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Cellular Nutrition: The Big Bold Health Journey of Dr. Terry Wahls
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Just a decade ago, the unstoppable Dr. Terry Wahls, who has multiple sclerosis, was in a wheelchair and on a path of degeneration that her care providers said was irreversible. She disagreed and took control of her diet, environment, and lifestyle. By doing so, she regained her health, shocked her medical colleagues, and now she is teaching people all over the world how to improve their own function using the concepts of cellular nutrition, minding your mitochondria, and being your own health advocate.
James Maskell: 00:09 Hello and welcome back to the Big Bold Health Podcast. And have we got a great episode here for you! We are here with one of the biggest, boldest characters in the functional medicine space and in the health creation space. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Terry Wahls. Great to have you.
Terry Wahls: 00:24 Oh, so glad to be here.
James Maskell: 00:25 And Jeff, I know you’re pretty excited about this one.
Jeffrey Bland: 00:27 Well, let me just add a quick parenthetical. So, Dr. Wahls is an absolute example of what we’ve been trying—in my case now for four decades—to get people to understand. Of taking charge of your health, and being bold about it, and being willing to not be deterred by a diagnosis. But to look forward to how you’re going to get the most out of your genes to put that diagnosis in the trunk and forget it. Dr. Wahls is that person.
James Maskell: 00:59 Absolutely, so let’s just start off, if you’re one of the very few people around the world who doesn’t know the story, hasn’t seen the TED Talk, hasn’t seen Dr. Wahls or read her book, why don’t you just take us back to the beginning?
Jeffrey Bland: 01:09 First of all, shame on them if they haven’t.
James Maskell: 01:10 Yeah, shame on them. But yeah, take us back to the beginning; give us the overview for those people, to catch us up to date. And then, we’ll get into some more big bold stuff from there.
Terry Wahls: 01:19 Yeah. So, 1980, I started having face pains. And then, in 2000, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Being a conventional trained medicine doc, I went up, saw the best people I could find, Cleveland Clinic, took the newest drugs, went steadily downhill. 2003, I’m so weak I needed a tilt/recline wheelchair, continue to go downhill. 2007, I’m beginning to have brain fog, I’m on the verge of being forced into medical retirement. Fortunately, I’ve been reading basic science, ancestor health principles, and thank you, Jeff, functional medicine. I integrate all three, create a diet and lifestyle program that to my amazement—utter amazement—got me out of my wheelchair. Now, mind you, I’d had 27 years of steadily worsening face pains, seven years of decline due to multiple sclerosis, four years in the tilt/recline wheelchair.
Terry Wahls: 02:06 And now, I was able to bike 20 miles. So, I radically changed how I practice medicine. And, then, my chief of medicine encouraged me to get a case report written up, which I did. Then he brought me back and said, “Terry, I want you to change your focus of your research.” And, he wanted me to do a safety feasibility study. And I said, “Well, I don’t know how to do that.” He said, “I’ll get you the mentors.” So, he did. We did our safety study, showed that others could implement my protocol. Others with progressive MS had remarkable improvements in quality of life, and half of them had clinically meaningful improvement in walking ability. And then, we did another couple of small studies, again, very positive. Now we have a much larger study going on and we are getting ready to launch a quasi-experimental study. That’s very exciting. So, it’s radically changed how I think about disease and health.
James Maskell: 03:02 Yeah.
Jeffrey Bland: 03:02 Can I say something just real quickly here?
James Maskell: 03:04 Sure.
Jeffrey Bland: 03:06 And, I’m going to say something that may be inflammatory, and if you disagree with me, please do. I know you will, because you will speak your mind. But I think what you’ve identified for me is the tyranny of diagnosis.
James Maskell: 03:18 Oh, yes.
Jeffrey Bland: 03:18 That diagnosis, when you get a label. You know, what is MS? It’s a neuromuscular disorder, but it’s not directly tracked in terms of severity to neuritic plaques. You know, you can’t actually say, “Oh, those plaques are related to this severity of the symptoms you’re going to have.” Because, there are people with plaques that have no symptoms, and there are people with a few plaques that have lots of symptoms. And so, there’s something else going on functionally, that’s systemic, that presents itself to the neuromuscular system. And then, we put a name on it.
