Terry Wahls: Books and Legacy

Editorial Note — Freedom of Research and the Right to Be Heard. This page documents the research, writings, and claims of Dr. Terry Wahls, the American physician and University of Iowa clinical professor who developed the Wahls Protocol diet after her own diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, in the spirit of open scientific inquiry. The First Amendment’s protection of speech, and the long American tradition of medical dissent that runs from Semmelweis to Barry Marshall to Linus Pauling, exists precisely so that minority and unpopular research can be examined on its merits rather than silenced by institutional consensus. We present her facts and claims as she stated them, attributed to her, drawn from her papers, books and talks. Readers are presumed to be intelligent adults capable of weighing evidence, consulting their own physicians, and making informed decisions about their own bodies. This page is provided for educational and historical-record purposes; it is not medical advice and does not endorse self-treatment. Censorship of a researcher is not refutation of the research. — MyHealthcare.com

Terry L. Wahls, MD, MBA, is an American internal-medicine physician and clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. She has secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) and built a diet and lifestyle program — the Wahls Protocol — that she credits with her own recovery and later tested in clinical trials.

This page covers what she has written for the general reader and what her work has left behind: her three books, the Spanish translation and the audiobook, a forthcoming fourth book, her essays in medical journals and her 2011 TEDx talk, the Wahls Behavior Change Model she published for clinicians, her published arguments that diet research belongs in the multiple sclerosis conversation, the research issue on diet and multiple sclerosis she co-edited, and the wider body of diet-and-multiple-sclerosis research that has grown up around and after her work. The diet rules, the trials and her life story each have their own page, linked under Connections.

Minding My Mitochondria, Her First Book
The Wahls Protocol (2014)
The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life (2017)
Translations and the Audiobook
The Wahls Spectrum, a Forthcoming Book
Essays in Medical Journals and the 2011 TEDx Talk
The Wahls Behavior Change Model
How Wahls Argues for Diet Research in Multiple Sclerosis
The Diet and Multiple Sclerosis Research Field Since
Reviews and Case Reports by Other Authors
Key Research Papers
Connections

1. Minding My Mitochondria, Her First Book

Wahls’s first book for general readers is Minding My Mitochondria: How I Overcame Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Got Out of My Wheelchair. The edition held in the University of Iowa’s research catalogue is the second edition, published in Iowa City in 2010, 235 pages long (ISBN 9780982175088). The year of the first edition could not be confirmed from a primary source, so this page gives only the 2010 date.

The university catalogue describes the book as a practical guide to mitochondrial health and to the steps readers can take to support brain function, and files it under the subject headings brain, multiple sclerosis, diet therapy and mitochondria. On her own website Wahls writes that the book “explains the key roles mitochondria play in maintaining a healthy brain and body.”

The book sits close in time to her own turning point. She has written that she began what she now calls the Wahls Protocol in December 2007, after years of decline into a tilt-recline wheelchair, and her research team’s papers state that the Wahls diet was “originally developed in 2008.” Minding My Mitochondria is therefore the earliest book-length statement of her ideas, written before any of her clinical trials had reported. Its central argument — that the cells of the brain, and the mitochondria that power them, depend on specific nutrients that ordinary diets may supply poorly — is set out in detail on the Minding My Mitochondria page of this wing.

Mitochondria are the small structures inside nearly every cell that turn food and oxygen into usable energy. Her team’s 2019 review puts one part of the idea this way: B vitamins “are key nutrients for mitochondria and ATP energy production and improved neural repair.”

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2. The Wahls Protocol (2014)

Her best-known book, The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine, was written with the writer Eve Adamson and published in New York in 2014 by a major trade publisher (viii + 421 pages). The paperback edition carries a broader title: The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles (ISBN 9781583335543). The change of subtitle reflects how Wahls came to present the program — no longer only as her own multiple sclerosis story, but as an approach she offers to people with other chronic autoimmune conditions.

The University of Iowa catalogue record summarizes the book’s story in her own terms: she combined the diet “with neuromuscular stimulation and gradual exercise,” and went from a tilt-recline wheelchair to biking eighteen miles in a day. On her own About page she writes, “Within a year, I was able to walk through the hospital without a cane and even complete an 18-mile bicycle tour.”

