Dear all, nearly 2025! All best wishes for the NY.
I’m 44 and diagnosed with YOPD 6 months ago. I’m not taking medication yet but do red light therapy, B1, Cinammon, brew my own kefir and eat a lot of fermented products. I also exercise a fair bit and meditate daily.
I have a good mainly Mediterranean diet with loads of veg, fruit, nuts, olive oil, seeds, fish, chicken, pulses , only one slice of sourdough per day and one serving of brown rice/ lentil pasta. I only eat one square of chocolate/ day and a mejool date so little sugar- nothing refined. I fast about 13-15 hours most days. Food is my love language and I enjoy cooking for myself and others but have really tried to stick to my guns on the healthy eating.
I’ve been reading about Keto diet for PD. It sounds like a really hopeful strategy but my heart is heavy with how restrictive it is. I feel pretty good on my current diet but am wanting to find other ways to help my mitochondria.
For those who use KD, how long do I need to do it to make a difference to PD? Is it life long commitment? How do you prevent other issues that are side effect of KD? what is the function of MCT oil?
Thank you so much kind people for reading my post and any knowledge you can share!
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Chastar
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It sounds like you have a well thought out diet that I would guess most PD aficionados would praise. It's not my diet, but mine is weird (gluten and lectin free).
I would suggest thinking long and researching deep before jumping on keto. There are some small studies showing a benefit with keto, but there are studies showing benefits with a lot of things. Just do your research (like you are doing here) before turning everything upside down.
Thank you Bolt for your encouragement, I will do more researching. I can see the reasoning behind avoiding lectins in your diet- link to autoimmune issues/ inflammation.
Thanks India, sorry you are in the club too but nice to meet you! I’m planning on adding broccoli sprouts as well- I’ve got my kit for growing them but need to get started.
You dont have to follow a restrictive ketonic diet to get benefits from ketones. I cover this off in detail in a post I made 3 weeks ago which may help.
Thank you- I looked up your post. V informative. I see there other options for using ketones not just keto diet. I do try to exercise in fasted state but I cab feel a bit faint sometimes. I’ll look into the MCT oil option. The esters sound too expensive to be viable atm. Hopefully they will come down in price.
I got pd at 44 and now am 46. I started keto 4 months ago and it’s helped alot. Im now doing ketovore (less than 20g carbs a day). My main symptoms were tremors, sleep issues, toilet problems and nausea/energy. All symptoms improved 80% except tremors which stabilised. Im taking no drugs right now but occasionally take sinemet if under stressful situations.
Took about a month to see a difference and you need to learn to love meat.
Edge- that’s brilliant news you’ve found the diet makes such a difference to you and you can manage largely without medication as a result. That’s pretty amazing result! I was vegetarian for 25 years and only started eating meat again as I lost a lot of weight pre diagnosis of PD. It was fully investigated for other causes and none could be found. My weight stabilised once I started eating meat again but I find it harder to digest!
Yes me too. I watched a few talks by Matthew Phillips- hence I got interested in keto as disease modifying option. That’s wonderful you’ve been able to return to work as a result of diet modification, wow!
Thank you for posting many of us are hungry for good news
could you potentially quantify the improvements you saw including reduction of drugs mood tremor mental state Physical Agility Etc thank you
Also most importantly how long have you been doing it, when did you begin to see benefits, do you feel the benefits are still increasing, or did they plateau?
To be honest sinemet doesn’t seem to help my tremors , maybe they do 10-20%. Propranolol is more effective. With keto and propranolol i do better than with sinemet!
Yes i count carbs using the cronometer app. Yes i take drugs before events but not every day. Yes i test ketones using keto strips. Yes i test blood sugar using a cgm but its normal at 5.4 mmol. I do feel some symptoms when my blood sugar is dropping back to normal though….
i follow dr ken berrys proper human diet. Well worth a read and its free.
I did Keto for quite some time and in the end, had to increase carbs because I lost too much weight. I certainly think keto/low carb diets give me more energy and there is no doubt that a large helping of a refined sugar treat just leaves me feeling lifeless and bloated. I settled for low carb which actually is more sustainable and realistic for me. Good luck.
I’m surprised by the amount of people who don’t support this. I started out doing low-carb after doing research and I have since evolved to doing a keto diet as much as possible. I’ve only been doing it for about three months or so. I was previously still eating a cup of brown rice per day but now I’ve cut out the brown rice too and I’ve gone completely keto. I chose foods that I really enjoy that also happen to be good for me. I eat sauerkraut daily along with an omelette containing spinach, onions, cheese sometimes an avocado (all cooked in olive oil). That’s the first thing I eat at about 11 AM. It’s so filling that I’m barely hungry for dinner, but I’ll eat some kind of meat for dinner. Then, I’ll snack on peanuts or pistachios. That’s really it.
I will say that once every two weeks or so I will eat homemade bread or popcorn that I make in our popcorn machine with coconut oil and butter. This way, I am in ketosis most of the time, but I still give myself the flexibility to enjoy things I really like every few weeks.
I certainly don’t feel worse and I hope in the long-term it improves my health.
With regards to MCT oil, I don’t take it, but the benefit is supposed to be that it contains ketones.
Absolutely. I wasn’t very overweight to begin with, but I lost about 10 pounds without even trying. I feel better mentally for sure. I don’t have tremor dominant Parkinson’s. I just have stiffness and rigidity. I haven’t noticed a decline at all since being diagnosed last March but since I haven’t been diagnosed for a long time , I am early in my progression.
My thought process is that there are so many other health benefits to doing this and it may be something that helps my progression so why not?
Thanks for sharing your reply Tenacious. Seems like you have a good balance in being able to eat things you like occasionally and it’s working for you!
Matthew Phillips is the neurologist from New Zealand who has done one small scale study with his patients regarding ketogenic diets
your diet is better than 99% of Americans but you would have to dig deeper to get into true Keto
you can measure ketones in the blood which is the most accurate method apparently measuring in the afternoon not the morning and at least 3 hours after any meal
it sounds like you're able to control your eating habits and Keto is not at all a bland way to eat you just have to find this few cheat items that will work for you if you need them low carb pizza for example
one theory is that Parkinson's and Alzheimer's are basically insulin resistance of the brain the brain can no longer take up glucose normally from carbohydrate
ketones are an excellent source for the brain/heart to make up the deficit
the theory is they also could help rebuild mitochondria and stop damaging the brain
unfortunately there's no money to be made in nutrition therefore you will never see the studies unless it's related to Big Pharma
I am well versed in a cyclical ketogenic diet and have done that for weight loss in the past with great success
look into the work of Dr Steven Phinney and Jeff volek regarding low carbohydrate diets mineral supplementation meal preparation sports performance and fat burning
Dr Eric Westman is also a keto proponent who treats patients for diabetes related disease also Sean Baker is involved with the carnivore diet which some have had great success with various diseases also there is a clinic out of bloomington Indiana I believe that is treating diabetes with diet only low carb Dr Sarah Hallberg was involved in founding the clinic she has since passed away. virtahealth.com/people/sara...
personally I'm about 3 weeks into a keto diet after my Parkinson's diagnosis
in the first 24 hours of going zero carb I actually had Tremors disappear for about a day and a half unfortunately it did not last
overall I would say I am more jittery than before - no PD meds
some improvements have been energy levels have been able to exercise and take less naps
I'm hoping the jitteriness will go away as I adapt further I feel it may take 30 days to fully adapt based on my past experience I've dropped about 11 lb but you've got to figure about five of that was water weight
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