Terry Wahls: 03:49 You know, what is really funny, Jeff? So, I radically changed how I practice medicine—I was asking less and less about drugs, and more and more about diet and lifestyle, and addressing those at my VA clinics. And, my chief of staff calls me in to say, “Hey Terry, people are really getting upset with you because you’re doing the same intervention for everyone. You just can’t do that.” And now, fortunately I’d been warned that this might be coming up, so I brought with me a stack of papers, and we went through them as I was sort of going through the science. And I was like, “But, John, we all have mitochondria. We all have cell membranes. We all have cells. That’s the stuff I’m focusing on. I’m fixing the cells. And, then I’m watching people closely to make sure that they aren’t overmedicated, if their self-physiology improves.” And so, he became supportive. And then, over time, at the university, I was clearly an oddity—people really didn’t know what to think back in 2008 and 2009. But now, in 2019 they’re like, “Damn, you are a brilliant visionary.”
Jeffrey Bland: 04:55 Well, you are. You’re big and bold.
Terry Wahls: 04:58 Yeah. And so, people now are mirroring my conversation that, yes, cellular health matters, mitochondria matter. And improving cellular nutrition is where it’s all at.
Jeffrey Bland: 05:11 And so, I just want people who are listening, and watching, and hearing from the voice, the experience, to recognize that this construct that you’re talking about… that health is more than the presence or absence of disease, it is related to the function of how our body is doing its work in the environment in which we find ourselves. And that function will produce then our phenotype, which could be a “well” or “not-so-well.”
Terry Wahls: 05:37 Correct.
Jeffrey Bland: 05:38 It’s a powerful concept.
Terry Wahls: 05:39 You know, back in medical school, I certainly remember being taught that disease begins with biochemistry not happening correctly, so I was taught you make a quick diagnosis, you go write the newest drugs, and we’re going to fix the biochemistry with drugs. And, what I learned reading the functional medicine, basic science, was we can do that by thinking about the food, and that we could alter NF-κB, and PPAR-gamma through food as opposed to a pharmacologic approach.
Jeffrey Bland: 06:16 And, what you’ve done is so brilliant… not only your own experience, which is just, you know, there’s a best teacher is experience… but then the way you’ve captured visually, using your videos, your blogs, your Instagram accounts. In which you’re bringing to life, through the color of food, through working in the soil, through showing how we are part of our ecosystem in real, dramatic, emotive, personal, humanistic ways.
Terry Wahls: 06:41 You know, I love that. I had a lovely recent post on Instagram. I’m sitting out in front of my very brown lawn, now Iowa was in the midst of a drought. And I say, “Okay. So, my lawn is now brown because the grass is dormant, because it’s lacking key nutrients, in this case water. Our cells will do that too when they’re lacking key nutrients, they survive by going dormant, and they don’t function very well. And then, we’ll develop all sorts of dysfunction, which will lead to symptoms. And if I get enough symptoms, I have a diagnosis. But if we just go back to feeding our cells the key nutrients, they begin to wake up and start functioning.” And, people loved that post; and they’re like, “God, you teach so clearly.”
Jeffrey Bland: 07:23 You’re so good at the analogy. I mean, I love watching your posts because you’re bringing color, you’re bringing life, you’re bringing vitality into the learning experience.
Terry Wahls: 07:33 And, what helped me so much, Jeff, was… One of my key teachers in Iowa was, whenever you interact with your patients, at the end always ask them, “What did you learn? And what are you going to do?” And so, I did that with my vets, my many former vets. I’d always say, “What did you learn? What are you going to do?” And so, I get a lot of feedback on how to teach effectively, because if they didn’t learn anything, I had not chosen the correct amount of force. And so, they taught me how to speak in concrete visual terms that people could relate to, whether they’re farmers, or gardeners, or factory workers, or sports aficionados, because they had to have concrete terms they could visualize.