The book lays out the diet in levels of increasing strictness. As her later cookbook and her team’s papers describe them, the levels are:

Wahls Diet — high in vegetables and low in grains, built around her rule of nine or more cups of vegetables and fruit a day, divided among leafy greens, sulfur-rich vegetables and deeply coloured produce.
Wahls Paleo — adds organ meat and sea vegetables such as seaweed.
Wahls Paleo Plus — a high-fat ketogenic approach, the strictest level, which she points readers with neurological or severe chronic illness toward.

The diet rules themselves — food groups, amounts, what each level removes and her stated reasons — are set out on The Wahls Protocol Diet Levels and Food Rules page. The book’s other legs, neuromuscular electrical stimulation, exercise and stress reduction, have their own page as well.

In 2017 the journal Family Medicine published a review of The Wahls Protocol by Scherger.

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3. The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life (2017)

Her third book, again written with Eve Adamson, is The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life: The Revolutionary Modern Paleo Plan to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions, published in April 2017 by the same publisher as The Wahls Protocol (368 pages, ISBN 978-0-399-18477-2).

Where the 2014 book explains the program, the cookbook turns it into meals. Her website describes it as holding recipes for “all levels of the Wahls Diet™.” A trade-press summary of the book describes the same three levels — the vegetable-heavy, low-grain Wahls Diet, the Wahls Paleo level with organ meat and sea vegetables, and the ketogenic Wahls Paleo Plus — and notes that she directs readers with neurological or severe chronic illness to the strictest level.

The cookbook appeared in the same year as her first randomized pilot trial of the diet in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, and while the larger WAVES trial comparing her diet with the low-saturated-fat Swank diet was enrolling. The food patterns in the cookbook and the diet rules written into those trials come from the same source; the trial version, the Wahls Elimination diet, is the one her team published in full in 2019.

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4. Translations and the Audiobook

Library catalogues list two further forms of The Wahls Protocol:

Spanish: El Protocolo Wahls, published in 2017.
Audiobook: an unabridged audio edition released on 11 August 2020.

Library records also link her name to two books by other authors, from 2018 and 2021, but her role in them could not be confirmed, so they are not counted here as her books. A revised edition of The Wahls Protocol is mentioned in retail and rights listings; no primary source for it was found, so it is not described on this page.

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5. The Wahls Spectrum, a Forthcoming Book

Her website announces a fourth book, The Wahls Spectrum, which it describes as a “5-stage, customized program.” The same page says the book covers “What to know before trying intermittent fasting, a very low-fat diet, or the carnivore diet.”

The book has not been published as of this writing, and no publication date has been confirmed from a primary source, so none is given here. The description shows a shift in how she frames her work: instead of one diet climbing through three levels, the announced book presents a spectrum of eating patterns, including ones she did not feature in her earlier books. What the book says about each pattern will be reported here once it is published.

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6. Essays in Medical Journals and the 2011 TEDx Talk

Before and alongside her books, Wahls wrote short personal essays for medical journals read by other physicians. PubMed lists three from 2008 — “Telling the world” in the Annals of Internal Medicine, “A daughter’s duty” in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, and “The primer never written” in the American Journal of Medicine — and a fourth, “The seventy percent solution,” in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2011. The keywords filed with the 2011 essay are secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, recovery and nutrition: it is her own account of her illness and recovery, written for fellow doctors.

In 2011 she gave the talk “Minding your mitochondria” at TEDxIowaCity. The University of Iowa catalogue record for The Wahls Protocol notes that “Her 2011 TEDx talk about her recovery became widely viewed online.” The talk carried her story and her nutrient argument to a far larger audience than her books or essays had reached, and it is the point from which many readers first heard of her. A full transcript could not be obtained, so this site does not quote the talk directly.

The case behind the talk had already been written up in the medical literature: a 2009 case report in Cases Journal, on which she is an author, described a 52-year-old woman with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis who after neuromuscular electrical stimulation and dietary changes “rode her bicycle routinely 8 miles, including hills.” Her team’s 2019 paper identifies that case as her own.

