disorders include:

What’s in sausage and eggs that can cause so much inflammation? See my video series on endotoxins, described in my blog How Does Meat Cause Inflammation?

Where is saturated fat found? See Trans Fat, Saturated Fat, & Cholesterol: Tolerable Upper Intake of Zero.

Those unfamiliar with Pritikin can watch a short introduction in Engineering a Cure. And, Ornish and Esselstyn’s great work is profiled in videos like Our #1 Killer Can Be Stopped and China Study on Sudden Cardiac Death.

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