Jeffrey Bland: 08:15 Exactly. And that’s, I think, the power of Dr. Wahls, because you are speaking a language into where it needs the most. It’s the information-deficient population that hasn’t had access to this information in ways that they can grok, they can understand, they can absorb. And, you do it so beautifully. And, I’m always reminded that it takes a very special skill to translate your personal experience, both your medical experience but also your medical training, and background, and pursuit of excellence as a doctor, and then to translate that into consumer ease, so that it empowers people to make these changes.
Terry Wahls: 08:50 And then on the other side, when I’m teaching my medical students and my fellows, you know, I’m talking biochemistry and they of course think I’m talking about the newest drugs—damn well know better. So, we have to talk biochemistry, biochemistry, biochemistry, and then say, “And I was talking about broccoli by the way.” So, it absolutely has to be steeped in understandable science, so that my college of medicine still lets me have privileges, and thinks that I’m brilliant, and lets me do the research. So yes, I have to keep bridging both groups.
Jeffrey Bland: 09:25 So, I’d like to just ask you a quick question. And that is: I know that you just presented a course that had a complex audience probably, and there wasn’t just one type of person in your audience, but yet you were just able to speak effectively into a broad group of individuals using your experience. But then this-
Terry Wahls: 09:46 Oh, you’re talking about our seminar.
Jeffrey Bland: 09:48 Yes. Yes.
Terry Wahls: 09:50 Yeah. So, this is my mission. So, every year we have this big seminar, and this year we had 300+ folks, and a mix of patients, and a mix of health professionals. And, I teach them the concepts that are used: diet, lifestyle. And, I teach at CME quality, but I also at the same time, simultaneously translate into metaphors that the public can understand. And, some of these folks are going to have a little more brain fog because they still have fairly active disease. So yes, I work very hard at that—but people love it.
Jeffrey Bland: 10:30 And, that’s what I’m saying, I mean this is… You want to talk about big and bold. What you’re doing, exactly, is what we’re aspiring to do in this series of podcasts. We’re trying to bring this construct of the advocacy of health, that we don’t need to be apologists, we don’t need to be in the dark corners of the room, we don’t need to be second tier to those of the aficionados and the super specialties. We can say our piece with strength.
Terry Wahls: 10:55 And what I learned, taking care of my vets, with complex chronic diseases, and when I ran my lifestyle clinic: I got the most seriously ill, from the general medicine clinic and from the pain clinic, and I said, “Give them to me. I won’t give them drugs, but I’ll take care of them.” And, what I saw was by addressing their nutrition, addressing their detox pathway, teaching them a stress-reducing practice, and having them eat these radical things known as vegetables, and giving up processed foods, that we improve their health, their quality of life, their hemoglobin A1c’s improved and normalized, their blood pressures improved. We had to keep reducing back their pain meds, reducing back their blood pressure meds, reducing their diabetic meds. And then, pretty soon I was giving reports to the chief of medicine, the chief of the pain clinic, every quarter, and then to the chief of staff, and the hospital director, every quarter because they were like, “Wow. What are you doing?” The next thing I know, VA central office is calling and I’m like, “Oh dear God, am I in trouble now?” And, they came out to see what we were doing. And, they were very impressed and ended up giving us a grant to expand our staff because we were just so successful.
Terry Wahls: 12:14 But, the bottom line that the VA began to see was the simple strategies I was using—creating health using basic primary care labs and basic concepts was the most effective treatment for pain, the most effective treatment for diabetes, the most effective treatment for high blood pressure, the most effective treatment for the autoimmune diseases that people were seeing before. And, by the way, for their cognitive decline.
Jeffrey Bland: 12:39 So, now we are talking about the domain of health, not the domain of a disease with a name and an ICD number.
Terry Wahls: 12:45 Correct. So, creating health by using things that we have literally thousands of studies for—that this is really all about health behaviors. It’s all about these radical things known as vegetables, it’s all about the radical thing known as a stress management plan, about the radical thing known as moving your body, about the radical thing known as sleeping. That, helping people address those step-by-step, by actionable step, getting them motivated. And, we had lots of things that we did in terms of knowing what you want your health for, strategies for creating resilience so people would take on the work of changing their dietary habits, and changing their daily habits.
