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When you went gluten free, were you told to beware of nutritional deficiencies as a result of not eating gluten? It’s one of the biggest issues about which critics of the gluten free diet (especially when you don’t have a celiac disease diagnosis) warn.
While some of the rhetoric is rather silly since you can get plenty of nutrients from eating a diet of real food as compared to processed, fortified junk, nutritional deficiencies still plague many of us with gut issues (even those who eat Paleo!).
And though it can seem very attractive to use supplements to dig your way out of or avoid a depleted nutritional status, there are some important problems and consequences that are rarely discussed in mainstream articles that might make you think twice before reaching for those vitamin and mineral pills.
In this podcast, Dr. Terry Wahls, author of The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine joins me to share her story and experience with micronutrients (meaning vitamins and minerals). We talk at length about practical solutions to such deficiencies which are more common than many of us realize and Dr. Wahls shares a simple at-home test you can do in less than three-seconds to see if you potentially have deficiencies.
Most Common & Unexpected Reasons of Nutritional Deficiencies with Dr. Terry Wahls
The following points were discussed in during the podcast:
1:50 The importance of micronutrients and why your body needs them.
2:34 Dr. Wahls shares her personal journey with Multiple Sclerosis.
3:50 The reasons why micronutrient deficiency is on the rise globally.
5:18 Micro-nutrient depletion of apples and other common foods.
7:10 Why should you care that you aren’t getting the appropriate amount of micronutrients in your food.
8:35 How getting both macro- and micronutrients from food is key to staying healthy over taking supplements.
10:39 The gut’s role in creating micronutrient deficiencies.
12:13 Why you should take epsom salt baths if you use heartburn medication.
12:50 How mineral deficiencies are related to the top 10 causes of death.
13:27 Why even a Paleo Diet isn’t nutrient-dense enough to avoid nutrient deficiencies.
15:54 The importance of sulfur for optimal bodily functions and where to get it naturally in your diet.
18:43 Fat’s role in making nutrients more absorbable during digestion.
20:06 Correlation between a low-fat diet and nutritional deficiencies.
20:55 Role of Vitamin D in the body.
22:00 The simple, three-second free test you can do right now to check for micronutrient deficiencies and what to do if you have classic signs of deficiency.
23:20 Jennifer sits in the patient hot-seat with Dr. Wahls.
COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT
Jennifer: Welcome back to the Gluten Free School Podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Fugo. And today, we are going to talk about mineral deficiencies.
You and I might know that minerals, vitamins and other micronutrients are so important, but we don’t quite know what’s going on in our bodies and how we might end up with a deficiency. And this happens a lot for people who are struggling with autoimmune issues, those of us who have gluten sensitivity and especially those with Celiac Disease.
I have a really special guest with me, Dr. Terry Wahls. She was on the Women’s Gluten Free Health Summit and now, she’s come to join us and talk to us about this really important topic. If you don’t know Dr. Wahls, you should. You should absolutely know her. She is amazing.
She is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa where she teaches Internal Medicine Resonance, sees patients in traumatic brain injury clinic and conducts clinical trials.
She’s also a patient with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, which is confined her to a tilt recline wheelchair for four years. Dr. Wahls restored her health and now pedals her bike to work every day. She’s the author of The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine and teaches the public and medical community about the healing power of intensive nutrition.
Dr. Wahls, it’s so great to have you on the podcast!
Dr. Wahls: Oh, thank you so much. I love doing this.
Jennifer: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the importance of minerals and vitamins, those micronutrients in our diet? Why do we need them?
Dr. Wahls: You and I are alive of complicated chemical reactions and the minerals and vitamins are the catalyst so those reactions can all happen. If we are low in our minerals, the vitamins are not effective catalysts. If we don’t have vitamins and have the minerals, we still don’t have the effective catalysts. Everything that thinking, moving, digesting, all of this, repairing ourselves, and growth, all of this depends on very complex chemical reactions.
Jennifer: And why do you personally know about this issue?
