It’s no secret that a good diet is the key to good health, so it stands to reason that a multiple sclerosis diet would benefit those diagnosed with MS. Food provides calories, vitamins, and minerals for healthy growth and tissue repair, but what researchers are now realizing is that the right diet may also serve as a useful form of multiple sclerosis treatment. Though we still aren’t sure why some people get multiple sclerosis while others don’t, or why twice as many of those MS patients are women than men, we’re beginning to learn more about how the body’s systems work in concert to keep us alive and functioning.
In the case of a multiple sclerosis diet, doctors, patients, and researchers have formulated various theories that have allowed them to apply different diets to the treatment of multiple sclerosis. While it is interesting enough to see how diet has affected the progression and mitigation of multiple sclerosis symptoms for many patients, what’s even more interesting is all of the different diets used to achieve this effect. Doctors have known for years that no two cases of MS are alike.
Almost no multiple sclerosis patients will show up with the same symptoms, or even respond the same way to the same drugs. Every multiple sclerosis treatment protocol has to be tailored to each patient, to help him or her achieve the best results with the fewest side effects. What we are now beginning to see is that, when it comes to natural multiple sclerosis treatment, even treatments that don’t come from a bottle or a syringe need to be carefully tailored, too, and it appears that this may also be the case for a multiple sclerosis diet.
There are a number of diets that are touted as being the best multiple sclerosis diet, from the Swank diet, to a gluten-free diet, to the Paleolithic diet. While many of these diets share certain traits, they are far from identical. One thing they do have in common is that they have helped many people suffering from multiple sclerosis to help get more relief from their symptoms. In some cases, the right multiple sclerosis diet can even allow someone to reduce their need for potentially dangerous medications.
Treating Multiple Sclerosis- Medication vs. Diet
Multiple sclerosis has been the subject of millions of hours’ and billions of dollars’ worth of research, but we still don’t have a cure for this condition. A big part of the problem is that MS appears to be an autoimmune disorder, which means that it rears its ugly head when the immune system decides to go on the attack, treating the body’s own tissues like pathogens. As a result, the myelin sheaths covering nerves are scarred and eventually destroyed as multiple sclerosis progresses.
People who are able to begin multiple sclerosis treatment early on have a better prognosis than those who aren’t able to, since a lot of treatments focus on slowing down the progression of the disease. During an acute attack of multiple sclerosis, drugs like Prednisone can help suppress the immune system and mitigate the severity of the attack. Unfortunately, Prednisone has a lot of severe potential side effects.
The same is true of many conventional medications- they are often very fast acting and extremely effective, but that effectiveness comes at a price. Corticosteroids work by suppressing the immune system, but a suppressed immune system isn’t able to defend the body effectively against infections. Many immunomodulators cause fatigue, nausea, and flu-like symptoms. By contrast, many types of natural multiple sclerosis treatment are effective and pretty much side effect free, but can take a long time to work.
So How Does A Multiple Sclerosis Diet Work?
An MS diet works with the body to discourage the immune system from attacking nerves and helps to promote healing, but this doesn’t happen over night. In many cases, it can take weeks before patients experience substantial relief. Certain foods like dairy and gluten decrease the effectiveness of the immune system and even trick the immune system into attacking myelin as it mistakes the proteins found in dairy products for the proteins found in the myelin sheath.
This process is called molecular mimicry as is thought to be one of the mechanisms behind foods being a trigger for MS attacks. Other diets like the Swank diet remove a patient with MS from saturated fats, keeping a total daily saturated fat intake below 15gms. This multiple sclerosis diet was actually studied over a 40-year period with impressive results. Patient who stayed on the diet long term showed little degeneration from the disease, while those who strayed from the diet showed higher levels of degeneration over the 40-year study.
A multiple sclerosis diet should be adopted by every one diagnosed with MS. What one should remember though is that individual needs still need to be taken into account and what works for one may not work for another. It is for that reason seeing someone who specializes in multiple sclerosis diets or following a tailor made multiple sclerosis diet plan like the one found in the You Can Beat MS program allows people to still be treated as individuals.
Not only can natural treatments like multiple sclerosis diets, help patients avoid the side effects of some medications, they can help them decrease their dependency on them, saving them both time and money. Natural multiple sclerosis treatment, like a multiple sclerosis diet or supplement regimen, allows patients to take a more active role in their care, instead of being at the mercy of their medication, these natural measures allow people to make informed decisions about how they want to be treated.
|
Grab Your FREE MS Health Report
We've been busy researching all natural MS treatments, and found out a stack of information to help eliminate the symptoms of MS!
|
|
|
We hate spam just as much as you
|