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7. The Wahls Behavior Change Model

A diet with nine cups of vegetables a day, organ meat and seaweed asks a great deal of the people who take it on, and much of Wahls’s later writing is about how people actually make and keep such changes. In 2022 she and colleagues published “The Wahls Behavior Change Model for Complex Chronic Diseases: A Clinician’s Guide” in the journal Degenerative Neurological and Neuromuscular Disease.

The paper sets out 11 principles for helping patients with complex chronic disease adopt and sustain lifestyle change. It is written for clinicians rather than patients: it is the part of her work aimed at how other doctors coach the people in their care, rather than at what those people eat.

Her group’s research has followed the same question from the patient’s side. A 2022 study by her colleagues asked women with multiple sclerosis and their support persons what helped and what got in the way of sticking with a dietary intervention, and a 2023 randomized waitlist-control trial from the group tested a web-based program for adopting wellness behaviours to self-manage fatigue and quality of life.

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8. How Wahls Argues for Diet Research in Multiple Sclerosis

Wahls has argued in print that diet studies deserve a place in the evidence that people with multiple sclerosis are shown. In 2019 a scoping review by Beckett and colleagues examined the diet recommendations for multiple sclerosis found on the web. In 2021 Wahls and three colleagues answered it with a published comment titled “Patient Empowerment and the Exclusion of Dietary Intervention Studies,” arguing that evidence from diet trials belongs in reviews of web-based diet advice for multiple sclerosis.

Her own 2022 review, “Dietary Approaches to Treating Multiple Sclerosis-Related Symptoms,” states the evidence as she reads it. She writes that “no dietary pattern ... has been proven to be effective for reducing the number of relapses or enhancing lesions,” while several pilot studies of different diets — the Swank, McDougall and Wahls diets, gluten-free eating, the Mediterranean diet and fasting — show reductions in multiple sclerosis-related symptoms. The distinction she draws is between the disease process seen on scans and in relapse counts, and the symptoms people live with day to day, above all fatigue.

Her trial papers repeat the same position in their conclusions. The 2015 report on her multimodal pilot cohort ends: “Larger randomized controlled trials with blinded raters are needed.”

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9. The Diet and Multiple Sclerosis Research Field Since

An earlier diet program for multiple sclerosis, the low-saturated-fat Swank diet, was first reported in 1960. Wahls’s own program grew into a run of University of Iowa studies, and in 2016 the National Multiple Sclerosis Society awarded her a $1 million grant to compare the Swank and Wahls diets in people with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis and fatigue. That trial, WAVES, reported in 2021 that “Both diets were associated with clinically meaningful within-group reductions in fatigue and improvements in QoL” (quality of life). The trials are described in full on the Randomized Diet Trials and Multimodal Pilot Studies pages.

In 2023 she co-edited a research topic on diet and multiple sclerosis for the journal Frontiers in Neurology, with Titcomb, Giesser, Plafker and Katz Sand, and co-wrote its editorial.

Around her work, a wider field has formed. Later papers by many groups include:

Diet quality and disability. A 2018 study in Neurology of a large registry of people with multiple sclerosis found that better diet quality was associated with lower disability and milder symptoms.
Reviews of the evidence. Reviews by Katz Sand (2018) and Evans and colleagues (2019) set out the proposed mechanisms linking diet and multiple sclerosis and the state of the evidence for specific diets.
Adherence. A 2023 study reported that people who kept to a chosen diet over time had lower depression, fatigue and disability.
Pooled trials. A 2023 network meta-analysis in Neurology, led by University of Iowa colleagues (Wahls was not an author), combined 12 trials with 608 people and found that Paleolithic, low-fat and Mediterranean diets reduced fatigue compared with control diets; the authors rated the credibility of the evidence as very low.
Cochrane review. A 2020 Cochrane review of 30 randomized trials concluded that there was insufficient evidence to determine whether dietary interventions affect multiple sclerosis-related outcomes.
Information people see. A 2025 study examined multiple sclerosis nutrition information shared on social media, the channel through which many people now meet diets such as hers.