Dr. Wahls: Because it’s my own personal story. I have the progressive MS, spent four years in a tilt recline wheelchair. Conventional medicine failed me and I was clearly headed towards becoming bed-ridden and demented.
And so I began reading the mouse studies and began reading nutrition and taught myself the nutritional requirements of brain cells based again on the latest science. And in that, I began to realize there’s this long list of vitamins, of minerals, of essential fats, proteins that we need for brain cells to function.
So this got me fired up about nutrition because when I adapted this nutrient-dense diet based on ancestral health principles, within a year, I went from tilt recline wheelchair, unable to sit up in a regular chair to being able to bike 18 miles with my family.
Jennifer: That’s amazing!
Dr. Wahls: Yeah. So I get this both on the scientific level and on the personal, experiential level as well.
Jennifer: And you’re still doing research, correct?
Dr. Wahls: Yes, we have several studies underway. One of our papers is under review. And so we’d be launching new studies likely in January or February.
Jennifer: That’s amazing! So why don’t you tell us a little bit about why you think there’s been this explosion of mineral and vitamin deficiencies globally? Where do you think that comes from?
Dr. Wahls: Like most things in life, there are a lot of factors that contributed to this. The first one is that we’re eating lots of grains and grain products, which have phytates that bind minerals and make them harder to absorb.
The second one is that the soils in the United States, now that we use chemical fertilizers as opposed to manures in green crops, those chemical fertilizers do not replace the minerals. So I believe the USDA says that there’s been an 85% mineral depletion in our soils.
And then, if you look again at the USDA reports on the mineral content of say apples, chicken or hamburger since 1919 to 1992, there’s been a 50% to 100% drop in the mineral content of minerals like magnesium, calcium, iron, zinc.
So we have a lot of anti-nutrients in the grains, our soils have less minerals, our foods have fewer minerals in them and all of these add up to accelerating rates of mineral deficiencies.
Jennifer: And where do we see that show up as an example? Do you have a particular food that you could share with us some more details about that to better illustrate it?
Dr. Wahls: Let’s take apples. If we look at the apples that our great grandparents ate, there was a lot less pesticide use, there was no chemical fertilizers for any of those trees. And so all that food back in the 1919s, it was all organic.
Now, we use chemically intensive farming methods that often, as part of the pesticide, herbicide chemicals such as RoundUp, they chelate and bind the mineral so the plant can’t absorb it. And so it decreases the mineral content of plants and they die, you add a genetically modified organism so that you have RoundUp-ready soy beans or corn, they will grow in the RoundUp, but they don’t get as much mineral as they would’ve had had they been wild type.
So the corn and soy beans have fewer minerals. Our animals eat the corn and soy beans. They have fewer minerals. We are having steadily fewer minerals, fewer vitamins per calorie. It’s very sobering actually.
Jennifer: That is really shocking that pretty much everything that we’re eating just doesn’t have the same nutritional profile that it used to.
Dr. Wahls: That’s absolutely true. There are farmers that are growing things more sustainably, working on what’s known as the tilth, which is the soil quality and increasing the bacterial content of the soil, more organic materials. My guess if we did a nutrient analysis of foods from those farms, the vitamin mineral content, antioxidant content would be very much closer, perhaps equivalent to what our grandparents have.
Jennifer: And so for somebody who’s listening to this and saying, “Okay, I’m not getting as many minerals, I could go out and buy a supplement,” why does it matter if they might have, say, Celiac Disease or an autoimmune disease, why does it matter that they’re not getting the appropriate amount of minerals and vitamins in their food?
Dr. Wahls: As I said earlier, all of our chemical reactions are dependent on catalysts to work effectively. And so you need the vitamins and minerals for that. As we get more and more nutritionally depleted, our bodies will do what’s known as triage – and Dr. Bruce Ames first identified this.
It’s sort of like in vitamin K, if your vitamin K stores deplete, it appears that we do a good job of making sure we could still clot our blood, but now we don’t do a very good job with some of the other roles for vitamin K like making sure the calcium doesn’t go to our heart valves and our blood vessels, but instead to our bones.
