Food for multiple scclerosis

(Populations that eat a lot of fat, especially diary fat, have high rate of MS while fishing communities seem immune to the disorder)

Dr. Roy Laver Swank, M.D., of the Oregon Health Science University, Oregon, documented in the Lancet in 1990 the success of his low-fat MS diet by tracking 144 MS patients for 34 years. Patients taking under 20 grams a day of saturated fat had much less deterioration and lower death rates. The most dramatic benefits are in those who started the low-fat diet before disability set in, where 95% lived for 30 years without disabilities. All those who did not go on the diet went downhill and most died within 20 years.

Dr. Swank's low-fat multiple sclerosis diet:

No red meat the first year. After that, no more than 3 ounces of red meat a week, the leanest possible.

No diary products with 1% or more butterfat. You can eat any amount of nonfat milk, skim milk, buttermilk, evaporated skim milk, nonfat dry milk powder, rinsed low-fat cottage cheese, dry curd cottage cheese, 99% fat-free cheeses, nonfat yogurt.

No processed foods with saturated fat.

Not more than 15 grams of 3 teaspoons of saturated fat per day. One cup of whole milk contains 5 grams of saturated fat, one tablespoon of butter, 7 grams, and an ounce of cream cheese or cheddar cheese, 6 grams.

A minimum of 4 teaspoons and a maximum of 10 teaspoons per day of unsaturated fat, such as sunflower seed oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, soybean oil, sesame oil, wheat germ oil, linseed oil, peanut oil and olive oil.

1 teaspoon of cod liver oil daily, as well as fish a couple of times a week, or an average ounce of seafood a day.