Originally Posted by cdwall

I don't have a lot of energy to type and think right now and my *dog* just stepped on my keyboard and erased what I was writing.

So here's another try - short and sweet. No, Wahls' diet did not cause my gastroparesis. I also have POTS and either that or the RSD can cause it.

I research a lot. I'm a PhD biochemist with lots of time to look up everything I can manage wrt my many health problems. I keep an eye out for all things diet. There is some theory and evidence to support the use of ketogenic diets in neurological disease. It has long been used to successfully help treat epilepsy in humans. It's now being tried for other neurological conditions. Terry Wahls is an internal medicine doctor so she's not into hocus pocus. No, we really don't know the consequence of long term ketosis. But if your disease is bad enough, it may be worth trying under the care of a doctor. I agree more studies are needed. I was fine doing it with what I knew and what made sense to me.

For me, just cutting out sugar helps a lot but I consider it temporary in terms of "healing" my disease. More like to control symptoms. However, there are a lot of people on the MS boards who report the Wahl's diet has arrested and reversed their MS. I don't doubt that. But there are also a lot of fanatics and blind followers on those forums and boards. Some of them doing the ketosis diet even though they don't have any real health problems. In that respect it may be considered by some to be a fad, and a dangerous one for those with no good reason to be on it. So study up and try to separate facts from fiction. If I can, I'll try to find recent studies on prolonged fasting (which creates a metabolic ketoacidosis and weight loss) and eating a low carb/high fat diet (which creates a nutritional ketosis and no weight loss). These two different types of ketosis may have very different consequences. Right off the top of my head, the fasting diet is thought to cause the body to clean up a bunch of trash (cells doing unnecessary things like the neurological over reactivity associated with RDS) that takes up too much energy for the now starving body forced to burn ketones to survive. Nutritional ketosis can help by providing fuel to messed up parts of the brain where ketones can still be absorbed whereas glucose cannot.

I hope this helps. If I feel better, I'll try to help you more later if you'd like.

Denise