The Revised and Expanded The Wahls Protocol is Now Available
You are a Wahls Warrior™! In this audio introduction, I’ll tell you why.
The Wahls Protocol®.
This is the revised and expanded edition. And what I’m going to do for you is read the preface to the revised edition to give you some insight as to why I’ve gone through all the work of revising my a classic, The Wahls Protocol. Now I will just read and see how this goes. I’m so glad that you’ve interested in picking up the book. It really is then a work of love and passion, and I spent a fair amount of time updating this because The Wahls Protocol become such a classic and it has been so important to millions of people around the globe. And so let’s begin. And I’m going to read it off my computer as opposed to the book just to make it easier so I can have a little bit more eye contact.
The preface to the revised edition. Much has happened since the first edition of The Wahls Protocol was published in 2014. When I first found myself in the spotlight and under the scrutiny of my professional colleagues, I received a lot of pushback about the contents of this book and my TEDx Talk. Since then, the world and the priorities of science and medicine have changed dramatically. Today, there is a huge amount of research published about the influence of diet and lifestyle on human health. This is no longer a new or controversial topic. We have gone mainstream. Other concepts have become popular topics of research as well, such as the microbiome and the gut-brain axis, which directly influence human health, which is largely shaped, fueled and influenced by both food and lifestyle.
What has driven this change? To a large extent you have, it was difficult to get our first paper published which described the preliminary data on the first 10 subjects in our trial who had progressive multiple sclerosis and who with the implementation of the Wahls Protocol experienced statistically and more important to a clinically significant reduction in fatigue. You’ll have to bear with me as I go through this.
Now, research like this is hardly unusual and that is because you wanted to know. You demanded answers. You knew instinctively that food and lifestyle influence health. You wanted options beyond the latest disease-modifying drugs. You wanted to take control of your own health, and that has led doctors, scientists, the media and those who fund research to sit up and pay attention. The National Multiple Sclerosis Society monitors social media to understand and the interest and needs of their constituency, people with multiple sclerosis.
When The Wahls Protocol was first published, there was a dramatic uptick in the mentions about diet, exercise, lifestyle and The Wahls Protocol, which eclipsed all the mentions about all of the drug disease-modifying therapies combined. This ultimately led the NMSS to have a wellness conference and they invited me to attend. They had 45 scientists and 45 patients with multiple sclerosis. I was a twofer. I urged the National Multiple Sclerosis Society to create a new peer review process for dietary intervention studies since it’s a very different science from drug development.
I also urged them to create resources so patients would know about the Wahls diet, the Swank diet, the Mediterranean diet and gluten-free diets, including the limited research behind each diet and the potential benefits and risks of each diet. And the MS Society did create those educational resources and did make diet and lifestyle interventions for wellness a research priority. They also funded our research lab to conduct a study comparing the Swank diet to the Wahls diet with a $1 million, four-year grant. And we will be analyzing the data in 2020 and presenting our results once the analyses are completed.
That is because of you. Since 2014, we’ve been very busy. We have had all of our subjects complete 12 months of the protocol. The second paper was published, which also showed significant reductions in fatigue and improvement in the quality of life. The third paper showed a reduction in anxiety and depression scores and improved verbal and nonverbal reasoning. All of this is remarkable. Next, we completed a randomized controlled trial, but this time our subjects had relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis only.
People were randomized to receive diet instruction right away or at 12 weeks after following their usual diet. We measured clinical outcomes at baseline in 12 weeks and demonstrated that our diet was associated with significantly less fatigue, improved quality of life and improved motor function. We recently published another paper that showed our diet increased HDL, the good cholesterol, and that this was associated with less fatigue in MS patients. The further dietary analysis will be coming in a future paper, and after that, we did a randomized controlled trial comparing the original Wahls diet to the Wahls paleo plus ketogenic diet to investigate whether the ketogenic version was more beneficial than the original Wahls diet. The results of this will be forthcoming in a future publication.
I cannot overstate the significant ways our research has changed research into the surreal. Other investigators are now talking about our work. The Wahls Protocol is published. There’ve been hundreds of scientific papers about diet and MS published and available on PubMed. Only a few involve actual clinical trials and most of these came from our lab. I’ve also collaborated with other scientists here at the University of Iowa to investigate how our protocol impacts the microbiome and vision function. We are developing collaborations with MS researchers at other universities who have expertise in lipids, metabolomics, vitamin K and vitamin A and brain structure analysis. We will have more data to analyze and more papers to write.