Jeffrey Bland: 13:26 Powerful.
James Maskell: 13:27 Yeah, I know I’ve referred to you as the unstoppable Terry Wahls on the functional forum, just because I see what it’s taken to get there. I know one of the things that I hear, living in California and then before New York, is that people think that this kind of health is not accessible to most people because they’re not close enough to whole foods. Tell us about your experience doing this in Iowa, because…
Terry Wahls: 13:49 So, November, at the VA, in my therapeutic lifestyle clinic, the people I saw were on disability, living on food stamps. And so, I did this in group clinics, and I taught people how to implement these concepts in rural Iowa, with rural Iowa grocery stores, and implementing this on their food stamp budget. We had cooking classes, we had skills classes, teaching them meditation strategies, movement strategies. And, we saw health transformation after health transformation. So, if people say they can’t implement the Wahls Protocol because they don’t have whole foods, I’m like, “Well, you know, the farmers in Iowa can do it living on food stamps, so you certainly can,” but you do have to learn how to cook—I mean, that is the key thing. It’s very important that we teach you how to cook.
James Maskell: 14:41 And, tell us about how… I know this hasn’t always been an easy journey. I know particularly at the beginning there were a lot of people that were like, “Please tell Terry Wahls to be quiet.”
Terry Wahls: 14:51 Yeah, yeah, it was true. And, I got warned by my chief of staff that people were complaining; they looked at my charts and I was not practicing the standard of care. But as I said, I brought my papers down, I went through the science, and then I won them over. I did learn that I had to be very careful how I documented in the record that I was improving cellular physiology, that I was not diagnosing, treat or cure, but I was simply trying to work on improving cellular function and health overall. And, I was addressing health behaviors. Then-
James Maskell: 15:23 And, how magically the disease went away, gee whiz. What a paradox.
Terry Wahls: 15:26 It was just an accidental byproduct. But by making that change, I was focusing on cellular physiology and improving health behaviors; now my partners were all comfortable, everything was fine. I’ve put those disclaimers up whenever I give my public talks, to say, “Work closely with your primary care doc before you implement anything. And they’ll have to monitor your medication use closely, because if things go well, you’ll need less, and steadily less, and less, and less.”
Jeffrey Bland: 15:52 So, can I ask you a question for the average viewer of this podcast? They probably are not familiar with the expense of the drugs that are now being used for treating this. Could you give us just a kind of a ballpark as to what we’re talking about for expense?
Terry Wahls: 16:05 About 50,000 to 100,000 dollars a year, that’s for the drugs. And then the drugs, once you start on them, coming off them becomes very tricky because you can get a rebound, a flare. So, that has to be done in a very, very thoughtful and careful way. But we certainly have observed, in the VA, people with serious autoimmune diseases on these very expensive drugs; we optimize their health through diet and lifestyle, and then can very slowly, carefully wean the drugs away.
Jeffrey Bland: 16:37 So, when people say, “This is not a cost-effective way to do a patient management,” I guess, at least in this example, we would say that’s not true.
Terry Wahls: 16:47 Absolutely not, yeah. You know, and I would like to mention that we have a new study that we will soon be launching. It’s a quasi-experimental study where we will try to answer the question: could the therapeutic diet and lifestyle without drugs be just as effective as these drugs costing 50 to 100,000 dollars, at turning off serious autoimmune conditions? But there are no, as you know, head to head studies comparing the two. But I’m going to answer that, because I’m unstoppable.
Terry Wahls: 17:22 So… And our neurology department is actually very, very excited about this. We will… And I’ve raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay my staff to do this study. So, we will be taking newly diagnosed MS patients who’ve been offered the potent drugs, who’ve said, “No, they would rather use diet and lifestyle.” We will train them on basically the Wahls protocol and we’ll compare them to newly diagnosed MS patients who will get standard of care by the MS clinic at the University of Iowa. And, we’ll use blinded assessors, so we’ll measure quality of life, and then measures of walking, thinking, vision, and a ocular coherence tomography, and MRIs, and blood, urine, stool. And then, we will compare baseline in 12 months at the two groups.