Her group’s current work continues on these lines: an active trial in people newly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a trial protocol on the efficacy of diet on quality of life, and studies of food security and the gut microbiome.

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10. Reviews and Case Reports by Other Authors

The Wahls Protocol has also become a subject in other researchers’ papers:

Low-dose naltrexone with the Wahls Protocol. A 2021 case study by Codino and Hardin described a patient with multiple sclerosis whose chronic migraines were addressed with low-dose naltrexone used together with the Wahls Protocol. A single case study does not test a treatment; it records one patient’s course.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). In 2025 the ALSUntangled series published its review number 76 on the Wahls protocol. Her University of Iowa lab page lists amyotrophic lateral sclerosis among its research interests; a planned amyotrophic lateral sclerosis trial of hers is listed as withdrawn on ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT03659422), so no amyotrophic lateral sclerosis trial results of the protocol exist.
Ketogenic diets in multiple sclerosis. A 2022 phase II study by another group tested ketogenic diets in relapsing multiple sclerosis for safety, tolerability and possible clinical benefit — the same kind of eating as her strictest level, Wahls Paleo Plus.

Taken together, her legacy as it stands in 2026 is three books and a fourth announced, a widely viewed talk, a clinician’s model for lifestyle change, a University of Iowa research program with randomized trials of her diet, and a place in the growing research field on diet and multiple sclerosis.