In addition to my research, I remain committed to public education? I’ve created a website and newsletters. I’ve recorded my lectures. I’ve given lectures all around the country. I do webinars, interviews, radio shows, talk shows, and one of the highlights of my career was what I was awarded the 2018 Linus Pauling Award presented to me by the Institute for Functional Medicine for my contributions as a researcher, teacher, clinician, and patient advocate. And you can read more about this terrywahls.com/i-did-all-that-i-could.
I have joined the faculty for the Institute for Functional Medicine, teaching dietary approaches to reduce neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration for the IFM advanced practice module on energy. I lecture for the American Academy of Anti-aging Medicine. I also work with philanthropists who believe in our mission of testing how therapeutic diets and lifestyle interventions create health and control neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration. I travel across the country and around the world teaching the public, clinicians and research scientists about the use of therapeutic diets and lifestyle to create a more healing environment for ourselves.
Many health professionals who had been forced to stop working because of the health challenges discovered my work and restored their health. During that journey, they too have found new purposes. They have often transformed the clinical practices and have become certified Wahls Protocol health professionals. They have shifted the focus of their work towards using a therapeutic diet and lifestyle within the realm of their clinical expertise. We have i- person and virtual professional training programs, which you can learn more about at terrywahls.com/certification. I also have a small private practice where I complete comprehensive assessments and provide six months of support to help people implement the recommendations. Again, details of these programs that I offer can be found on my website.
And now I offer you a revised updated version of the Wahls Protocol. The addition is full of new information including new scientific developments, further understanding of old concepts, more references to more new research, and more things that you can add to your Wahls Protocol arsenal. I’ve included some new recipes, new testimonials, and my assessment board is new and important in the world of health and wellness. I’ve also expanded many of the discussions in this book to apply to people with chronic diseases other than multiple sclerosis as they meet and learn about people using the Wahls Protocol to resolve a wide variety of challenges.
Even if you’ve read this book before, it’s worth another book and another look now so you can keep up with the latest developments and the latest tools available to you. We are very optimistic about the future. We’ve just recently published four papers with more under review, all about the role of diet and multiple sclerosis. Three analyze data from our previous studies. Others look at how diet composition may influence MS-related symptoms and disease activity. And other scientists are now making the case that diet and lifestyle factors impact the risk of developing autoimmune issues including multiple sclerosis.
And again, I could not have done any of this without my Wahls Warriors behind me. We will always have more to learn, but the more we learn, the more you can benefit and the more you can benefit, the more the world changes. Our epidemic of health is spreading. It’s contagious. Indeed, I can only hope that someday the knowledge that food, movement and lifestyle are the most important factors for health, will be the standard of care in every doctor’s office, every clinical trial the world over.
This revised edition is my thank you. I want to take you along with me into the future. No matter what else is happening in the world, I have hope because I see how far you have come, how much more you demand, how dedicated you are to change and how that has changed the world for the better. Welcome, I am so glad you are here.
And that was the preface. We’ll be glad to have you. The new book is amazing. It’s a third new material. Lots more information about epigenetics, the microbiome, about the gut-brain-immune axis. You’ll hear more about the advances from our research lab and the advances and the understanding of evolutionary biology and [inaudible 00:11:19] health principles, functional medicine, integrative medicine. You’ll learn more about diet. I’ll talk about oxalates, histamines, who would benefit from the low lectin version of my diet, who will benefit from the ketogenic versions and how we can do ketosis intermittently or sustained, when it’s worthwhile to do this intermittently, what we need to monitor if you’re on the ketogenic versions of my program.
I will talk more about detoxification. I have some additional nuances in the supplement chapter of what we’ve learned about cognitive support. We’ll talk more about what we’ve learned with neurorehabilitation in electrical stimulation of muscles, and then I have a much more robust conversation about the process of behavior change and that the reasons people struggle is that we’re addicted to harmful foods, harmful lifestyle. You ended that it’s a very complex and large asked to give up today’s pleasure for a potential benefit in the future, and what are the things that we can do that help people be more successful at changing their diet, changing their habits, and what makes them more likely to fail?
This is a great addition, great conversation. It’s a much more robust program that we’ve created and that I now also teach in the certification program. So enjoy the new book. It’s filled with more information I have on my website. More tools to help you support making these changes. If you’d like to have a deeper relationship with me and my team, we have many ways for you to do that.
Again, welcome, The Wahls Protocol revised and expanded. We’ve done a lot to update the information and to give you more tools to be more rapidly successful in your journey to reclaim your health.
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