Learn How This Doctor Healed Her Multiple Sclerosis Through Diet and Lifestyle | Dr. Terry Wahls

With my two kids, they're watching me. They watch what I do every day. And what I do is what they're going to absorb. And so either I'm teaching them that when life gets difficult, really difficult, you give up. Or when life gets difficult, you keep going on no matter how difficult it gets. Everybody, welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is Dr. Terry Wahls. She's an author and clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa, as well as living proof that you should absolutely let food be thy medicine. She was diagnosed with MS and spent four years dependent on a tilt-recline wheelchair because she was so devastated by her symptoms. But instead of giving up, she dove headlong into the research and ultimately created what is now known as the Wahls Protocol. A diet-based rehabilitation program that took her from being wheelchair-bound to now riding her bike to work every day. Today, a full 20 years after being diagnosed, she continues to thrive and help countless others with her diet and lifestyle therapies. Dr. Wahls, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. It is amazing to have you. Your story is insane. Um and I want to start the thing that I find most profoundly interesting about your story is the way that you responded to being diagnosed with MS. A lot of people, I have to imagine, would just sort of fold up and accept that fate. It's pretty daunting. Uh medical literature is all going to tell you it's a one-way street. So, how did you get yourself in a proactive state? Oh, yeah. Well, that was uh very straightforward. I have uh when I was diagnosed, I had two very young kids uh age eight and five. And you know, when they were really young, I had assumed I was going to teach them how to be successful adults by uh athletics, wilderness travel, whitewater kayaking, cross-country skiing, um mountain climbing, uh teaching them martial arts. Uh but of course, uh that became very uh quickly apparent that was not going to be possible. Um and and so I I knew they their success was very important to me. So, I had to keep reimagining how was I going to teach them how to be resilient um as I was getting more and more and more disabled. I and so ultimately I I realized that all I had was that you don't give up. You get up, you go to work, you do the best you can. And then I was like, "Okay, I have to read everything that I possibly can to slow the decline." Because I knew recovery was not possible. I knew that functions once lost were were completely gone. And so I was doing all of this not to recover. I was doing all of this to slow my decline. And I I uh had been a vegetarian. I got introduced to Loren Cordain's work. I went back to eating meat. I gave up all grain, all legumes, all dairy. I could still declined. I needed the wheelchair the next year. Um I'm taking uh chemotherapy. Then I'm taking uh Tysabri. I'm still declining. I And then it's like, "Okay, the best medicine from the best people in the country is not stopping my march towards a bedridden, demented life." I also have trigeminal neuralgia as part of my uh problem. And so those episodes of pain were getting steadily more frequent, more severe, and more difficult to control. And so I might also be having to come to terms with intractable pain. I And so it's like, "Okay, I'm going to go back to reading the basic science." And I would uh develop theories that mitochondria were the big driver for disability in MS. So, I I was focused in on brain nutrition, focused in on mitochondria, focused in on cellular health. You know, and at first I did supplements. You know, and I and I had already cuz I already made a big change to my diet, that didn't do a lot. Added supplements that helped my fatigue a little bit. And and I was thrilled in the speed of my decline was slowing, and I was thrilled, but of course I was still declining. Mhm. I want to I want to dive into that a little bit more. It It is got to be very difficult for people to conceptualize that MS 20 years on is either the person has has just completely either they passed away or they have been just failed to manage the symptoms, become bedridden, demented, whatever. So, for you to be practicing medicine, for you to be you know, physically active and doing the things you're doing, it it I don't use the word miracle, but like just if I were to juxtapose two things, it's insane. Like to to really contextualize that for people, legitimately up until you being sort of this demarcation point, it was it was a one-way street. So, I want to focus on the mindset in that moment. It's super dark. You're researching this paper. Everyone is telling you and you you know, you even said you used the word no. I knew that there was no coming back from this. How did you see the evidence when you were so convinced that there was no coming back? Well, I so there was no coming back, but I could slow my decline. And I had this