What’s up, buttercups?

This Wednesday, I’m highlighting the Wahl’s Diet, another one of those fantastic “get rid of your MS symptoms through food” solutions that has good science behind it.

About Dr. Wahls

Created by Dr. Terry Wahls, a professor of medicine at the University of Iowa. The Wahl’s diet is based around the idea that food is the key to restoring health.

This is a FUBU diet! (For us by us!) Dr. Wahls has secondary progressive MS – one of the biggest, baddest, scariest form of MS you can get. It’s the one where you start becoming disabled and it just gets worse and worse. No remission. She actually went to the trouble of reteaching herself nutritional medicine to develop this diet which focuses on eating foods that give your body the basic components necessary to build myelin and to feed your brain the vitamins and amino acids that it needs to thrive instead of decay.

The Wahls Way

The “Wahls Way” is 9 cups a day of vegetables and fruits, 3 cups of greens, 3 cups of sulfur rich food, and 3 cups of color.

Keeping in mind that the good ole FDA has not evaluated any of the statements made regarding this diet, and that I got my info from a transcript of one of her talks, we can continue.

Examples of the foods on the diet are: wild fish and grass-fed meats that are high in Omega 3 fatty acids; green leafy vegetables and mushrooms high in B vitamins; cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, rutabagas, turnips, radishes, mustard greens, watercress, winter cress, arugula, collards, and kale that are high in sulfur and magnesium; and offal that is high in cobolamin and B12.

A Plateful of Greens: (Full of Vitamins B, A, C, K) Kale, leaf lettuce, spinach, parsley.
A Plateful of Sulfur: (Packed with magnesium!) Mushrooms, cauliflower, garlic
A Plateful of Color: Fruit – (Superfoods are blue/black!) raspberries, blackberries, beets, red cabbage, aronia berries

To feel even better, she suggests going Paleo: no grain, no dairy, no legumes. (like me!)

I’m strongly considering using her proportioning methods in addition to the Paleo diet to try to improve my health like she has. I mean, she went from a wheelchair to bike races. This awesome lady doctor knows whassup. You might even want to pick up her book.

Here’s her talk on Minding Your Mitochondria at TED in Iowa City.

I’m pretty sure she’d like this recipe. It’s for one of my favorite salads that I fix almost once a week!

Rae & A’s Spinach Salad

Ingredients
10 oz baby spinach, rinsed and washed
8 oz bacon, cooked and made into bacon bits
4 oz sliced mushrooms, white or baby bella
1 c. carrots, diced, sliced, or grated
1/4 c. sliced almonds

for dressing
1/8 c. honey
1/8 c. spicy brown mustard

Preparation
Put all the ingredients in a bowl and toss well.
Serve and enjoy.