Jeffrey Bland: 18:13 And, how are you going to measure compliance? Because some people may say, “Whoa, they may-“
Terry Wahls: 18:17 Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s a great question. So, remember we’re going to have urine and blood, so we’re going to be able to measure gluten in their urine and in their stool. So, we’ll know, are they gluten free or not? We’ll also do a number of dietary assessments to know what they’re eating or not. And, I do fully expect, because the University of Iowa is getting more and more excited about my work, that hopefully my neurology colleagues are saying, “You know what? Yes, take the drugs, but you really ought to get this great book called, The Wahls Protocol. And, you ought to read it and think about eating more vegetables.” So, some of those patients following the standard of care are going to end up implementing my diet.
Jeffrey Bland: 18:56 That’s the problem, isn’t it? Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative), that’s a confounder.
Terry Wahls: 18:59 Yes, that’s a confounder. And, all I really need to show, Jeff, is diet and lifestyle equivalent? I might end up showing that it’s better, but it’s going to be hard to show that it’s better if it turns out the drug people also end up following my diet, which they may. More and more of them will, because my research and my value is getting to steadily rise. But if I show that they’re equivalent, now people all over the country and the world who have a serious autoimmune problem can feel much more comfortable, like, “You know what? I’ve read those package inserts, I’m afraid of the drugs. I’m not afraid of vegetables, I’m not afraid of exercising, and meditation. I’ll do diet and lifestyle, and I’ll do close follow-up to make sure that that really can turn off my serious autoimmune problem.”
Terry Wahls: 19:47 Because it’s not that I’m saying, “You can’t take drugs,” there may be some people who are ill enough that they’ll require both. But, even my neurology colleagues at the University of Iowa tell me that, “You have three months where you could safely think, you’d be looking at the drug list, and thinking carefully about: do I want to take those drugs or not?” So, they could go all in on diet and lifestyle-
James Maskell: 20:12 100 days, right?
Terry Wahls: 20:13 For the 100 days. Come back to see the neurologist, say, “You know what? This is a really big decision; I’ve got to think another three months. I’ve not had any relapses. I’m feeling really good.” So, they come back in another three months, and they still haven’t had any relapses. They’re feeling good; they’ve had another MRI and the neurologist has to say, “Well, you know, it’s better. There are fewer lesions.” And the person can say, “You know what? I think I’ll wait another six months.” And, if they keep doing well without relapses, and their MRI lesions are disappearing, then they never have to take the drugs. And, my conventional neurologists are admitting that they’re having more patients that are taking that route.
Jeffrey Bland: 20:50 I bet that’s true, but you’ve raised a very interesting, important question now, and that is how this has effects on shaping both medical curriculum, medical standard of care, and medical reimbursement. I mean this is a disruptive innovation, right? That has a-
Terry Wahls: 21:07 Creating health, yes.
Jeffrey Bland: 21:08 Well, yes. That’s right. And that’s why we call this Big Bold Health, because the construct of health, ironically, even though we call it a healthcare system, is really a disease care system. And, when you introduce health, it’s disruptive.
Terry Wahls: 21:22 And, when I hear our political discourse about, “We have to control the healthcare cost,” and all the political conversations about how do we do this… To me they’re missing the question, is, “Why do we become so ill? How did we miss the fact that we allowed the food industry to become so distorted? How did we allow our food, water, and air to become less clean? And, how did we allow the recreational industry to create addicting activities so that we become less and less active?” And so, that contributes to the poor health. And, that’s going to be very hard to unravel because of the challenges with our political system. So, it’s going to require people to do what I’m doing, what you’re doing, and what you’re doing is we got to teach the public directly. The public is going to have to learn that it’s really up to them, to eat these radical things known as vegetables.
James Maskell: 22:21 So, do you dream of the day when TEDx will take away their disclaimer and say, “Actually, this is real science.”
Terry Wahls: 22:28 No, no. I dream of the day when I’m going to be on the big TED talk.
James Maskell: 22:31 Yeah, you should be on it.
