Is There Anything this Diet Won’t Help?

Last Friday night I learned from a Facebook post that a College buddy of mine had been recently diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, otherwise known as ALS. Or Lou Gehrig’s disease after the famous baseball player who contracted it.

Pretty devastating news.

My uncle also passed away from ALS about 15 years ago. Seeing what he was like at the end was heartbreaking. I’m convinced this is one of the most horrible diseases anyone can ever have. There is no known cure for ALS. It’s pretty much a death sentence.

After my college buddy’s news, I started looking around for what can be done about ALS. Conventional medicine doesn’t seem to offer much hope. There are two FDA approved medications to treat ALS (from the Mayo Clinic article linked above:

• Riluzole (Rilutek, Exservan, Tiglutik). Taken by mouth, this medicine can increase life expectancy by about 25%. It can cause side effects such as dizziness, gastrointestinal conditions and liver problems. Your health care provider typically monitors your liver function with periodic blood draws while you're taking the medicine.

• Edaravone (Radicava). This medicine may reduce the speed of decline in daily functioning. It's given through a vein in your arm or by mouth as a liquid. The effect on life span isn't yet known. Side effects can include bruising, headache and trouble walking. This medicine is given daily for two weeks each month.

They also recommend physical and occupational therapy and assistive devices. Not much here other than to delay the onset of symptoms and try to use products that will help with the disabilities a patient faces.

So I kept looking. A couple of links into social media led me to Matthew Phillips. His website goes by the title Metabolic Neurologist. I first met Matt at a Low Carb USA conference in San Diego about a year and a half ago. He is a Canadian scientist living in New Zealand.

After studying neurology in Australia, he realized he didn’t want to go into the typical mainstream neurological specialties that didn’t have a lot of answers for people with brain disorders.

He decided to move to New Zealand and study how ‘metabolic strategies’ (fasting and ketogenic diets) would help brain diseases.

He’s had a lot of success in his studies.

I found a case study linked on his website where he put a 64 year-old man with ALS on a ketogenic diet with fasting protocols. Not only ALS, this guy has bulbar-onset ALS. This form of ALS generally gives you about 24 months to live after diagnosis. It’s pretty ugly.

This particular man had been living with bulbar-onset ALS for 21 months. Not much time left.

Matt put him on a time-restricted ketogenic diet that lasted 18 months. The fact that it lasted 18 months meant he was already beating the odds.

The results were pretty amazing:

“During this time, he improved in ALS-related function (7% improvement from baseline), forced expiratory volume (17% improvement), forced vital capacity (13% improvement), depression (normalized), stress levels (normalized), and quality of life (19% improvement), particularly fatigue (23% improvement).”

Improvement of ALS symptoms are pretty wild. Every other treatment just tries to slow down the progression. Another testimony to the power of a ketogenic diet.

I sent the case study to my friend. I sure hope it can help him.