 Treating Parkinson's disease with velvet beans. I have several videos on foods that may trigger Parkinson's disease, but how can diet be used in treatment? This video and the next look at beans for treating this disease. Two centuries have passed since James Parkinson's essay on the Shaking Palsy described a disease characterized by tremor and problems with movement. Today, treatment options include surgically implanting electrodes into the brain there has to be a better way. Who knows since the 1950s that Parkinson's disease is manifested by a dopamine deficiency in the brain? Well then, why not eat a dopamine diet? A variety of fruits and vegetables contain the same dopamine made by our brain. Unfortunately, dopamine can't cross the blood-brain barrier and hence is ineffective as therapy. However, the dopamine precursor, known as L-dopa or levodopa, can get from the blood up into the brain, where it can then be converted to dopamine within the brain by an enzyme called decarboxylase. We don't want the levodopa to be converted to dopamine outside the brain, because then it can't get in, so we give people a decarboxylase inhibitor, which itself can't get into the brain, so that keeps levodopa from prematurely turning into dopamine before it gets into the brain where we need it. So, eating dopamine-rich foods doesn't help, but what if we ate levodopa-rich foods? More than 1500 years before Dr. Parkinson came on the scene, an Indian physician seemed to have nailed it and even suggested a treatment. Velvet beans, the plant with the highest amount of L-dopa. So, might there be a way to forestall the epidemic of Parkinson's disease through plant-based remedies after all? Levodopa is the gold standard therapy for Parkinson's patients, but most Parkinson's patients in low-income areas cannot afford long-term daily levodopa therapy. In rural Africa, for example, it's estimated that only 15% of patients are treated with levodopa, because the daily cost of levodopa treatment is about a dollar a day, which may be half of what people make in a day. Same with other regions in the global South. L-dopa is mostly unavailable or unaffordable, so patients frequently use powdered velvet beans as a replacement or supplement to the drug, but does it work? You never know until you put it to the test. Velvet beans in Parkinson's disease are randomized, double-blind clinical study, and a dose of 30 grams, which is about three tablespoons, led to a reliable and sustained anti-Parkinsonian effect in all patients working significantly quicker than the drug, working significantly longer than the drug, and working significantly better than the drug in another double-blind, randomized head-to-head crossover study. The levodopa in velvet beans appears to be two to three times more potent as compared to the same dose of pill-formed levodopa, suspected to be because there may be some intrinsic decarboxylase inhibitor compound in the plant as well. Okay, but those were single-dose studies. What about the chronic use of velvet beans for Parkinson's? 14 patients with advanced Parkinson's received roasted velvet bean powder, or the standard drug, switching back and forth for months. Looking at changes in quality of life, activities of daily living, movement, and non-movement symptoms, and time with good mobility without troublesome involuntary writhing movements. And the velvet beans seem to work as well as the drug in all measures of efficacy, including quality of life. Here's a video of someone with Parkinson's solely treated with velvet bean powder for 14 years before and after treatment. Looking about both hands out for me, and tap your fingers on the right, just the right, try to go big, and the left, and turn. Despite the efficacy, the chances of this cheap herbal remedy ever being licensed seems unlikely, and for good reason. First of all, the stuff evidently tastes nasty, and we don't really have good data going on more than a few months. While velvet beans may potentially be part of the answer to Parkinson's disease management in low-income countries and high-income countries, one may be tempted to prefer them to drugs just because it's a more natural therapy, but researchers discourage patients or physicians to consider its use when the drugs are available. So leave it open. Pill form should remain the first-line treatment for Parkinson's. However, velvet bean powder may be better tolerated in certain patients. Psychologically, some patients just have a thing against taking pills, and so if they refuse, then certainly the beans can step in. But otherwise, velvet bean supplements suffer from the same issues common to all supplements, specifically lack of sufficient regulation and quality control. There's all sorts of brands out there, but there's no head-to-head comparisons as to which is best, and the quality of the products likely vary, but you don't know until you put it to the test. Six brands of velvet bean product were ordered through the internet, and most of them, four out of six, showed a large discrepancy between the claim on their label and the actual Eldopa content. And only two even came close. Their remaining products contained considerably less, less than 10% in two cases. Too bad there isn't a food source of Eldopa that you could just eat instead of taking in a supplement. Well, wait a second. Eldopa was originally discovered more than a century ago in fava beans. Might eating fava beans help with Parkinson's? I'll explore just that question next.