MS, Gut Bacteria, and the Lonely, Stressful Job of Finding Your Way

While I agree that there are significant links between diet and many diseases, especially with some of the info coming from newer research into gut biome etc, you need to be careful about the various "diet/lifestyle" websites - all of them will ONLY include research which supports their particular viewpoint - regardless of what that viewpoint might be (i.e. "paleo" based or vegetarian/vegan orientated or whatever). The two most widely known, the Wahls Protocol and the Jelinek/OMS approach, both have quite a lot of good principles which will benefit anyone whether they have MS or not (especially around getting away from processed foods), but some of it really flies in the face of a great deal of established science.

A lot of OMSers have serious difficulty understanding cause and effect, and once they are converted to the OMS cause they will attribute everything good to following OMS, and everything bad to not following it 100%. So, according to them absence of relapses is generally due to following OMS, and having a relapse is down to being non-compliant. If you are 150% compliant the usual fallback position to cover suffering a relapse is that you haven't been "doing OMS for long enough" because it take 3 to 5 years to really "turn the tanker around". It's a bit along the lines of once you take it up you can't afford to admit that maybe it's not all you had hoped it would be. The fact that most MS is of the RR variety and will relapse and remit regardless of what diet you are following seems to not compute with some people who are following these dietary approaches.

Unfortunately, when given a diagnosis of MS many people seem to stumble across one or two well presented websites with avid converts blogging and "foruming" away like crazy and singing the praises of their own dietary religion, and the newly diagnosed often don't seem to look much further for real substantiation of what they are reading online. Those who don't experience the success that such approaches promise often just "fade away" into the background after constantly being told that it's their fault for not doing it right. Before diving headfirst into such approaches research more widely on the internet and dig a bit deeper, especially if the sites have user forums as often clues to how they don't work for many people can be found in posts from those for whom it didn't produce the proclaimed miracles, and the responses they receive from the "true believers".

If you are going to adopt one of these approaches, then at least do it with your eyes wide open and based on wider research than just a whole bunch of people on a site specific forum claiming success. And if you do publicly question any of their tenets in one of their forums be prepared for an onslaught of advice about how you must have faith in the approach. Questioning is not welcomed unless it is related to how to "do" the approach.

The research that you have cited was "posted" in a lot of different places. It does draw a CORRELATION between diet and disability, but this is not the same a "cause and effect". To draw anything more than a correlation would require considerably more research into any underlying contributing factors as to why the dietary intakes are different - for example, are the people with higher disability less able to access or prepare better foods? It's like the Vitamin D and MS issue - it is not known whether low Vit D contributes to developing MS or whether having MS means you need more Vit D and blood tests will thus show lower Vit D levels. According to some diehard OMSers low Vit D will cause a relapse - yet this has NOT actually been proven by ANY of the Vit D research. Even the highly qualified Prof Jelinek himself has posted this on his own OMS website' forums - and yet he claims that all of OMS is based on scientific evidence. The Vit D council is more informative and scientifically evidence based than OMS - and if the Vit D Council's recommendations are good enough for one of the foremost MS experts in the world, then they are good enough for me.