 Multiple sclerosis is an unpredictable and frightening degenerative autoimmune inflammatory disease of the central nervous system in which our body attacks our own nerves. It often strikes in the prime of life and can cause symptoms in the brain, cognitive impairment in the eye, painful loss of vision, tremor, weakness, loss of bladder control, pain, and fatigue. The most frequently prescribed drug for multiple sclerosis beta interferon, which can make you feel lousy and cost $30,000 a year, but hey, it might be worthwhile if it actually worked. We learned last year that it doesn't seem to prevent or delay long-term disability. That leaves chemo drugs like mitazantrone that causes irreversible heart damage and one out of every eight people who go on the drug and treatment-related acute leukemia. It causes leukemia in nearly 1% of people who take it. But hey, MS is no walk in the park. If only there was a cheap, simple, safe side-effect free solution that also just so happened to be the most effective treatment for MS ever described. Dr. Roy Swank, who he lost at age 99, was a distinguished neurologist whose research culminated over 170 scientific papers. Let's look at a few. As far back as 1950, we knew that there were areas in the world that had a lot of MS— North America, Europe, and other places— Africa and Asia—that hardly had any. And now we have all these migration studies showing that if you move from a high-risk area to a low-risk area, your risk drops, and vice versa. So it seemed less genetics and more lifestyle. Dr. Swank had an idea, as he recounted an interview with Dr. John McDougal at the ripe young age of 84. It seemed possible to me that this could be a matter of food, because as further north you go, the less vegetarian life is led, and the more people are carnivores, you might say, they'd spend a lot more time eating meat. After looking at the multiple sclerosis data from World War II, in occupied countries where meat and dairy were rationed, and his famous study in 52 finding the frequency of MS directly related to the amount of saturated animal fat consumed daily in different areas of Norway, he concluded it might be the animal fat, so he decided to put it to the test by restricting people's intake of saturated animal fat. Here's his first 47 patients, before cutting out about 90% of the saturated fat from their diet, and here's after, showing a decrease in both the frequency and severity of MS attacks. Normally you're lucky if you get people to stick to a diet for six months, and so that's why most dietary trials last a year at the most. This is reporting results from the first three and a half years. Then came the five and a half year follow-up. He adds another hundred patients. Then the seven-year follow-up, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Then the 20-year follow-up, the 34-year follow-up. How did they do? If you can get people early in their disease, when they're only mildly disabled, and restrict their saturated fat intake, Dr. Swank showed he could stop their disease in 95% of cases. No further disability 34 years later, but if they started slacking on their diet even years in, their disease could become reactivated. It felt so great they were like, hey, I can cheat a little bit. I got this disease under control, but eating just 8 grams of saturated fat more a day was accompanied by a striking increase in disability and nearly tripling the death rate. How about a 50-year follow-up? They were able to track down 15 of the original patients that stuck to the diet now in their 70s and 80s with multiple sclerosis for over 50 years. And 13 out of 15 were walking around normal in all respects. They were active and evidently unusually youthful looking. Conclusion. This study indicated that in all probability, MS is caused largely by consumption of saturated animal fat. He thought it was the sludging of the blood caused by even a single meal of saturated fats that can clog tiny capillaries that feed our nervous system. See, diets rich in saturated fat and cholesterol can thicken the blood and make our red cells sticky. A single meal of sauces and eggs can stick our blood cells together like rolls of quarters. And this kind of hyperaggregation can lead to a reduction in blood flow and oxygenation of our tissues. If you put someone's blood through a machine that sucks out about 90% of the cholesterol in their blood, you can demonstrate an immediate improvement in microcirculation in the heart muscle. But what about the brain? Eyes are the windows to your brain. You can visualize, in real time, changes in blood vessel function in the retina at the back of the eye, which gives you a sense of what's happening further back in the brain. And if you lower the cholesterol level in the blood, you can immediately get a significant improvement in vasodilation. The little veins open wider and let the blood flow. So yes, it could be the saturated fat leading to clogging of our capillaries, but now we know animal fats can have all sorts of other deleterious effects, such as inflammation. So who knows what the actual mechanism may be by which cutting animal fat can cut MS progression? Regardless, patients with MS that follow a diet with no more than 10 or 15 grams of saturated fat can expect to survive and thrive to a ripe old age. Of course, cutting out saturated fat completely might be better, given that heart disease is our number one killer. The bottom line is that the results Dr. Swank published remain the most effective treatment of multiple sclerosis ever reported in the peer-reviewed medical literature. And patients with early stage MS 95% were without progression of their disease 34 years later after adopting his low saturated fat dietary program. Even patients with initially advanced disease showed significant benefit. To date, no medication or invasive procedures ever even come close to demonstrating such success. It doesn't cost $30,000, doesn't give you leukemia, and works better. Of course, this all begs one big, obvious question. If Dr. Swank's results are so stunningly impressive, why haven't other physicians, neurologists, or centers adopted this method of treatment? Good question. One reason may be that MRI machines weren't invented until the 1970s. MRIs are how we track the progress of MS today. We don't have to rely on patient-subjective reports, or doctors' clinical judgments. We can see the disease get better or worse right there in black and white. It's like in the 1970s when Nathan Pritikin appeared to reverse heart disease by the thousands, but no one took him seriously until angiography was invented and the likes of Ornish and Esselstyn could hold up images like this, proving conclusively that a plant-based diet could literally open up arteries right there in black and white. So what we need is someone to repeat Swank's experiments today with MRI scans every step of the way, and I'm happy to report that exact experiment was just completed by Dr. John McDougall. Dr. Swank was one of Dr. McDougall's medical mentors, and Dr. McDougall is one of mine. Study enrollment was completed last year, and we should have the results sometime soon.