We do the most life-preserving, life-threatening kinds of things that we have to do as our vitamins and minerals get depleted, but we begin doing fewer and fewer of the other functions.
And so vitamin and mineral deficiency leads to what we call long latency diseases. Diseases that will show up in two or three years or ten years or fifteen years.
Jennifer: We’re so obsessed with supplements. I understand to some degree we think, “Okay, I’m just going to take this pill,” but ultimately, it’s best to get the minerals and vitamins and even essential fats in food. Why is that?
Dr. Wahls: All of our receptors that are taking up our minerals or vitamins or antioxidants nearly always… there are multiple compounds that will interact with that receptor. For example, some of my patients may have read that there are about 200 different enzymes in the brain that are dependent on zinc. And so they think, “Well, my memory is not doing quite as good. I think I’ll start taking zinc.” So they go down to the pharmacy and start on the zinc capsules.
But what happens is now that they’re taking all this zinc, that same receptor should be also taking up copper, but it doesn’t because it’s been so flooded with zinc. The person will develop copper deficiency and zinc toxicity. And then we’re beginning to have neuro-degeneration and autoimmune problems because of the imbalance of the zinc and copper ratios.
For most people of our chemical functions related to vitamins, minerals and the antioxidants, it’s in part about the total value, but also about the ratio various vitamins, various minerals, antioxidants, one to another. And as that ratio gets imbalanced because we’re taking supplements, then we develop reactive insufficiencies.
It’s extraordinarily difficult as a treating practitioner to give you a cocktail of vitamins and supplements that does not create this altered ratio. So I’d much, much prefer that people get their vitamins, minerals, antioxidants from food. If I use supplements, I target them and I generally monitor using blood levels to make sure I’m not getting an overshoot creating reactive insufficiencies.
Jennifer: And with this, let’s talk about that for a second, you said if they’re taking supplements or if they’re eating foods, what happens if there are gut issues? Can gut issues prevent people from absorbing the vitamins and minerals properly?
Dr. Wahls: One of the very common medications people are using is stomach acid-lowering medication. They’ll use proton pump inhibitors. There’s H2 blockers and liquid antacids. They’re doing that because they have heartburn, probably a dysbiosis.
Now the problem is we need acid to digest your food. We need acid to absorb minerals, which are absorbed predominantly in the stomach. Without the acid, mineral absorption dramatically declines and we also decrease the activation of the pancreatic enzyme that digests our fats and our proteins. So we set ourselves up for nutritional insufficiencies and deficiencies whenever we take an acid lowering medication.
Now, we have leaky gut, which a lot of folks have following antibiotic use or an overgrowth of yeast bacteria, that leaky gut allows food particles to get into your blood stream, but it also is associated with decreased absorption of minerals.
Jennifer: Really?
Dr. Wahls: Leaky gut is a complex issue and can lead to malnutrition in addition to the increase risk of food sensitivities.
Jennifer: Many of us then may actually have deficiencies and we’re not aware of it?
Dr. Wahls: Yes. Actually, one of the things that I talk to my patients who are on their proton pump inhibitors is that you need to be taking Epsom salts bath with dead sea salts and to do that once or twice a week because your skin will let you absorb those minerals.
Jennifer: That’s great to know. I love Epsom salt baths, but I wasn’t quite aware that you were able to do it that way.
Dr. Wahls: Yes. So do an Epsom salts bath. Then put in another cup of dead sea mineral or sea salt, Himalayan sea salt and just lounge, read, try and spend at least half an hour. That will also help improve your mineral status.
Jennifer: Nice! So I’m curious– Is there a connection or any sort of association between mineral deficiencies and some of the top causes of death and disability in the U.S.?
Dr. Wahls: Ooh, thank you so much for asking that! In fact, the top ten causes of death and disability are associated with mineral deficiencies and the most common mineral deficiencies are selenium, zinc, magnesium, calcium and to a little lesser degree, potassium and chromium. And of course, iodine would be associated with endocrine disorders and chronic infections as well.
