HackerTube.dev

Minding your mitochondria | Dr. Terry Wahls | TEDxIowaCity

TEDx Talks · 4.2M views · 2011-11-30 · 17:47

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

Dr. Terry Wahls tells how she used diet to manage her multiple sclerosis and get out of a wheelchair, drawing on mitochondrial biology. TED flagged the talk as health advice based on personal narrative.

On Hacker News

HN commenters point to it as a moving personal story that motivated dietary changes, though it is also cited as anecdotal evidence.

Recommended by 7 HN people across 7 months · HN mentions 2011–2022

Topics

Search by tags

What people said

abdophoto · 2014-02 · Strong recommendation

Less than 2 years ago, my wife was diagnosed with MS (Multiple sclerosis). As soon as we found out, I started digging like crazy to learn more about why this happened and what we could do to prevent it from progressing. I'm a big believer in that the body has the ability to heal itself by avoiding certain foods and intaking others. I mean, food is fuel we put in our body. After digging for a while, I came upon some staggering discoveries. First, there are people who have reversed their MS almost completely on diet alone. The diets consist of A LOT of high-nutrition fruits and vegetables along with Omega 3's, organic meats, etc. These Paleo-like diets also forbid gluten with the main reason being that it causes serious inflammation in some folks. This TEDx video by Dr. Terry Wahl was very helpful ( [VIDEO] ). I read her book and it literally laid the foundation for which changed our eating habits entirely. A month or so after, we flew out to Massachusetts to a well-known wellness center where they performed various blood and stool tests. The Dr's (including a Nutritionist) sat down with us for the entire day and asked about daily habits from what our work days were like to what we ate. Without mentioning my own research, they also said that gluten is something we should completely remove from our diet. There's a ton of other stuff out there, but since removing gluten entirely, my wife has felt great. We just did an MRI and she has no new lesions. She no longer experiences blur

Read the original HN comment ↗
hvass · 2011-12 · Strong recommendation

Related to this topic I think you might find Dr. Terry Wahls' story fascinating, she pretty much 'cured' herself from Multiple Sclerosis by adopting a 'paleo' diet. She presented her findings at the 2011 Neuroscience conference ("Effects of intensive directed nutrition, progressive exercise program and neuromuscular electrical stimulation on secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (PDF)[1]") She also had a TED talk[2] taking us through the process of getting out of her wheelchair and the specific food she ate. I know this immediately turns on your B.S. sensors, but she changed her lifestyle after spending hours on Pubmed doing research on nutrition's impact on the brain and specifically the mitochondria. I highly recommend the talk, it is both very informative and very moving. And there are some saddening statistics about the lack of vitamins and minerals in the American population. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗
wtetzner · 2022-01 · Recommendation

An interesting talk about someone who was able to reverse a lot of her MS symptoms with a change in diet: [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by TEDx Talks, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks
  • SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
  • Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources