good and bad fats

Since early childhood, I have loved buttery, creamy foods. I adore chocolate, cream cheese, sour cream, ribs, cheesecake, and cheesy pizza. After I married, at age twenty-one, I began to put on weight. My skinny husband loved hot fudge sundaes and banana splits, so I –who had always been thin—went right along.

When I discovered Adelle Davis, I found she encouraged her readers to add cold-pressed vegetable oil to their diets. She knew that vegetable oils—what we now call omega-6 oil-- easily broke down under the heat and stress of the extraction process. She was right in wanting us to get more oil in our diet, but wrong because she did not know that later research would show that the open bonds in the molecules in polyunsaturated fat caused oxidation in the body and could lead to many health problems. She died in the 1970s and never learned about antioxidants—even though she urged us all to take vitamins, some of which are antioxidants.

Davis encouraged her readers to take cod liver oil, an Omega 3 oil, which is a good thing. She taught me to shun shortening and margarine, even writing that lard was preferable to the white canned shortening American cooks relied on. It was from her I learned not to save and reuse cooking fat. Old grease or oil is oxidized—otherwise known as rancid.

Only within the last few years have Americans learned about the dangers of trans fatty acids, those found in man-made spreads. Another author from whom I learned the science of trans fatty acid is Udo Erasmus, a man who wrote his dissertation on oil and later published it as Good Oils, Bad Oils.

Erasmus explained that fat molecules are chains of atoms. The shorter the chain, the lower the number in the fat’s name, and the less likely this fat is to clog the arteries. Saturated fats come from animal sources mostly—the exceptions are coconut and palm oil. Saturated fat molecules are wavy, which causes them to stick together. The longer the chain, the more they like to coagulate when cool.

Butter, butyric acid, has only two atoms, so melts or softens at room temperature. It is a good saturated fat. From Davis I learned to make super butter: soften butter, then mix it with oil until spreadable. Refrigerate before using. Davis used sunflower oil. I use extra light olive oil. Extra virgin is better but tastes stronger.

Unsaturated fat molecules are straight; therefore, they do not stick together unless very cold. Scientists had to find a way to make these molecules coagulate through chemical manipulation. They call these trans fatty acids. Trans fatty acids are substitutes for saturated fats. When butter was in short supply during World War II, someone invented a way to make oil into pseudo butter. As their first product was white, consumers refused to spread it on their bread, so margarine companies included a packet of yellow food coloring to add to it. Later, they added flavor and color before selling.

Why is margarine bad for us? It is made from chemically altered polyunsaturated fat. Bends have been forced into the long chains, making a product that clogs the arteries, has open bonds that oxidize, and who knows what other chemical bad stuff.

As time went on in my life, I got away from much of the good I learned from my study of nutrition via Davis. I moved to small towns where health food stores were hard to find, and I was financially unable to go find them. However, I still made soup from scratch, did not feed my children processed cereal, and tried to cook from primary ingredients rather than packages.

After my MS diagnosis, I immediately went back to my healthy roots. I haunted the health food store, found homeopathic medicine for my hay fever, bought flax seeds, and found cod liver oil. I searched the health area of Books-a-Million, our local chain bookstore. Here I found a wonderful book, MS—A Self-help Guide, by an English woman, Judy Graham.

This book got me interested in diet as a way to control MS. She has a new, updated version available now named Managing Multiple Sclerosis Naturally: A Self-Help Guide to Living with MS. Her advice led me to Dr. Roy Laver Swank’s book, The Multiple Sclerosis Diet Book, which he wrote with Barbara Brewer Dugan.

For nearly sixty years Dr. Swank, a neurologist, worked with MS patients, using a diet protocol he developed. He was not willing to do a double-blind test because he wanted all his patients to follow the diet. However, when he compared those who stayed on the diet with those who quit, the faithful followers stayed healthy while the others went downhill.

I immediately took on this diet—no easy chore. The Swank diet limits you to 15 grams of saturated fat a day. No red meat for a year and little after that. Cheese should not be eaten as it is so high in saturated fat. No chocolate, whole milk, and few eggs. I followed this diet perfectly for two years after diagnosis until a Christmas gift of chocolate truffles started me on a chocolate binge.

I was stupid not to go back on this diet, but back in the mid-1990s, I had absolutely no support. My doctors and others with MS scoffed at the diet, so I began to doubt its validity. But Dr. Swank was right when he said those who leave it go downhill. Today I am following it once more.