obligation to slow it as much as I could. And besides, with my two kids, they're watching me. They watch what I do every day. And what I do is what they're going to absorb. And so either I'm teaching them that when life gets difficult, really difficult, you give up, or when life gets difficult, you keep going on, no matter how difficult it gets. And uh it's certainly what I saw with my parents were farmers. Uh that, you know, life's not not fair. You know, you have you have good weather, you have bad weather, you know, uh you know, up up markets, down markets, but you keep doing everything you can as well as you can forever. Or you give up. And giving up is just not an option. And I do want my kids to see giving up as an option. Uh and yeah, absolutely. I I tell my kids that uh it's my perception that they saved my life. My children were absolutely instrumental in my getting through this. My wife was absolutely instrumental in my uh having the courage to get through all of this. You know, yeah. It was not easy. Yeah, you know, facing being uh bedridden, that that's not easy, but doable. Facing uh losing cognitive uh abilities, that's not easy. Uh that's doable. My my fear is that there will be a time that that pain is turned on, nothing turns it off, and light, sound triggers the pain, a breeze triggers the pain, talking triggers the pain, swallowing triggers the pain, my children trying to comfort me triggers the pain, and I'm trying so hard to not flinch or jerk when they're trying to comfort me. So, I I'd come I I'd come to terms with bedridden and demented. I had not come to terms with face pain, trigeminal neuralgia turned on, and not be able to have it be turned off. But, you know, now with my with my diet and lifestyle, uh as long as there's no exposure to gluten, dairy, or eggs, I'm I'm pain-free. If I come to your home and you accidentally serve me contaminated food. Within 6 to 24 hours my pain will turn on. Let's talk about that. So you you go into the research and what was it that made you put your finger on the mitochondria? What's actually happening in MS? So there's two there's two disease processes with MS. There's the inflammatory component which is when you have the acute relapse and you have worsening of symptoms. And then if you if you did an MRI you'd see an acute inflammatory lesion in my brain or my spinal cord. And then my the the acute inflammation subsides and my brain and spinal cord can add some additional sodium channels and I can make the signals work again more slowly but they can work between my brain and my sensory organs or my brain and my motor organs. And so that's when the symptoms remit. The relapse is the worsening symptoms, the remission is the recovery and improved function. And then there's another process that happens. The slow accumulation of fixed disability. Of permanent sensory loss, permanent motor loss. And the slow accumulation of shrinking brain and shrinking spinal cord. Now we think that that's volume loss due to loss of the axons. That's of the wiring that goes between brain cells that dies off. So why does this loss of brain volume, loss of spinal cord volume, breakage of the axons, why does that happen? The thinking has been that the mitochondria can't make enough energy to maintain the wiring, to maintain the brain cells and they atrophy or die. And do you know what's going So, from a diet perspective, I'm going to guess leaky gut is a big part of this that um Well, you know, I was starting in 2000 I started reading. You know, nobody very few people were talking about leaky gut. And very few people were talking about mitochondria as a big driver for MS. But because I was reading the basic science for uh MS and then for other diseases that had the shrinking brain as the hallmark of the disease and the slow accumulation of disability as the hallmark because that was the way my MS manifest. So, I'm reading about other progressive neurologic disorders. Uh Parkinson's uh and Alzheimer's being the being two that I read. And in those diseases mitochondria were sending signals to die too early. So, I figured okay, that's probably a factor for MS. And I might as well figure out what I could do to support my mitochondria. And of course, I originally I was looking for drugs. Then eventually I was like, okay, you know, that's not going to work. Um so, then I started looking for uh diet. Uh couldn't find much there. So, then I went down the animal model uh supplement path. And so, I started with a a a variety of supplements. You know, B vitamins, coenzyme Q, lipoic acid, uh carnitine. Uh and added those. You know, then interestingly, after about 6 months the uh professor of medicine sort of reared back up and said, "Oh, you're you're wasting your money. You're you're not any better. You know, just" So, I quit everything. And uh 2 days later I just could not seem to get out of bed. I was even more exhausted than usual. And then after the third day, my wife came in and said, "You know, honey, I think I'd