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Key Research Papers

Wahls TL. The seventy percent solution. J Gen Intern Med. 2011;26(10):1215-6. — PubMed PMID: 21253878
Reese D, Shivapour ET, Wahls TL, Dudley-Javoroski SD, Shields R. Neuromuscular electrical stimulation and dietary interventions to reduce oxidative stress in a secondary progressive multiple sclerosis patient leads to marked gains in function: a case report. Cases J. 2009;2:7601. — PubMed PMID: 19918474
Scherger JE. The Wahls Protocol. Fam Med. 2017;49(2):149-150. — PubMed PMID: 28218946
Wahls TL, Chenard CA, Snetselaar LG. Review of Two Popular Eating Plans within the Multiple Sclerosis Community: Low Saturated Fat and Modified Paleolithic. Nutrients. 2019;11(2):352. — PubMed PMID: 30736445
Elliott-Wherry AN, Lee JE, Pearlman AM, Wahls TL. The Wahls Behavior Change Model for Complex Chronic Diseases: A Clinician’s Guide. Degener Neurol Neuromuscul Dis. 2022;12:111-125. — PubMed PMID: 36110247
Dean C, Parks S, Titcomb TJ, Arthofer A, Meirick P, Grogan N, et al. Facilitators of and Barriers to Adherence to Dietary Interventions Perceived by Women With Multiple Sclerosis and Their Support Persons. Int J MS Care. 2022;24(5):235-241. — PubMed PMID: 36090239
Titcomb TJ, Sherwood M, Ehlinger M, Saxby SM, Shemirani F, Eyck PT, et al. Evaluation of a web-based program for the adoption of wellness behaviors to self-manage fatigue and improve quality of life among people with multiple sclerosis: A randomized waitlist-control trial. Mult Scler Relat Disord. 2023;77:104858. — PubMed PMID: 37399671
Beckett JM, Bird ML, Pittaway JK, Ahuja KD. Diet and Multiple Sclerosis: Scoping Review of Web-Based Recommendations. Interact J Med Res. 2019;8(1):e10050. — PubMed PMID: 30626570
Wahls T, Titcomb T, Bisht B, Ramanathan M. Patient Empowerment and the Exclusion of Dietary Intervention Studies. Comment on “Diet and Multiple Sclerosis: Scoping Review of Web-Based Recommendations”. Interact J Med Res. 2021;10(1):e17063. — PubMed PMID: 33595444
Wahls TL. Dietary Approaches to Treating Multiple Sclerosis-Related Symptoms. Phys Med Rehabil Clin N Am. 2022;33(3):605-620. — PubMed PMID: 35989054
Bisht B, Darling WG, Shivapour ET, Lutgendorf SK, Snetselaar LG, Chenard CA, et al. Multimodal intervention improves fatigue and quality of life in subjects with progressive multiple sclerosis: a pilot study. Degener Neurol Neuromuscul Dis. 2015;5:19-35. — PubMed PMID: 30728736
Wahls TL, Titcomb TJ, Bisht B, Eyck PT, Rubenstein LM, Carr LJ, et al. Impact of the Swank and Wahls elimination dietary interventions on fatigue and quality of life in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis: The WAVES randomized parallel-arm clinical trial. Mult Scler J Exp Transl Clin. 2021;7(3):20552173211035399. — PubMed PMID: 34377527
Titcomb TJ, Giesser BS, Plafker SM, Katz Sand IB, Wahls TL. Editorial: Diet and multiple sclerosis. Front Neurol. 2023;14:1347478. — PubMed PMID: 38152642
Fitzgerald KC, Tyry T, Salter A, Cofield SS, Cutter G, Fox R, et al. Diet quality is associated with disability and symptom severity in multiple sclerosis. Neurology. 2018;90(1):e1-e11. — PubMed PMID: 29212827
Katz Sand I. The Role of Diet in Multiple Sclerosis: Mechanistic Connections and Current Evidence. Curr Nutr Rep. 2018;7(3):150-160. — PubMed PMID: 30117071
Evans E, Levasseur V, Cross AH, Piccio L. An overview of the current state of evidence for the role of specific diets in multiple sclerosis. Mult Scler Relat Disord. 2019;36:101393. — PubMed PMID: 31574403
Yu M, Jelinek G, Simpson-Yap S, Neate S, Nag N. Self-reported ongoing adherence to diet is associated with lower depression, fatigue, and disability, in people with multiple sclerosis. Front Nutr. 2023;10:979380. — PubMed PMID: 36937366
Snetselaar LG, Cheek JJ, Fox SS, Healy HS, Schweizer ML, Bao W, et al. Efficacy of Diet on Fatigue and Quality of Life in Multiple Sclerosis: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis of Randomized Trials. Neurology. 2023;100(4):e357-e366. — PubMed PMID: 36257717
Parks NE, Jackson-Tarlton CS, Vacchi L, Merdad R, Johnston BC. Dietary interventions for multiple sclerosis-related outcomes. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2020;5(5):CD004192. — PubMed PMID: 32428983
Probst Y, Saffioti E, Manche S, Eaton M. Examination of social media nutrition information related to multiple sclerosis: a cross-sectional social network analysis. Public Health Nutr. 2025;28(1):e166. — PubMed PMID: 40964911
Codino H, Hardin A. Low Dose Naltrexone in Conjunction With the Wahls Protocol to Reduce the Frequency of Chronic Migraines in a Patient With Multiple Sclerosis: A Case Study. Integr Med (Encinitas). 2021;20(3):30-34. — PubMed PMID: 34377098
Li X, Wicks P, Brown A, Shivaprasad A, Greene M, Crayle J, et al. ALSUntangled #76: Wahls protocol. Amyotroph Lateral Scler Frontotemporal Degener. 2025;26(1-2):181-185. — PubMed PMID: 39385461
Brenton JN, Lehner-Gulotta D, Woolbright E, Banwell B, Bergqvist AGC, Chen S, et al. Phase II study of ketogenic diets in relapsing multiple sclerosis: safety, tolerability and potential clinical benefits. J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 2022;93(6):637-644. — PubMed PMID: 35418509

Terry Wahls: Books and Legacy

Table of Contents

1. Minding My Mitochondria, Her First Book

2. The Wahls Protocol (2014)

3. The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life (2017)

4. Translations and the Audiobook

5. The Wahls Spectrum, a Forthcoming Book

6. Essays in Medical Journals and the 2011 TEDx Talk

7. The Wahls Behavior Change Model

8. How Wahls Argues for Diet Research in Multiple Sclerosis

9. The Diet and Multiple Sclerosis Research Field Since

10. Reviews and Case Reports by Other Authors

Key Research Papers

PubMed Topic Searches

Further Reading

Connections