Dr. Swank’s theory, backed by some experiments, was that MS patient’s bodies have trouble breaking down saturated fats, and that small molecules of this fat collect in small veins feeding the central nervous system. When the fat globules stretch the veins, it causes a breakdown in the blood-brain barrier, allowing foreign invaders (viruses, chemicals, metals) to attack the myelin sheath of the nerves.

I was reminded of this theory recently (2008-2010). Dr. Paolo Zamboni theorized a blood flow problem in MS compromising the blood-brain barrier but saw the blockage (CCSVI) in the jugular and azygos veins in the neck. Some people have had angioplastys to help these veins. More trials are underway now; however, these results are so far inconclusive. It does, however, underscore the necessity of limiting saturated fats if you have MS.

More from my MS book--

Looking back at when I probably had the beginnings of multiple sclerosis, my 20s, the first thing I did wrong was to avoid the sun. This was the 70s, and the scare health news of the time was about cancer being caused by excessive exposure to the sun.

I grew up in the years before air-conditioning. My sisters and my friends and I played out all summer long, indeed all year long, in the sunshine. We wore shorts and short sleeve top, giving us the greatest amount of sun exposure possible. We played in the sprinkler in our bathing suits and went to the pool for hours.

Recently, when I went to my neurologist for my regular checkup, she checked me for a vitamin D deficiency and found I had one. She told me to go to the drugstore and buy a vitamin D and to take it regularly.

This deficiency is very common in people with multiple sclerosis. Now I look back on all the years I've spent avoiding the sun for fear of getting skin cancer. I went overboard to avoid swimming pools and sunbathing during the years when most young people spent hours in these pursuits.

When I was in my early 20s and a new journalism graduate, I went to work for the local newspaper in my hometown Lawton, Oklahoma. I worked in the feature department, and one of the assignments I had was to investigate the new type of store that had just opened--a health food store.

I went to the store and met the owner, who was very enthusiastic about the need for vitamin supplements and healthy foods. She loaned me a book by Adelle Davis, the 60s and 70s guru of vitamins and health foods. Mrs. Davis had done much research and, using the studies of her time, knew a great deal of about the efficacy of the different vitamins.

I grew enthusiastic about this subject as I researched it for a series in the paper. I read all her books and began to take vitamins myself. Using her advice, I took cod liver oil (rich in vitamins A and D) by the spoonful daily. I continued taking vitamins for several years until my husband and I began our family. Even then I gave cod liver oil to my babies. Eventually, though, the expense of vitamins to a young family with three children became prohibitive, I thought, and I drifted away from buying them.

Many years later, in some of the earliest material I found after MS diagnosis, I found a doctor who told his patients to take a teaspoon of cod liver oil daily. I did this for several years, but eventually got away from the diet. Although I knew cod liver oil is rich in vitamin D, I did not know the multiple sclerosis connection. I will discuss the Swank diet later.

So what did I do wrong? To begin with, I quit taking vitamins when I reached my 30s and felt I could not afford to them. I quit taking cod liver oil after I had been advised to take it by a multiple sclerosis specialist.

Would my health be different today if I had done all the things right? Yes, I believe it would. Perhaps I would still have multiple sclerosis, but it might never have I manifested itself as strongly had I kept my body well supplied with vitamin D.

A Series of Adjustments

I guess it is natural to ask “why me” when you find out you have a serious illness. I don’t remember going through that stage. I had more of the “why not me” reaction. I did not feel sick. I could walk fine. It was scary, but it did not immediately change my life drastically.

Since being diagnosed sixteen years ago, I have seen multiple sclerosis as a series of adjustments. A few weeks before finding out I had MS, I was walking with my husband a mile a day, and now I did not have the stamina. Now I knew why I was so exhausted at the end of each school day that I headed for the nearest gas station for a Coke—which I immediately drank just for the sugar and caffeine lift.

I began to adjust. I adjusted to tripping a lot. Then I adjusted to falling once in a while. I kept driving until I could not lift my right leg fast enough for a braking emergency. At that point I got hand controls and drove many more years.

When I could no longer walk through a big grocery store, I adjusted to a smaller one. I adjusted to a cane, then a walker, and then a wheelchair. To keep teaching, I eventually bought a second-hand power wheelchair, which I only used at school.

My house was a split-level with a sunken living room. I adjusted to a stairlift to get upstairs, and gradually adjusted to sitting—first downstairs and then upstairs. Eventually I spent most of my time in my bedroom upstairs. I even had my own little refrigerator and microwave.