Why don't you try taking your supplements again?" Uh and I did. And the next day, I could get up and go to work. And I thought, "Wow, that's really interesting." So, 2 weeks later, we did the same thing. I stopped everything. I and uh after 36 hours, my energy was even worse. I couldn't I really couldn't get out of bed. I waited 3 days. I took my supplements again, and the following morning, I could function. So, I was thrilled. I was like, "I'm figuring some stuff out that my neurologist is not telling me, that my primary care doc is not telling me. And now I'm I'm very excited about reading uh the basic science and reading the research." Do you know now what was in the supplements that you were taking that was actually having the impact? Well, sure. You know, these supplements were really designed to uh help with the Krebs cycle, be more efficient. Uh so, that was the B vitamins, the coenzyme Q, uh the lipoic acid, uh the extra magnesium, uh carnitine. So, I want to walk people through um just a sort of recapitulate what you've just said for somebody watching. So, you're looking at the research. You begin to realize, okay, there's something going on here with the type of um disease that I have. There are other diseases like it. The one thing that they all have they seem to have in common is something around the mitochondria, the ability to harness the energy. And then I'm guessing the next step is going to be beginning to ask yourself the question of why are they malfunctioning in the first place? So, yeah, actually for me in my recovery story, this went over several years and uh and I want to set this up. So, at the at at this point, I'm so weak I can't sit up like I'm now. I had been in a zero gravity chair, knees higher than my nose. Um I I struggled to walk 10 ft using two walking sticks. I began to have brain fog. I know my chief of staff is pressuring me. I'll soon have to uh for medical retirement. So, that's where I'm at. And and my face pains are more frequent, much more difficult to turn off. I'm very afraid they're going to be permanently on. I I I discover the Institute for Functional Medicine, take the course, I love it. I have a longer list of supplements. Uh not a lot's happened, but I have another really big aha. Like, what if I take this this longer list of supplements that I'm taking now, and if you got where the the food supply. And I redesign my paleo diet cuz I I decide that that science made made some good sense. So, I redesign my paleo diet in very specific way uh to uh stress the nutrients I was taking uh in the food. You know, what's in uh blueberries? Or what's in uh tomatoes? Or what's in uh green leafy vegetables? It is much more than a single nutrient that I might be taking in in the capsule. And that we have we as a species have been eating food for a long time, which is very complicated. And so, maybe what I'm taking in supplements, I should figure out as these are uh markers of what's a really nutrient-dense diet that my brain needs, and I should figure out if I if I get the food, I'm probably going to get thousands of more compounds that are really important for my brain that we haven't yet figured out what what the names are or what what the roles are, but they're probably really important. And so, again, that takes me about 3 months to you know, get this sort of sorted out because my dietitian friends, they can't help me, the librarian can't help me, so I'm back to uh doing online searching. And yeah, it turns out the Linus Pauling Institute for micronutrients uh was very helpful for me in in figuring out good food sources for all these key nutrients. What year is this? This is 2007. December 26th, I start this new way of eating. It's still paleo, but it's now it's very structured paleo. I'm making sure I'm having liver once a week. And now I'm having a very specific array of and less meat, only about 6 to 12 oz. It's about two palm-size servings. Uh and very specific bunch of vegetables. Lots of green leafy vegetables, lots of cabbage family, onion family, mushroom family vegetables, and deeply pigmented things like beets, carrots, berries. And this is all going back to the supplements that were working for you and just trying to find them in their um their natural state essentially. Trying to find trying to reorganize my food around that nutrient list. Mhm. And so within a month, my pain is gone. My trigeminal neuralgia is gone. My brain fog is gone. My fatigue is gone. So, that's in 1 month. In 3 months, I can sit up. And I can eat at the table again. I am beginning to walk with walking sticks. And and my colleagues at the hospital are like, "Oh my god, Dr. Walls, you're you're you're walking." Cuz they hadn't seen me walk you know, in years. Wow. And then at 6 months, and this was on Mother's Day in 2008. I uh tell my family I want to try riding my bike. And we have to have this emergency family meeting because my kids are very concerned. They don't want me to fall. I wondered about that. Uh and my