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Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory, autoimmune disease of the central nervous system affecting an estimated 50,000 Canadians. It generally strikes at an early age, most often the early adult years, and affects twice as many women as men.

Frequent symptoms include numbness, impaired vision, loss of balance, weakness, bladder dysfunction, and psychological changes. Fatigue is an early symptom, often the earliest. The disease can wax and wane for up to 30 years, but in perhaps half of all cases, it steadily progresses to severe disability and premature death.

MS owes its name to the presence of multiple sclerotic (hardened) lesions in the brain and spinal cord&multiple scars. The optic (visual) tract also is often involved. This disease has major autoimmune character, with T-cells and other immune-effector populations entering the brain and attacking the nerve cells. Currently approved drug therapies for MS are highly toxic: the immuno-suppressants cortisone, prednisone, methotrexate, and cytoxan. Their limitations make imperative the development of a less toxic, integrative strategy for MS management.

Potential Causes and Triggering Factors

Numerous factors undoubtedly contribute to the causation, exacerbation, or progression of multiple sclerosis. It may be characteristic of a family, though no single gene has been identified and the genetic contribution seems relatively minor. Most likely, the disease is a product of innate susceptibility spread over several different genes that interact with multiple environmental factors.

One environmental factor that correlates with MS is latitude. Higher latitudes, in both the northern and southern hemispheres, have up to 10 times greater rates of MS, making Canada a high-risk area. Longer-term conditioning factors probably include ethnicity, gender, and personality. Other factors most likely involved in triggering exacerbations are viral infections, emotional stress, pregnancy, heat exposure, allergic reactions to foods, irritation, or provocation by environmental agents such as mercury and organic solvents.

Among short-term triggering factors, the best documented are minor respiratory infections. Sinusitis is also suspect. Heat exposure is a known trigger, especially from the deleterious experiences with a hot bath test&now obsolete but formerly used in the diagnosis of MS. Diet has been conspicuously less studied but undoubtedly makes important contributions.

Nutritional Implications

Some dietary factors contributing to the worsening of MS include a high animal-fat diet; food allergies and intolerances (especially gluten and milk); and digestive malfunctions, including poor digestion and assimilation of nutrients, poor stomach function with inadequate acid and pepsin production, inadequate intestinal digestive enzyme secretion, and dysbiosis (imbalance of gut flora).

In 1952, researchers reported a strong association between butterfat consumption and MS incidence, along with a strong association with low fish consumption. Subsequent studies have supported a strong association between dietary animal and dairy intake and MS, while fish and vegetable intake are negatively correlated.

A modified-fat diet is empirically proven beneficial for MS. Beginning in 1948, Dr. Roy Swank began treating MS patients with a diet that specified 50 to 90 grams of protein, with one egg per day and several glasses of skim milk as animal protein; a maximum 15 grams of animal fat, 10 to 15 grams of fluid vegetable oils, five grams of cod liver oil; and carbohydrates as required for calories. Margarine, shortening, and hydrogenated oils were not allowed, three fish meals per week were encouraged, and most patients increased their fruit and vegetable intakes. This diet is not much different from what would be considered healthy today.

In 1988, Dr. Swank reported on 150 patients followed long-term, from 1949 to 1984. Those who complied with daily fat consumption of less than 20 grams of fat (less than 15 grams of saturates) fared much better on morbidity and length of life than those who consumed larger amounts. The death rate was lower in the former group compared with the latter (31 per cent versus approximately 80 per cent). Swank also concluded that 95 per cent of the patients placed on his diet before the development of disability suffered no significant increased disability from MS during the 35-year period.

Parris M. Kidd, PhD, is an internationally recognized nutrition educator who has written and lectured since 1984 on every category of dietary supplement for practically every health application. In his 1990 book, Living with the AIDS Virus(Hk Biomedical-Educational Div.), he advocated antioxidants, phospholipids, and other nutrients for HIV/AIDS management.

Source: alive #256, February 2004