This Is MS Multiple Sclerosis Community: Knowledge & Support

Just curious if anyone else (Jimmylegs??) was into the Nourishing Traditions way of eating. I was a vegetarian/vegan for 10 years and was in remission from all my ills for 7 years. Then I was the sickest I had ever been in my life all of a sudden with new neuro symptoms while I was vegan.

The above occurrence and a sudden unexplained craving for flank steak I could not ignore, made me decide to start eating meat again. I subsequently found that I was a bit anemic, so it was good that I decided to be a carnivore once again. I started doing my research, and found Sally Fallon's book. I like her philosophy of eating the most nutritionally dense non-processed foods you can get your hands on.

I now cook almost everything we eat from scratch and we pretty much avoid processed foods. I refuse to eat anything with artificial crap in it. I make all of our bread, yogurt, and even sauerkraut (Wild Fermentation is another good book for nutrition). We have our own chickens for good eggs. Hopefully I will have goats soon and will use the milk for cheese and yogurt. We buy organic grass fed meats and try to get local organic veg and grow a lot on our own and can them for later. The only thing I cannot do that Ms. Fallon recommends is the soaked grain breads...As a bread baker I found them utterly repellant in every way! Ew!

I have been better but do have the odd flare here and there, sometimes requiring prednisone...and have developed a pesky tremor of late. I feel like the healthiest sick person around!

I am interested in the fact the MS folks are low in magnesium and zinc..I am highly stressed as well (work a lot of 12 hour days as a medical writer). I am going to look into these 2 supplements.

Jimmlegs...any advice on that is much wlecomed.

Reiki
y'all...

hiya!

sounds like you're on the right track - ah, another ex-vegan, we can start a club! don't worry about the soaked grain thing, it's just to lessen the effect of the phytates and gluten, both of which screw up your zinc status. you just have to ensure your zinc levels are up, so basically you can still have home baked bread but keep the servings per day waaay down. i recently put a sick vegetarian co-worker on a dietary regimen and told him he was allowed one serving of wheat every other day. it really woke him up to how bread-dependent he was. last report he was feeling much better! i can't convince him to get bloodwork or consider supplements though. a work in progress

if you can manage to slog through my regimen thread (ms nutrition etc), as you work through the pages there's more and more info on magnesium and zinc over time. you could also search the forum for posts with those terms - that could be a bit of a time saver.

anyway. do you ever use www.whfoods.com for selecting foods? i love their pages for zinc and magnesium.
zn http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tnam ... t&dbid=115 (venison, beef, lamb, scallops)
mg http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=nutrient&dbid=75 (spinach, chard)

also. we've been chatting lots lately about epsom salts baths. good for helping with magnesium (follow package directions carefully)

if you get into zinc supplements at therapeutic doses, you have to balance with copper. i take 50mg zinc citrate with 2mg copper.

as for magnesium supplements, i like magnesium glycinate (a highly soluble, organic, absorbable form) the best for during the day, and magnesium citrate (a little less soluble/absorbable) for bed time (i can't personally take magnesium glycinate and then lie down - makes me cough b/c it relaxes the LES).

hope that's good for starters!

_________________
my approach: no meds so far - just balanced whole foods (partial 'paleo', much less outright elimination), science, supplements, & bloodwork
my regimen - www.thisisms.com/ftopict-2489.html
www.whfoods.com, www.nutritiondata.com

Awesome! Thanks for the tips.

As far as the bread goes, I eat my toast in the am, which are very small pieces of bread since I make small loaves. The bread I make ferments a little, I believe, because you keep the 4lbs of dough in the fridge and scoop out what you need and bake it. So it sits for a bit. I think it breaks down the phytates more than bread that rises twice and is then baked all on the same day. Usually we don't indulge past our morning toast.

I will be looking into the zinc and magnesium as well. I have been thinking about the epsom salts baths...but since it is has been about 100 degrees here for weeks it was not appealing to sit in a hot bath! But it is cooling off now and that would be lovely. Wish you could put them in the hot tub!
I think soaking the feet is helpful as well.

One question about magnesium...does it have an unpleasant laxative effect? Mag citrate is what is in many laxatives...and it's what one takes to cleanse the colon before colonscopy (I'm a nurse...).

Funny how there are so many ex-vegans in the same boat. Makes ya wonder.....

I Really do think I would be much worse off if I did not eat this way. I am off to check out the whfoods site.

Thanks!

reiki

hi there! you're welcome. i wonder if you could dissolve the salts in a little hot water, and then mix them into a cool bath? i've never tried a cool bath. does sounds a little wierd when it's not the size of a swimming pool :S hehe! and yes as autumn draws in hot baths'll be very nice.

as for the mag citrate. basically, yes - but it's dose-dependent. magnesium oxide is the worst, but citrate definitely can kick in if you get up into a few hundred mgs per day. hence, the recommendation to get some of the daily intake from the highly absorbable glycinate form.

the only reason i take citrate still is because when i only take one a day, it doesn't have the laxative effect. and, i can take it at night when its relaxing action helps me settle for sleep.

when i first started taking glycinate i took it at bed time too, but i developed a terrible cough, dry heaves terrible, lack of sleep, missed work, weight loss terrible, and it took me a year to figure it out - the highly absorbable form was relaxing my LES too much and it was my version of heartburn, this horrific acid reflux cough.

so now i only take mag glycinate when i know i'm going to be staying upright for a good long time. and i can take citrate at night and be fine.

have fun with whfoods lots of great info!

yvw - ttfn!

_________________
my approach: no meds so far - just balanced whole foods (partial 'paleo', much less outright elimination), science, supplements, & bloodwork
my regimen - www.thisisms.com/ftopict-2489.html
www.whfoods.com, www.nutritiondata.com

I forgot one very integral part of my regimen..."Phototherapy." I love my tanning bed. Before I moved and got married I tanned regularly at the gym. I had the actual first MS symptoms and some major horrible joint pain after I stopped. I got to thinking about what I had done differently that might have triggered the flare (besides the immense amount of stress I had at the time) and realized that I had not been tanning. I started up again and started to feel better almost immediately...

So now that I am out here in the boonies of Central VA (where there is nothing but a gas station) instead of the lovely city of ATL where there are tanning salons on every corner, I bought my own. It makes me feel awesome...that along with going out into the sun I think is important for me. I do it about once a week...