Podcast 532: Rethinking Multiple Sclerosis: One Woman’s Path to Remission

MARTIN: Hey, everyone. Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast Podcast and with me today, Jessica Faulds, a warrior, if you want. She is one, and Jessica's story is compelling. My story, I was destroyed by, well, medical injuries. I don't know how Jessica has came by, but we'll find out in this conversation, the important part is that she has overcome and let's find out how.

JESSICA: Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: Yeah, it's a delight. And so Jessica, let's name the problems that you've had, and how did you get into them?

JESSICA: So I was diagnosed with MS or multiple sclerosis one month after my 15th birthday. So I'm one of, at the time, I think about 2% of people are diagnosed before their 18th birthday. I woke up one morning and my left eye had stopped moving. It was frozen in place, and my other eye was moving normally, and I hid it from my mom for the day, and my dad was out training because he's an Iron Man. But eventually, by the end of the day, she took me to the emergency room in our hometown. They said they thought it was a lazy eye if it hadn't gone away by Monday, go see your eye doctor on Monday, obviously it hadn't gone away. So we couldn't get into our family eye doctor, so I went to see a different eye doctor who then told me that I had a brain tumor. 

MARTIN: Not a bad guess, really.

JESSICA: Not a bad guess. He was kind of examining me, and he just kept saying: “Oh no, oh no, no, no.” And then he said, “I think you have a brain tumor, or you're diabetic.”

MARTIN: Or maybe there's a gerbil living in your brain.

JESSICA: Yeah, and this was before cell phones. So he actually took my mom then, so he left me alone at 15 in the exam room and took my mom away and gave her a phone book and told her to find our family doctor's number, and then called him and said, “I have your patient here. She has a brain tumor.” Our family doctor very quickly reassured my mom that there's no way to diagnose a brain tumor just by looking at someone's eye. They got me in for MRI. 

MARTIN: Yep.

JESSICA: Got the MRI. We never got the results. All we were told was they were trying to get me into Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto, but I have been the same height. I have been the same build. At the time I was 15, I could have passed for 22. They said we don't know if Sick Kids is going to take her, but Sick Kids did end up taking me, because on paper, I was a pediatric patient, and I got diagnosed with MS. And then from that point on, through my journey.

MARTIN: Yeah, did you progress with that?

JESSICA: I did. So MS, how it works. The very title is Multiple. So to get diagnosed, I went away, it was in April, and they said, based on the MRIs, we're 90% confident that you have MS based on where the lesions were and how many I had, and what it was looking at. But they're like, but we're not allowed to say that until something else happens, or your MRIs progresses.

MARTIN: Because it will be a single rather than multiple.

JESSICA: Yeah, it's a single event. And there is actually something that they called CIS, which is Clinically Isolated Syndrome. And there are some people who have one episode and nothing ever happens again. I went back three months later, I got another MRI, which showed more progression, and then they're like: “Okay, multiple. This is two separate scans. We've shown the progression.” And that's kind of when I started the rabbit hole of different treatments. I have had four treatments in my life. One of the treatments, a side effect I got, was Legionnaire's Disease and Necrotizing Pneumonia. So I ended up in the ICU for two weeks. I don't remember that. I was very knocked out for a good chunk of that because I only had about 10%,

MARTIN: How are you coping emotionally? Like at 15 being told that you're I don't know, how do you how did you do?

JESSICA: I was okay. I was more sad for my mom. My mom was quite devastated. My mom was crying. My dad and I are very similar personality types. So from the moment I was diagnosed, they gave us all of this literature, and they said, “These are your options. This is what you should do.” And my parents, they read it all, and they said, “You need to read it all, and we're here to support you, but you get to pick what you want to do.” And so I picked a medication. I had to give myself an injection every other night. That was for the first couple of months, not a fun time in our house, because every night I would cry, and there was this whole thing, and we didn't want to do it. But you kind of, you adapt. And it becomes, you get used to it. It becomes normal. And my parents from day one, have always been there saying, “This is your life. It's your body. You get to choose.”