Jennifer: And what about vitamins? How do vitamins play a role? People think that since they’re eating fortified foods, somehow, they’re getting enough. But some of the fat-soluble vitamins, a lot of people are deficient in them.
Dr. Wahls: If you look at the NHANES data, they’ll say that on average, Americans are meeting their RDA’s. But that means there’s probably about half of us who are not.
If you set as requirement that everybody has to meet all the RDA’s for every vitamin, every mineral, now very few us are meeting those unless people are doing a very structured intensive approach to their nutrition.
Even the Paleo diet doesn’t meet all the RDA’s, which I think most of us would agree is generally a very nutrient-dense diet, but that’s not the case when it’s been analyzed using diets from Diane Sanfilippo and the Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson. They used the menus and recipes from those books for a week and found that they still missed 40% of the RDA’s in both those diets, which is still a huge amount.
That’s because we don’t have the cultural wisdom without some more structured guidance to know how to organize a diet that really provides all the vitamins, minerals, essential fats that science says we need to avoid a nutrient deficient disease state.
Jennifer: If you were to tell someone just one thing to do in order to improve your micronutrient status – I don’t know, maybe I’m asking too much, but is there one thing a person could do that might not fix it, but have a major impact?
Dr. Wahls: I’ll take the easy answer, buy my book, read it and that’ll help you out a lot. I’ll give you a little more nuanced answer and that is eat more organ meats at least three times a week – things like liver, heart, tongue, gizzards, mussels, oysters. Ramp up your vegetables, six to nine cups – six for women and maybe somewhat small if you’re really petite, nine cups if you’re a guy. Ditch the grains. That will amp your nutrient density considerably.
I would also throw in seaweed, so you can get plenty of iodine, selenium and other trace minerals.
Jennifer: And I want to ask you about sulfur because I think from having seen you speak twice, you talk a lot about the sulfur rich vegetables.
Dr. Wahls: Yes.
Jennifer: Why are they important? We need sulfur for a lot of our physiologic functions – for making neurotransmitters, for processing and eliminating our heavy metals, plastic solvents and other toxins.
I would also structure my diet that way because I know that the onion family vegetables, the mushroom family vegetables and the cabbage family vegetables have been medicinal foods for thousands of generations across many, many cultures. And I think the reason they were medicinal foods is because they have all these organic sulfur, which has so many critical functions in our bodies.
Now, there will be some people who have mild genetic mutations, so they can’t handle sulfur quite as well. So they may need to have only one cup of vegetables in the sulfur family as opposed to three. But most of us would be well to have three cups.
Jennifer: And what are some of your favorite ways to get them into your diet?
Dr. Wahls: I love dehydrated kale chips. We have a big bowl full of kale chips that we go through every other week. My daughter is – after loving kale chips for several years – now requesting that I do bacon in greens. So I take a couple pieces of bacon, fry them, throw in some chopped and sliced ginger, garlic and then stir in kale until it’s wilted and serve that. The fat from the bacon really mellows out any bitterness and so the kale is really quite yummy.
In addition, I do a fermented garlic and ginger relish where I like to ferment a quart jar of garlic with sliced ginger. I pulse it through Cuisine Art food processor and have a very nice condiment for vegetables and meats. I like that a great deal.
Jennifer: Do you cook a lot? I know that you’re very busy with your work, research, and seeing patients. Do you spend a lot of time in the kitchen or do you try to find fast and easy things that you can do in order to get the food in.
Dr. Wahls: So I’m a very big proponent of – when I started cooking to the time I eat, I prefer 15 minutes, but I could make do with 20, never more than 30.
Jennifer: So it’s got to be fast.
Dr. Wahls: It’s got to be fast. On the weekends, I’ll do a bigger, more exotic meal. I’ll do crockpot meals or I’ll do skillet meals. Sometimes, we will grill, but otherwise, I’ll basically do things in the skillet or in a crockpot just because it’s fast, efficient and very tasty.
