Dr McDougall: "What kind of dietary regime do you work out for people who come to see with MS?"

Dr Swank: "We've worked this out pretty carefully; published it in book form. It's a guide which contains less than 15 grams of animal fat and we have substituted -- they're not insistent but we have recommended that the patients eat somewhere around 15 to 20 grams of oil that is a vegetable type of oil. And it contains about 60 to 80 grams of protein and the rest carbohydrates as much as a patient needs to in order to keep up their energy and to meet the requirements of the job in life."

Dr McDougall: "How strictly do you have to follow this low-fat diet?"

Dr Swank: "That is the problem. The patient has to follow it strictly and steadily. Now there's an interesting thing that happens here and I think we should bring out. The patient who doesn't follow the diet strictly, in other words, these 10 grams or 20 grams over the diet, he will not have an increase in exacerbations; he'll go along just the same way without an exacerbation and he'll get the idea that he can eat that much fat without getting in trouble. But actually what happens is he's soon starts going downhill rapidly and once that starts, it's very difficult to stop."

"I'm reading Dr Swank's book summarizing his treatment of MS patients. Once a person goes beyond a threshold, with MS, they have lots of problems. Where is the "threshold" for each of us, with regard to coronary artery atherosclerosis, etc? Might as well, eat & live as healthy as possible, and leave it at that. People see this as a "burden." That's the wrong attitude. It's a blessing. A way to avoid obesity, HTN, diabetes, cad, impotence, cognitive slowing & most of the other problems that are ubiquitous among persons over 50 years old."