Terry Wahls: 22:33 And, that will tell the whole story all over. And, then it’ll have 20 million views.
James Maskell: 22:37 No, totally. You know, one of the things that the Jeff and I are working on is just thinking about measuring this term of health, right? So, you’re giving them all the vegetables, and the cellular health is improving. You know, I know when you were probably first at the beginning of your journey to reverse MS, there were some disease-specific markers that you were looking at that you wanted to get down. In retrospect now, what are the health markers that you look for to know like, “Is this person improving?”
Terry Wahls: 23:07 Well, when I talk to the public, I tell them I pray for their benefit, that they have some biosensors that rear up and become more active when they’re more inflamed. For me, I am so blessed that my trigeminal neuralgia turns on, and I have incapacitating pain. For others it’s paralyzing anxiety, for others it’s joint pain, for others it’s gut-whatever. So, we all have biosensors that tell us that we have, “My chemistry is doing well. I’m great, and I have plenty of energy, plenty of mental clarity.” For the people who are really attuned to their biosensors, they will do a much better job of following this diet lifestyle. If they’re not so attuned, it’s going to be a huge struggle. And, depending on your disease state, you’ll have different blood tests that I could monitor, or late findings on an imaging study. But we all have biosensors, but you have to get your health fairly cleaned up so you can recognize, “I’m in low inflammation, low oxidative stress. My chemistry is doing well. I have plenty of energy. If I had some gluten today in six hours, my face pain would be on, my biosensors would be active, and I’d be having incapacitating face pain.” So, when I do my public talks, I tell everyone, “You should pray for biosensors that will give you feedback.”
James Maskell: 24:38 Yeah.
Jeffrey Bland: 24:38 So, I’d like to share just to kind of close, one of, I know literally countless positive responses you’ve gotten from people who have followed the Wahls Protocol. So, my dear colleague who is a manager of our operations in our little business, our little company, our information company, she has a daughter. A very, very sharp woman in her late twenties, who got a diagnosis of trigeminal neuralgia, and really serious, and was so disabling that she was going to have to go on permanent work release and disability.
Jeffrey Bland: 25:16 And, she started to go… She came over and we had a discussion, and she said, “I’m going to sleuth this. I’m going to find out more about this.” She found your Wahls Protocol—she dug in; she’s a big gardener. She has her own garden—it reminds me a lot of your videos. And, she has completely managed it and it’s completely gone away. She was going to be on very high doses of Tegretol and other kinds of things, which now she’s not taking anything. So, she came over the other night and she said, “So when you were talking about being big and bold around health, I can stand up and say—in my six foot two frame—that the difference between aspiring for health and the fear of trying to treat disease is like two different realities, and I’ll select health.” So, I think what you’ve given people is that option and it’s unbelievable, powerful gift. So, thank you.
Terry Wahls: 26:08 Thank you.
James Maskell: 26:09 Beautiful moment here at the Big Bold Health Podcast. You know, we’ve been looking for the biggest and boldest female leaders in health creation, and there is no one like the unstoppable Terry Wahls. I’m excited to see what happens in the next 10 years; I know the last 10 have been an incredible journey for you. Now the next 10, I’m super excited to bear witness to it and facilitate however I can. Next March, I know there’s a big book coming out, right?
Terry Wahls: 26:34 Yes, yes, yes. So, we’ve revised The Wahls Protocol. And, I talk a lot more about resilience, and talk more about all the exciting stuff with fasting, and how much the research has progressed in the five years since the previous book was out.
Jeffrey Bland: 26:52 Awesome. Awesome.
James Maskell: 26:52 Absolutely. There’s a lot more to learn, but so many great starting points here. I hope that Terry’s story is as powerful to you, the listener, if you have questioned your own ability to be big and bold in assertion with your health, hopefully that is no longer a question. This has been the Big Bold Health Podcast. If you want to tell us what health means to you, go to bigboldhealth.com, you can fill it out there. But in the meantime, it’s been myself, James Maskell, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, and the unstoppable Dr. Terry Wahls. It’s been the Big Bold Health Podcast, thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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