Jennifer: I want to kind of go back for a second because you mentioned about the bacon fat and fat is so important for absorption of certain vitamins. Could you speak a little bit to that? I think people don’t quite realize that they can’t just take the pills and that’s enough. We’re missing out a lot of times on the vitamins in foods because we don’t have the correct combo.
Dr. Wahls: The fat side of vitamins, which are vitamin A, D, E, and K all need fats to be well-absorbed. And many of the antioxidants are fat-soluble as well. So when you have greens, what you really want to do is be sure that there’s fats either in the smoothie or in the skillet or on your salad – very, very important.
And the same goes for mitochondrial nutrients. People have heard about co-enzyme Q10, that’s a fat-soluble compound, and if you don’t have fat in the meal, you will not absorb it nearly as well.
If you look at many of the vitamins whether they’re in the powder, capsule or liquid form, if you’re just taking it in a glass of water in empty stomach without any fat, you’ve just made it impossible to absorb the fat-soluble compounds in that vitamin.
Jennifer: So you’re literally sort of…
Dr. Wahls: Wasting…
Jennifer: Yeah, you’re wasting your money.
Dr. Wahls: You’re wasting your money.
Jennifer: Wow!
Dr. Wahls: Have fat, a little bit of fat whenever taking a multivitamin or an antioxidant supplement, so we can absorb it.
Jennifer: And would this be part of the reason too – I mean, we have such a craze of low fat diets. I think for a lot of women, it’s really hard now to make that shift to eating fat. There’s just fear still for many women out there being told, “Don’t eat fat.” But do you think that there’s something potentially there in the fact that for so long, we were told, “Don’t eat fat” and yet now, we’ve ended up with so many deficiencies.
Dr. Wahls: Oh, they’re absolutely correlated. All that, when you took out the fat, we have a much higher carb diet, higher insulin levels, higher rates of metabolic syndrome, diabetes, dementia, probably atherosclerosis.
So the problem was not the fat. The problem was the sugar and the damaged fat-carrying molecule from all the sugar and the lead and the mercury and the bacterial particles.
Jennifer: And about vitamin D– we talk a lot about vitamin D, but most people don’t have any idea what happens if you just take lots of vitamin D as most women do. They’re told, “Take vitamin D, take some calcium, take all these supplements for your bones.” There is a danger, is there not, to taking these things by themselves?
Dr. Wahls: Yes, so vitamin D, vitamin K, vitamin A all interact and manage the calcium in our bodies. So vitamin D increases your absorption of calcium out of the gut and it also talks to about a thousand genes – a very important talk that must do.
Vitamin K and vitamin A will see to it that the calcium you absorb get into your bones and teeth. Without vitamin K2 in particular, you’re very likely to have that calcium that you got from your vitamin D deposited into your heart valves and your blood vessels increasing your risk for stroke and heart disease.
Jennifer: What is someone to do if they’re suspicious that they could have a mineral deficiency? How do you even find out if you have a problem?
Dr. Wahls: Well, one very cheap thing to do is look at your nails. Be sure you don’t have any fingernail polish on it and see if you have any white spots or lines on your nails or if there’s lots of ridges on your nails. If that is there, you’re much more likely to have multiple minerals that you’re deficient in. Sometimes, irritations at the corner of the mouth, irritations lurking between the eyebrows can also indicate mineral deficiencies.
It can be tricky to get a blood test that accurately assesses that. Most primary care physicians don’t really have access to that. A functional medicine doctor can do more sophisticated nutritional testing. They can certainly do that.
Jennifer: With that, if you suspect like – I have a white spot on one of my nails, look at that. Alright!
Dr. Wahls: Okay!
Jennifer: I’m like, “Oh, no!” I have no ridges, but I definitely have a big white spot. What would be the next step if I’m like, “Okay, I have this problem,” should I run out to the drugstore and buy a store brand supplement?
Dr. Wahls: If you take zinc, I would never take it for more than two weeks or four weeks because you don’t want to create copper deficiency. What I’d rather you do, Jennifer is – how often do you have organ meat?