MARTIN: So you're now, what, 30 something?

JESSICA: I’m turning 33 in three weeks.

MARTIN: Okay, so this is now an 18 year old journey.

JESSICA: Yes, so I'm actually in my 19th year with MS right now.

MARTIN: Alright.

JESSICA: Based on when everything was.

MARTIN: Okay. Did you ever get to the symptoms that so many people have, like lack of stability, lack of balance, lack of this and that whatever?

JESSICA: Yes, I have. I had a very cool purple cane when I was in university. My MS was very active when I was in university, I have a degree in Health Science. I have a degree in nutrition and dietetic sciences. I did a two year holistic nutrition course, and I'm actually now doing my MBA. But when I was in university, I did try to be a normal university student who's like, “Let's go drink it! Let's do all the fun things.” I found out very quickly that I couldn't do that. I could go out once a week, maybe once every other week, not three times or four times a week. I couldn't live off Kraft dinner, and so when I was in university, I had, I do have lesions at T8 and T10 on my back that have affected my trunk. I lost feeling in my legs. For several years I couldn't feel temperature or any of that with my feet. I did have a cane that I would use. I have run a couple half marathons and 10Ks, and done some major bikes. And it was always, there's actually, there's a girl in the States, and there's a video called ‘Catching Kayla.’ So as long as she was running, she was good, but when she crossed the finish line, she's down. And I have done races where a family member or friend has had my cane, and as soon as I cross the finish line, they'll throw me my cane, and I actually use the cane to walk through the end. 

MARTIN: So, running is okay, walking is not.

JESSICA: Once you stop, that moment for me, at least at the time, I was very lucky with my stem cell transplant. I have not had any progression or symptoms since,

MARTIN: Oh, you mentioned stem cell? 

JESSICA: Yes. Okay, so I did. I failed off of four treatments. So I started with a drug called BetaSeron. They're all interferons. I did BetaSeron, and then I did Tysabri, which is one of the first infusion medications. That was great. I didn't have to do injectables anymore, but if you have an antibody positive in your bloodstream, it puts you at a higher risk for brain infection. And so I eventually said “I don't want to be on this medication just to make things go wrong.” So then I did a drug that was the first oral call that I could take, called Gelania. I failed off of that, I was still having active relapses, and at the time I was a student, so it was really important to me that we get my medications covered while they're still under my dad's health plan. And so I decided to do a drug called Lemtrada. And how Lemtrada works is you do an infusion all day for five days, so you're at an infusion clinic for like nine hours for five days in a row, and then the next year, you go back and you do an infusion for three days. And at the time, I believe they've said it helps progression of MS in like, 80 or 90% of patients.

MARTIN: Interesting. Is it a toxic thing or what's what?

JESSICA: I called it ‘chemo light.’ If you look it up, it was used as a chemotherapy for other,

MARTIN: Alright. So it's trying to kill stuff that

JESSICA: Yeah, the way it was described to me is, your immune system, go home, you're drunk, you're all being fired. So it kind of plummets your immune system, you build it back up. And then the next year, they said “You're doing better, but you're still not great. We're going to reset you again.” So I did that. That's the one that gave me Legionnaires disease and necrotizing pneumonia after that.

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah, because it's killing you.

JESSICA: Yeah. It wiped out everything. And I just happened to be exposed to Legionella at some point. We have no idea where, and then I moved,

MARTIN: You could have been harbouring it all along. Just keeping it in check. And when you shut the immune system down, it just is allowed to go.