so, fortunately, my wife decides that my son can jog in the left, my daughter will jog in the right. She'll follow on her bike. We walk my bike down to the curb. We wait for the all clear. And I push off. And I could bike around the block. You know, my son's crying, my daughter's crying, my wife's crying, I'm crying. It felt miraculous then. It's still a very emotional moment for me because I had never thought I'd get to bike again. And then just a few months later, October, she signs us up for the Curry Ride, which is an 18.5 mile bike ride. And of course, I'm like, "That's pretty far. I don't probably can't go that far, but you know, whatever I can go, it will be miraculous." So, I we start off. I have to take a couple breaks, but in fact, I bike 18.5 miles. So, once again, you know, my son's crying, my wife's crying, I'm crying, my daughter's crying. And this fundamentally changes how I think about disease and health. It will change the way I practice medicine, and it will ultimately change the type of research that I do. That that story is so incredible and so transformational. If you had to distill what that change is, what is that change? Is it just more natural remedies, food-based? The The change is that uh I focus on teaching my patients how to create health. That the drugs that we prescribe treat symptoms, but they don't create health. Health is a is because the diet and lifestyle that we're living is a mismatch between what our DNA expects and what we're providing it. And so, if I teach my patients how to eat closer to what our ancestors ate, you know, vegetables and and a protein source, and I have a different strategy for vegetarians who are vegetarian for their beliefs, than those who eat meat. That we exercise, we meditate, we have a positive social network, and we have seen remarkable transformations with the uh diabetes, obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, fibromyalgia, uh MS of course, uh severe pain from polyneuropathies, uh old war injuries, uh heart heart failure, by creating health, by teaching people this is all about your diet and your health behaviors. And then we have to watch them carefully, because once I show them how to create health by improving their diet and lifestyle, their blood pressure begins to normalize. And we have to start adjusting the blood pressure meds. Their blood sugars begin to normalize, and we have to begin adjusting their blood sugar meds. Their pain fades away, and we start rolling back their pain meds. I and then if they're on a chronic uh disease-modifying uh drug therapy, and we've had great response, so that their disease activity is is negligible, and their biomarkers are normalizing, then I we have conversations with their specialist about either transitioning them to a uh milder immune suppressor or tapering them off immune suppression entirely. It Man, it it it's amazing. Like hearing the kind of changes that people go through on the Wahls protocol. Um let's walk through some of the basics of what creating health is, and I think something that will help people is what are the insults that people are adding to their lives? You know, is it sugar? Is it being sedentary? Is it indoors? Like what are what are the the key components? Our food has been designed to be addictive, to create cravings, I uh it's be very very cheap. So, a lot of sugar, a lot of processed foods, um uh uh vegetables, uh meats uh are much more expensive. People won't have that. I and so our ancestors would have had um uh protein according to the success of the hunt uh and carbohydrates uh green materials uh roots uh berries according to the season and what was uh locally uh available at that time. So, everything was fresh, organic, in season. We've been having fermented foods uh fermented vegetables uh for about 100,000 years. Cooking for about 100,000 years. And you know, our ancestors uh once we moved into uh northern climates and had winter you had you were either fasting during the winter or you had a successful hunt, you had protein, or you had fermented vegetables. Um because you there was no freezer and there was no canning. We're physically very very active cuz it took a lot of work to get your food either either as hunters or as farmers. Either way, it was a lot of work. Um and we slept at night. There was no artificial light. Living habits were in perfect synchrony with the day-night cycle. We had small small social networks and we had to get along because the the clan couldn't survive if you were fighting all the time. You had to work out your differences because you know, I I depended on you as part of my hunting clan or part of my farming clan. We had to figure out how to cooperate and get along. I may not like you, but I had to at least cooperate with you. It's interesting to me how much you talk about connection and that part. What's physiologically you can see the impact on tissues like the heart if somebody doesn't have good strong communal relationships? Yes. What what at a at a mechanistic