The main adjustment I made was the frame around my life being much smaller. I still had a picture inside, but the frame was smaller.

Immediate changes for the better that MS brought to my life:

External things fell out of focus. Suddenly I did not care so much about the peripheries of life. I turned my eyes on God in a way I never had before. He was the only answer to the uncertainties I faced. I decided to finally read my Bible straight through. All my earlier efforts had fizzled out in the minor prophets.

This time I set no time limit, read some Genesis, some Matthew, and a Psalm each day. I used a newer version, and it took a year and a half. Immediately I started over in another version, and finished in a year. By now I was teaching half a day, and even with grading had a lot of time, I chose another version and read it in sixth months.

One day I was telling someone how much I loved the Holman translation when I suddenly realized that I had fallen in love with the Bible, God’s Word, no matter what the translation. It took MS to narrow my focus to what was really important.

The other change for the better was that I finally had time to write—at least after I began working part-time. It was what I had wanted to do since high school, it was what I studied in school, it was my dream. I had made an effort to write when my kids were young; however, the need to help out financially sent me back to school for a second degree—this one in teaching.

Teaching English should take three or four hours a day of homework—I mean for the teacher. You can’t teach writing unless you are willing to spend the time marking papers. That is what it takes to help students improve their writing. This took all my after school hours before I went part-time, and a lot of time after.

But now I had a little time for me—thanks to MS. No matter what this disease has taken from me, it has given me focus on what is really important.

Introduction to MS book

The sun reflecting off the fields of snow outside provided all the light I needed as I read book after book while stranded inside a log cabin a few miles from the entrance to the Smoky Mountains National Park. I had no other way to pass the time.

We had traveled hours for the family funeral, but a freak storm had trapped us in this cabin. The grave high at the top of a hillside cemetery could not even be opened. After two days of reading by the reflected sun, my eyes began to act oddly. I blinked and blinked, trying to focus; however, when the funeral finally happened, I had to play the organ with one eye closed.

My plan to drive part of the way home so that my husband could rest had to be shelved. After trying to drive a while, I pulled off the road and proclaimed that I could not focus well enough to be safe.

I drove to work the next day with one eye shut. I taught that day looking at two of each student. By the end of the day I knew I needed to see a doctor. This was not going away.

“You have diplopia,” the ophthalmologist said, "and the cause could be many things—diabetes, Grave’s disease, Gilliam barre, aneurysm, myasthenia gravis, cataracts, or multiple sclerosis.” Of course, he quickly eliminated some, but for the others, he sent me off for a string of tests, ending with an MRI.

When I returned to the ophthalmologist for results, he left me sitting in a chair while he saw to another patient. Meanwhile, my folder with my tests results lay open on a table beside me.

Now, I am a naturally curious person with a good mind. I saw it this way. These were my test results. The doctor left the open folder in plain sight. Only a mindless robot with an overblown fear of doctors would not look.

So I looked, and I saw—“suspect multiple sclerosis.” I was not unfamiliar with the disease, but I was ignorant about it.

The ophthalmologist sent me to my first neurologist, who sent me off for a battery of tests commonly used in the 1990s to diagnose MS, including an evoked potentials test, another MRI, and a spinal tap.

I was lying forward on an inclined board while a nice doctor tapped my spinal fluid when he asked, “How did you get in this shape?”

I thought about my two weeks or more of going from one doctor to another and one test to another. You would have to know that I have always avoided doctors, going only when absolutely necessary,

“Do you mean how did I fall into the hands of doctors?” I laughed as I answered him, but had no idea how radically my life was about to change.

Second Quest book

Having lost this blog for a year and just recently rediscovered it, I thought I would discuss my latest work. In the past year, I published Pride and Prejudice, Mary's Story and Quest for Eden: The Fifth River. How do I find the time to write so much, you might ask.

Well, I live in a wheelchair, except for times in bed. I am essentially house-bound now, so I face hours of time on my hands. Writing gives purpose to my days and goals to my future. It is better to think about the next book than the next stage of MS.

I am now forty pages into Quest for Eden: The Tree of Life and ten pages into a non-fiction book I might call Forty Years with MS: What I Did Right, What I Did Wrong. This would be a short work, but I would like to write it quickly and get it out there where it could help others.

I will post some of my covers here. Anyone interested in finding my books should go to Amazon and put in Jeanne Desautel Foster. They are all also available in Kindle and other ebook formats for much lower prices.