Jennifer: Oh, no. Never.
Dr. Wahls: Okay!
So when we have organ meats, the minerals, zinc, magnesium, calcium are actually much more absorbable from the organ meats than there are from any other source that you’re going to have.
So oysters, mussels, great source for that zinc. Now, another thing that you could do is to have your nuts and seeds, but you soak them and sprout them because if you soak them for 24 hours, the phytate has been broken down by phytase and now, the minerals are absorbable. So you could have sprouted nuts and sprouted seeds and that would be another source.
That is why I tell my followers organ meat three times a week. I fix chicken livers with a little bit of a curry and chili sauce last night and onions and my 20-year old daughter said, “Damn! These really are pretty good, mom.”
Jennifer: You know, I have such like a mental aversion. I did tell Sarah Ballantyne, the Paleo Mom… I said, “I’m going to try it, you convinced me. I should just grind up the liver and put into ground meat. I’ll never know what’s there.” I went to the grocery store and I really tried to figure the whole thing out. I have such a mental block about it. I’m not perfect.
Dr. Wahls: How about oysters and mussels?
Jennifer: I really don’t like seafood and shell fish. I have a real aversion to it actually.
Dr. Wahls: You know, sometimes, when you have these big aversions, it could be that metabolically, your SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) are unique and are telling you that you can’t handle that food. So I’ll say, “Okay, maybe you have some sort of a metabolic problem that freezes your ability to absorb and deal with organ meats.” Have you ever had tongue?
Jennifer: My gosh, no.
Dr. Wahls: Oh, tongue is so wonderful. Pickled tongue, put it in a crockpot, slice it, have it cold. Ah, it’s wonderful. My kids love that. We’re not getting anywhere without one. How about liver paté?
Jennifer: I’ve never had it, but I would give it a try.
Dr. Wahls: So I’d use chicken liver and make paté and then I’d put – here’s a recipe that my kids really, really like. A fresh kale leaf or colored leaf, add the liver paté, smear it on the leaf. And then guacamole on top of that and now, you roll that up and eat it like a role.
Jennifer: Okay! I think I could do that.
Dr. Wahls: That’s very good. Here’s another version that again, my daughter found, made it and really, it was quite wonderful. Do you like bacon?
Jennifer: Yes, I do. Okay, so you get chicken livers and you wrap each liver with a whole strip of bacon. You put your soaked toothpick in there. So you line up all this on your broiler pan and now you can either bake it in the oven at 500° or broil it until the bacon’s a little done than you want. I prefer to have my liver sort of medium rare. If it’s too done, it gets a bit chewy. That’s another wonderful, yummy, yummy way to serve organ meats.
Jennifer: Okay!
Dr. Wahls: My daughter discovered that at age 18.
Jennifer: Wow!
Dr. Wahls: We made this lovely feast for some of our friends. She said, “I made some bacon wrap yummies for you all.” I’ll tell you more after we’ve eaten them all. And so we all ate them and it’s like, “Man, this is really good” and then she said, “You know, that was liver.”
Jennifer: And no one knew they were eating liver?
Dr. Wahls: They didn’t realize they were eating liver and it was quite tasty. We’re serving it to kids, teenagers and pre-teens and they ate it and enjoyed it.
Jennifer: Wow!
Dr. Wahls: The trick is to not overcook the liver and to wrap it with enough fat. That mellows out the taste for us. Chicken liver is the easiest way to start.
Jennifer: Well, I’m going to have to give this a try. It’s funny, I feel like somehow we just turned this interview around and I got totally outed not doing any of this. Although I don’t ever claim to do this because I’ve really had a hard time with the organ meat stuff and I’ve sat in at a lot of events like Paleo f(x) on how to incorporate in organ meat and I still have a hard time. And the shellfish… I just really have and have had an aversion to it since I was young and really don’t like it.