level? Like I get at the the level of like, "Hey, we're humans and we're bonding animals and all that." But like mechanistically, what on Earth What what are the molecules? Yeah, like what's happening? Yeah. Yeah. So, at the at the molecular level, um uh my cortisol levels uh that is going to go up with stress, uh down uh uh when I have a sense of safety. If I have uh isolation, uh then my cortisol level will go up. Uh my cytokine levels and we have these inflammatory and these uh uh uh declining or anti-inflammatory cytokines. Uh Really fast, sorry to to interrupt. I I need to understand cytokines better. So, this is something here with COVID-19 that we're hearing a lot about cytokine storms and what are cytokines? So, let me sort of talk a little bit about inflammation. Inflammation are my immune cells that go around and inspect cells all over my body. And the cell is healthy, needs no work, or the cell is damaged, needs to be repaired or replaced. So, if the cell is damaged, I'm going to uh release some cytokines that call other immune cells to come in and uh dissolve that damaged cell and replace it. And so, those are the inflammatory cytokines. And now we have a we call in a different set of uh cytokines to do the rebuilding and the repair work. And then the repair work is done. And so, now the inflammation should stop. And so, then we have a third set of cytokines that resolve everything and and uh dial the inflammation completely back down to normal. So, so it's And this is vital. This is how we repair wear and tear that we get from you know, the wear and tear of aging, from working out too hard, from being burned, having a sunburn, breaking my breaking uh bones, uh having a muscle injury, I need my cytokines to come in to help and my immune cells to help guide that repair. I need a different set of cytokines to come in to announce the repair's all done. When the a immune cell encounters a new virus, the novel virus, my innate immune cells have to call in cytokines to come and start killing off that that virus. So, it's really important that I can quickly call in the cavalry. And they all get there very quickly, kill these viruses. If it's a slow response, I have to keep that uh keep that response on too long. If my body's already inflamed because I eat a lot of sugar, because I have severe obesity, because I'm a smoker, because I have severe asthma, because I have a lot of air pollution, because I have an autoimmune condition that's not well controlled, those those states increase uh a molecule called uh inflammasome and NLRP3 and are driven by a process called NF-kappaB. And so, all of my inflammation cytokines are a little too reactive and too high. In those situations, I'm going to be much more likely to have that runaway train with the cytokine storm. So, that's part of why smoking is such a big problem now, why air pollution such a big problem. So, in those communities where there's a lot of air pollution, water pollution, they're going to have a much higher rate of the COVID-19. If you're a smoker or you're severely obese, or if you have an autoimmune condition that's not well controlled, you're going to have a bigger problem. And I talked about those things in my book, the NF-kappaB, the inflammasomes, and how diet and lifestyle either if if you have the conventional standard American diet full of sugar, you're driving up your inflammation. If you are sitting around all the time, being very sedentary, you drive up your inflammation. If you're in conflict all of the time, you're going to drive up your inflammation. If you eat these radical things known as vegetables, lots of greens, cabbage, you know, beets, carrots, berries, and you meditate, and you do moderate exercise, you bring all that stuff down very nicely. And you don't have high insulin, you don't have high blood sugar. And again, I I don't have any studies that have looked at these lifestyle factors, but from a mechanistic standpoint, we would certainly predict that if you're following the Wahls Protocol, you're you've greatly lowered your vulnerability towards the cytokine storm. Yeah, that that I think we are in an age where that's really important. I obviously it is not the end-all-be-all, but I've become really obsessed with n of 1. So, um my wife my my poor viewers have heard me talk about this so many times, but she got sick, and she went from I'm not feeling great, feeling weird, that's what she said. I'm feeling weird. I was like, what does that mean? And then it was, actually I'm feeling kind of nauseous, and then she called me and was like, I am literally projectile vomiting. I was like, what is happening? And so, then it just wouldn't go away. Her stomach was just upset all the time, and it becomes a massive problem. Of course, we end up realizing it's a microbiome, that this is dysregulation, dysbiosis caused by years of antibiotic use, um whole story there, but realizing, okay, it doesn't matter what the literature says, what matters is what's working for