JESSICA: Yeah, it comes up. So I sat down with an infectious disease specialist, we have to figure out where you got exposed. And I'm like, “I'm living in London, Ontario, at university, so we don't know where.” And so after that, I had a couple years where I didn't have to do anything. This was supposed to be it. I ended up moving 3600 kilometers away, to the other side of Canada, because I'm originally from Ontario, and I had an MRI here, and my neurologist, who's a very young neurologist, he's pretty progressive. He really wants to be aggressive with his treatments, said, your MRIs are showing that the Lemtrada didn't work. Your MRIs are progressing, and I want you to have a stem cell transplant. And I said: “Go to hell. Well, I don't want to do it. I'm 27 and I don't want to be bald. I still want to have kids. I don't want to do it.”  And then my parents flew across the country, and we all sat down together, and we talked it through and I ended up deciding to go through with it.

MARTIN: Now to me, stem cell transplant does not require you to go bald. I thought that it was a injection of pluripotent cells or something like that. What have I got wrong?

JESSICA: So for me, what I underwent was called, it's called HSCT, so it's an Hematopoietic Stem Cell transplantation, right? Autologous means it's my own stem cell.

MARTIN: So where did they get those out of fat cells?

JESSICA: Nope, my blood. So hemopoietic means it's from your blood. And so basically, this is what I believe the term is Myeloablative, so they completely wipe everything out from your system.

MARTIN: So this is an immune and stem reboot?

JESSICA: Yes, currently in Canada, you can have it done in Ottawa, and you can have it done in Calgary, and those are the only two it’s being studied. I think I remember the doctors here telling me I was like patient five in Calgary to have it for MS. It did start in Ottawa. I think the first study was from like 2007, so they've been studying it for a while up here. So how it worked was, first I did a fertility harvest, so I was able to successfully harvest 27 eggs in one go. So I learned that if I didn't do this, I could probably get pregnant very easily, and so I did. We harvested 27 eggs. The fertility harvest put me into a relapse. I actually lost complete feeling on my entire body,

MARTIN: Because it's a hormone stimulation to do it?

JESSICA: Yeah, with all the hormones and everything. So I lost complete feeling, my whole body went numb. They ended up putting me on very, very high dose prednisone to try and correct that, and it didn't fully go away. And then after we did the stem cell heart, like the fertility harvest, we started the stem cell process. So the first process was, I did one round of chemotherapy, and that kind of just shocked the body into going, “Oh, something's happening here.” So I did one round of chemotherapy, and then I started doing these daily injections, and they were called GCSF shots, I believe, and they're in my belly, and they were designed to pull the stem cells from my bone marrow into my blood. So I had to do those for, I believe, I did four or five days. I think it was four days, and then on the fifth day, you go back into the hospital, and they take a blood sample, and they take it off, and they count how many stem cells are there, and they decide, do you have enough that we can harvest today, or do you need another shot and we'll check tomorrow? And I was very lucky, I had enough that I could harvest on that first day, and I went up to basically what I think is like a dialysis machine. So I was hooked up with a port to my chest. 

MARTIN: To take them outside of you. Concentrate. Multiply.

JESSICA: And so they extracted all the stem cells and gave me my blood back. And I shared this room with a very heavily tattooed, tough-looking guy, and I was 27 and I'm a runner, and I'm 5’7, and he goes, “oh my God, you poor little girl.” He compared the pain in his bones. He's like, how did you survive the weekend? Because for him, the pain in his bones, he compared it to being shot. And I said, “Well, I've never been shot, so I don't know what to compare it to, but I ran 7k this morning, so I was fine.” I had a little bit of bone pain and I felt so guilty, I was like, “I have no pain, sir.” 

But they harvested, I think, a couple billion stem cells from me, right? They took them away. My parents had flown out for this part, then they went back to Ontario, and I'm very lucky, because my dad's a teacher, so they ended up driving out as soon as school was done, and that's when we started the stem cell transplant, and so then I did 11 rounds of chemotherapy in eight days, and it wipes you out completely, lifting you down. Yeah, at one point they walked in and they said, “We want to give you a blood transfusion, but we've run out of your blood type.” Because I'm A negative, and they're like, so we want to give you a positive with the medication, so there's not a reaction. And I was like, that doesn't sound great. “How low are my platelet levels?” And for context, anything below fifty, I was not allowed to floss my teeth. My platelet levels were at four.