Dr. Wahls: Then I would honor that. There’s something metabolically that might not be working for you… it could possibly be the liver, but my guess might also be that it’s a taste and texture that you’ve just not gotten exposed which you haven’t gotten used to.
Jennifer: And I’ve actually never had it aside from liverwurst as a kid and when I found out it was made of liver, I just stopped eating it. You know, I think it’s something I just have to go back to and maybe this is a tip to everyone out there who has an aversion to something… I don’t have an aversion to liver specifically, I’m just adverse to the thought of it… you’ve got to find someone to cook it for you who knows how to cook it so that you have it in a way that’s most tasty the first time. So this will probably be something on my agenda for the next six weeks is to someone, maybe my sister. I’m sure she cooks liver and I’ll have to ask her to cook some for me and we’ll go from there.
I really appreciate this Dr. Wahls! This is very interesting since this is a different perspective looking at nutritional status and I’m glad that I got to use myself as a guinea pig and everyone listening can know that not all of us are perfect. This is a journey for all of us!
Dr. Wahls: And I’ve made myself mineral deficient. I was into Zeolite and clay for a detox and I took them faithfully and then all of a sudden I’ve got white spots on my nails. I realized I’d made myself zinc and other mineral deficient. I stopped all of that and ramped up the organ meat and it went away fairly quickly. So we’re all learning. Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s a journey for us all.
Jennifer: I won’t, but thank you very much for the kind words. I appreciate them! And I want to remind everyone that your book The Wahls Protocol is one of my all-time favorite books. It’s one of the books I recommend to almost every person with which I speak. And I’m not just saying this because you’re here. I want everyone in the audience to know that no matter where you have MS or not, it’s just overall an amazing book. And you’ve helped even more people than just who have MS.
Dr. Wahls: Oh, many more! So I have thousands and thousands of followers. We have people Parkinson’s, mental health disorders, early cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s and all sorts of autoimmune issues, Sjogren’s, psoriasis, lupus, myasthenia gravis, and even autoimmune conditions I’ve never heard of who are reporting great benefit. And we’ve had a few people who’ve not reported benefits and I tell them “Look, you’ve got to go get a functional medicine assessment to get things personalized.” And then they come back to check in and say that personalization got them over the hump and now they too are improving as well.
Jennifer: That’s great! And your book in now available in paperback, correct?
Dr. Wahls: Yes, and I’m sure it’s going to change thousands of live once again.
Jennifer: Well, thank you so much for joining us! I really appreciate you coming by to talk about this because I had yet to have the conversation about micronutrient deficiencies. I’m glad we were able, especially using myself as a guinea pig, to see that it’s pretty easy to become mineral and vitamin deficient despite I, for example, do for myself. And everyone in the audience can hear that it really can happen to anyone. So it’s something we all have to be cognizant of and work on and hopefully people will be able to use some of the recipes in your book to get on top of this and get more of the organ meats in and try some of the fermented traditional foods as well.
Dr. Wahls: Absolutely!
Jennifer: Please stay in touch with Dr. Wahls. She’s got an amazing community. If you haven’t visited her website, you can go to www.terrywahls.com and she’s also on Faeebook and Twitter. And as we discussed, The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles is out and you can get it in paperback. It is a truly amazing book.
If you haven’t done so yet, please go subscribe, rate and review this podcast and leave you questions and comments below about vitamins and minerals. Thank you guys so much and I look forward to seeing you the next time. Bye bye!
IMPORTANT LINKS
CLICK HERE to purchase The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine!
Dr. Terry Wahls: http://www.terrywahls.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TerryWahls
Twitter: https://twitter.com/terrywahls
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What about azomite mineral powder? Is that a good way to get more minerals? I read somewhere that it’s high in aluminum though. I saw it recommended in Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions book.
I was born in Colombia, and came to the US at age 9…30 years ago. I clearly remember being fed, tongue, liver and gizzards.. now I can’t even!! But, i guess I’ll have to embrace it for the sake of my children. They are healthy, but I must ensure they grow up strong in this crazy world of ours. Great PODCAST! THANK YOU!!