you. And so, we became obsessed with um researching for sure to get sort of broad strokes about what people, you know, we're sort of pointing us towards. We tried the autoimmune protocol for a while, FODMAP, all of that stuff. And ultimately we found the things that were really inflammatory for her, that maybe for the next person weren't a problem, but for her they were. But what I want people to understand and the reason that I'm so enamored with your story is taking that ownership, doing the research, seeing an angle, like you said, where your physicians they weren't not telling you this because they wanted to keep a secret from you. They weren't telling you because they didn't know. And so going in and having a hypothesis, this has something to do with mitochondria, testing it. Even the N of 1 test that you did with your your um, your supplements is brilliant. And so people taking the time to try these things out for themselves. So I get it, you don't have all the data that you want, Yeah. but I think it's it's really powerful. And I think it's uh, definitely it's um, incredibly helpful is to journal. Because you need to be your own principal investigator for your life. That we all have a unique uh, DNA, a unique life experiences in terms of what are uh, the exposures, what are the factors. Uh, and so ideally, you know, what symptom am I am I trying to address? What is my intervention? And you can decide, is it 2 weeks, 100 days, somewhere in that time frame to decide, yep, this intervention is helpful or it's not. about What are you putting in the journal? Are you describing I ate this, I did this, I am in this place? Because for some people the environment itself is the toxic thing. And then do they describe I felt feel this way today? and it the depth that you're going to go into that will depend on the person. Uh, the more uh, detail you put in the journal, the more information you'll have. But if you make it it's so exhaustive, then it's hard to keep up. I And so, uh, I like to have a initial entry of here's what the symptom that I'm trying to measure, here's a description of my intervention. And then, depending on the intervention, I I'm going to have to log that uh uh so that I know that I've done that. If you have decided uh for example, if you're going to do the Walls protocol, uh I My advice to people is be all in. Do it 100%. So, at the end of your intervention period, ideally 100 days, you can know know like, "Okay, it it worked." Or it did not, and I need to, you know, get further assistance with an integrated functional medicine doctor to investigate this further. But if if you just sort of do the diet, at the end of the 100 days, you won't know if if doing the full program would actually make a difference. And what's the bigger problem? Leaving something in your diet or your lifestyle that is problematic or failing to add a nutrient? You know, everyone's going to be somewhat unique. I I think the first thing you want to do is get the most inflammatory foods out. Uh so, sugar, gluten, dairy, and eggs uh are the four that I'd really want people to get out. And then, uh if you add in uh more vegetables uh and a good source of protein, uh that is sort of the high-level conversation I have. good protein? Well, you need a complete protein. So, if you're a vegetarian, that's going to be legumes and gluten-free grains. If you're a meat eater, then that's going to be meat. Um I There's something really magical about having organ meat. So, I want people to have liver once a week. It is just like a phenomenal superfood. If you If you can't do that, um and you're a meat eater, you can take uh uh There are a bunch of organ meat capsules that one could take. And I know plenty of my followers have gone down that route. And I'm And I'm glad to see them go down that route rather than not have any organ meat. But you know, certainly our ancestors valued livers, heart, brains. Brains was particularly prized. Those were very helpful and they were superfoods. And many traditional societies would prioritize the superfoods for the members of the clan that were trying to conceive and for moms who are breastfeeding. Moms who are breastfeeding. Wow, I've never heard that before. If the clan doesn't have babies, you got a problem. No kidding. So, how much liver should I be eating? 