ME and low carb, high fat

Here is a copy of the  post I have commented on over at forums.about.com about chronic fatigue syndrome

Olive24 Posted:

Hello, I have been on the low carb high fat diet for two months now. I have ME and was hoping the diet would help the condition. I read that you are supposed to have more energy . My symptoms have improved alot but i still have the fatigue.

Does anyone have any experience with having ME and going low carb? I would be grateful to hear your experiences, if you recovered or about any improvements in health, thankyou.

My Comment:

Hi Olive24,

ME can also be called CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) but it’s also known as CFIDS or Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome that showed quite a wide spread problem.  There are upwards of about a million people in North America who suffer from it, but probably more that that one now. There is quite a lot of research gone on for this which may be of interest to you. One of the conclusions that many of these researches have come to is that there is quite a connection to diet as a cause, or a certainly an aggravator of CFS. One of those is a yeast sensitivity that can also be a linked to wheat sensitivity as well as sensitivity to milk. There are a number of things you can do to help with CFS. You’ve already discovered one of the biggest things and that’s “start eating a proper diet” but it doesn’t actually end there as far as diet goes. There were some excellent studies done back in 2007 and again in 2010 which you can get the abstract for on PubMed. Basically they showed there is definitely a link between acute infection of the gastrointestinal tract that can lead to a manifestation at the time or even years later of chronic fatigue syndrome.

From my own experience  of having a number of, I used the term digestive problems, I found that one of the things that totally alleviated a lot of the problems I had and as a side effect gave me more energy, was sorting out, firstly, my stomach bacteria, which I did through the use of probiotics. Then also sorting out my intestinal enzymes which I did very simply by using enzyme supplements. The advantage of doing that, of course, is that it more or less resets your digestive tract and helps it to work at full efficiency, firstly by building up the level of good bacteria in your stomach and the level of enzymes in the rest of your digestive tract. At the same time, because of the good bacteria will then outnumber the bad bacteria; the bad bacterial will get pushed out.

Going back to the reports I mentioned earlier, as I have said, they are quite worthy and technical; fortunately, Dr. Mercola has produced a much more readable article.

So if you are looking for ways to improve not just your energy levels but your health in general, firstly, do consider, neatly taking probiotics and again I would encourage you to use good quality ones not just the generic types you can find in the drugstore and enzymes, again, quality is the name of the game there. They are a little bit expensive but think of the benefits you’re going to get from them and do please, take time to read those articles from Dr. Mercola and the reports on PubMed.

Hope that helps,

Mark