6 oz to 8 oz a week. A lot of great nutrition in it. Vitamin A is fantastically good for you. If you have not enough, your immune cells can't protect you from infection or cancer. If you have too much vitamin A over a long time, you'll you'll begin to have some scarring of your liver and your lungs. So, 6 to 8 oz, you'll be fine. If you go more than 8 oz long-term, eventually it will get to be a problem. And and you know, most of our nutrients are like that. Everything is a U-shaped curve. If you don't have enough, there's a disease state. If you have too much, there's a disease state. Even water. If there's not enough water, we die of dehydration. But if there's too much water, we die we can have strokes and die of water intoxication. And so when I when I point that out to people that every nutrient is a U-shaped curve. So, one thing that I wanted to ask you as we were going through and I want to I want to keep this in context of the Walls protocol and exactly what people should be doing. So, you just told us what we should be eliminating at a high level. Love to get a little bit more about what we should be intaking and then how much does seasonality and where your ancestors, you know, have been for the last 20,000 years? Like how much does that play into all this? So, as I think about all of this, I I think about my recommendations through an evolutionary biology perspective, ancestral health perspective, what I can find based on clinical trials. And can I from a molecular cellular physiology pathway, does this make sense? I and so my recommendations I want to have us try and emulate as well as we can with a within our modern life and conveniences more of the environments that our ancestors would have had that our DNA evolved with. So, our DNA expects us to be physically very active. And that if we chew, if we chew hard foods as kids we're going to have much broader faces. We won't have crooked teeth. And you won't have to spend $20,000 or more to correct the airway for your children and they won't have sleep apnea growing up. When they're adults. I had no idea it changed the I knew that it strengthened your jaw. I had no idea it changed the shape of your face. It it changes the shape of your face. It gives you more room for your prefrontal cortex. So, your kids will have better decision making as well. So, there are all sorts of reasons to not use boot to not use so much baby food. To breastfeed and to have kids chew and eat hard stuff. Wow. At an early early age. And then physical activity. How do we maintain physical activity? How do we improve the quality of our sleep at night? And then in in terms of the of the of the diet choices I recommend, there are many versions of diets that work. That's why humans could spread all over the globe. We have diets that can work in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, in North and South America. And all all of our diets are adapted to local seasons, local geography. And so I get a little crazy when people are telling me that they're trying to import kale cuz I talked so much about kale. I said, "No, no, no. Just eat your own local greens." Eat your own local cabbage family vegetables, your own local onion and garlic family vegetables, your own local culinary mushrooms. And then your local herbs and spices. So you have lots of diversity. And I fully endorse eating local with the seasons. And think about our eating paradigm, that that my goal is 200 different plant species in a year. Woah. How do you get that all locally? You know, actually um once once you decide that I'm going to do this and you make a sort of a game out of it for your family and you have a little chart. Now the whole family can get fired up about Well, let's try these spices in teas. So that may not be all local cuz now we're trading for that. Um that expands things. It also makes people far more excited when they go to the grocery store like I've never seen that vegetable. We got to bring it home. Let's figure out what it is. Because then add it to the list. It gets people much more excited. Now one thing that I know, so my wife really struggles. Vegetables are sort of the bane of her existence um in terms of what she can and can't eat. She has to be very careful. So if we're trying to get 200, are there ones like nightshades or something that we should be avoiding or no, no, no, like go crazy, try everything? Um I think it depends on the clinical context. So, if someone has rheumatoid arthritis if they have an autoimmune condition affecting their joints or inflammatory bowels, they're more likely to not do well with nightshades. Otherwise, uh I start out with the least restrictive diet taking out sugar, gluten, dairy, eggs. Add the vegetables. Sorry, I I I have meant to ask you about that every time you've said eggs. I love eggs. I eat the most eggs ever. Um where where do they become a problem? Eggs have a lot of great nutrients in them, particularly in the yolk. The white, the protein in the white uh is probably the third most common uh in uh a protein for causing a food sensitivity issue. So, for people who are having any kind of health challenges or who are not uh their ideal body weight or have mood issues, I have them take out, you know, sugar, gluten, dairy, eggs. Add up the other things I recommend. And then at the end end of the 3 months, put the eggs back. And if the eggs don't give them any problem, fine. They're then they're very fortunate that eggs are are fine. And eggs are really great nutrition. For me, if I had eggs, my face pain turns on. So, for me, it's never it's it's not going to work. Yeah, no, I totally get that. Um talk to you You said something about food and mood, um which is I'm a I am a just dogmatic proponent of the the connection between what you eat and how you feel. Um but walk people through how much food in can influence their mood. Well, so the food that uh you and I eat our microbes in our gut help us digest the food, uh make uh vitamins, uh and as they break down our food into smaller molecules, they'll get uh into our bloodstream. And what a lot of people don't realize is that many of these smaller molecules are actually neurotransmitters that will then get into the bloodstream, come to the brain, cross the blood-brain barrier, and influence my mood in terms of anxiety, uh depression, mental clarity, uh energy levels, uh fatigue. I and I they will also uh activate or calm the microglia, that is the immune cells in my brain. If my microglia are activated, I will be more irritable, I'll be more fatigued, and I'll have more brain fog. Do you have particular diets for anxiety and depression? Yes, the Wahls protocol. Start with that. Because what I'm trying to do is create health and then assess uh your response. Instead of thinking of treating disease, I I really push everyone, the goal is to create health and vitality. I'll let your prescribing physicians, your medical team, treat your disease. We're going to create health. We're going to uh try and get that mismatch between what your DNA expects and how you are running your life to narrow. And as we do that sort of step by step by improving your diet and improving your self-cares, we may discover that we have to make uh further adjustments with your diet based on who you are and your and your uh spiritual beliefs or religious beliefs. But I'm I'm I I'm much less focused on disease. I'm far more focused on creating health. Cuz we all have mitochondria. We all have cellular structures. So, if I focus on teaching you how to feed your cellular structures, and as your cellular pathways all work better, what you'll probably find is your blood pressure's is your blood sugars are better, your mood is better. And so, by focusing on cellular health, you inadvertently disease states often improve. And but I I It also makes my uh medical colleagues far more comfortable if I tell them, "Look, I'm not treating any disease state. You're treating the diseases. I'm just helping people with their health behaviors, helping them improve their overall quality of life and uh a sense of vitality." And you don't have to watch them closely and adjust medicines uh as clinically warranted. That's something that my colleagues are are comfortable with. And of course, as I've had more and more success through these last 12 years, um people who used to who used to say, "Terry, you cannot treat every disease the same way." And so, I got I kept saying, "I'm not treating disease. I'm creating health. You are the one treating the disease. I'm just working on their health behaviors." And now my colleagues are saying, "You know what, Terry? You can You really can treat every disease the same way." Dude, that that's big. That's really big. Getting people to understand that notion of I mean, you're probably right. It's better to think of it not as treating the disease, but as creating health. But since so many people are chronically ill now, especially in developed nations, getting them to understand, "Hey, whatever you have, the treatment is probably something like this." So, I think you may have already um hinted at this, but if you were going to have people make one change to their lifestyle that would have the biggest impact on their health, what change would you have them make? Remove sugar and gluten and replace it with more vegetables. If you want to have yams, squashes, sweet potatoes, uh you know, that would be fine. Uh that would be profound. Uh I'd also like to see you eat more greens, more uh leafy greens, you know, kale, Swiss chard, spinach, uh romaine lettuce, uh uh parsley, cilantro. That would be profound. Liver once a week would be good too. I love it. All right, where can people um get the book, The Wahls Protocol, and where can they connect with you? So, here's my book. It's beautiful. Um so, find me at terrywahls.com, t e r r y wahls w a h l s dot com. And if you go to terrywahls.com/diet, you can get a one-page handout. Uh and if you go to terrywahls.com/webinar, we have a short summary that uh highlights my research and it's very exciting. Amazing. Terry, thank you so much for coming on the show today. This is amazing. Your story is insane, and what you're doing, what you're researching, and what you're sharing with people is absolutely extraordinary. I'm so, so grateful that you came on. So, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. You got it. All right, guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And if you haven't dove into her world, do it. Trust me, you'll be rewarded a thousandfold. It's incredible. All right, everybody, until next time. Be legendary. Take care. Thank you, guys, so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.