MARTIN: Right. Because any tiniest nick and you're bleeding to death.

JESSICA: So they're like, yeah, you need them. So I ended up having this infusion, we did the 11 rounds of chemotherapy in eight days, which is not a fun experience. I highly don't recommend, if people don’t have to do it.

MARTIN: So you had your journey. So somewhere along the way, before even this, you have become a fully trained nutritionist, Health Scientist. Mind you, the mainstream way, they don't teach you really what's going on. They only teach you their certified mainstream pharmaceutical nutrition, which is not the same thing as going natural, right?

JESSICA: So I have a degree in Health Science, Med SCI. My original goal was to be a pediatric neurologist and help kids like myself, but my health would never have allowed me to go through with all of the med school and all the stuff that you needed to do is quite bad. But while I was doing my first degree, I took my first nutrition class, and I fell in love with nutrition. And so then I decided I'm going to go get a degree in nutrition and dietetic sciences, and at the time, so this would have been 2014 to 2016 is when I was doing that. I was following the Terry Wahls protocol.

MARTIN: Let’s just make sure that this is not glossed over. Terry Wahls. 

JESSICA: Yeah.

MARTIN: Terry Wahls.  W, A, H, L, S, she's a very famous woman. She was full MS and fixed herself. You mentioned something really important, which was that my blood type is A negative. I will bet my first born that Terry Wahl is a blood type O, not A negative.

JESSICA: Yeah. I don't think she has the same blood type as I do, no.

MARTIN: And so here goes, yeah.

JESSICA: So I was following Terry, and if anybody has ever heard of the Terry Wahls protocol it's a, Terry had MS, secondary progressive MS. She was wheelchair bound. She changed her diet. It was very, and she published this book, and I can say it's very well known. All of my friends, I have like 40 friends with MS because I went to MS summer camp. So we've all read it. We've heard about it. And when I was in university, I was like, I'm going to do this. This is supposed to be functional. It's supposed to, and if there's different levels to the Terry Wahls protocol. And I said, “Screw it. If I'm going to do something, I'm going all in. So I was like, level three, let's do it. And level three involves organ meats.

MARTIN: Okay, so let me explain something here, just so, this audience knows me as a Metabolic Typing Advisor, where we interact with how genetics intersect with food inputs. And depending on your genetics, depending your ancestry, whatever your ancestors ate, that is your sweet spot. So if your grandparents were Eskimo, then you're going to be just fine eating raw seal meat and whale blubber. But not everybody's like that. And so when you, in mainstream medicine, or in general mainstream people don't think of these things. They think that every human is identical to the other, and that is totally not right or not true. So here goes how you did on level three, Terry Wahls organ meat.

JESSICA: So I was in university, and I remember at one point I drove around to about seven different butcher shops looking for a cow's heart, because in the book, she says the cow's heart is closest to, if you've never had organ meat.

MARTIN: Yeah, well, just to be clear, this is the high purine stuff. So it starts with raw bison meat, and then going in from there would be tongue, heart, liver, brain, kidney, lungs, all of that stuff that is super high in purine.

JESSICA: Yeah. And so I cooked a cow heart. I made a cow hearts stew, okay, and then I couldn't eat it. I couldn't do it.

MARTIN : Yeah, I would expect that you with your A negative blood, you would want to throw up.

JESSICA: I fed it to my roommate. He loved it. But I was trying to follow it. So I was following essentially, there are other terms. People call it a paleo diet. I was eating meat. I was eating vegetables. I wasn't eating anything with wheat or gluten. I wasn't having any dairy. And at this time, I was going through my nutrition degree at the University of Western Ontario. 

MARTIN: Well, let's highlight this little bit, so you just gloss over it, but let's highlight it. So paleo is essentially pretending that agriculture was not invented.

JESSICA: Yeah.

MARTIN: So we're going in with whatever grows in nature, natural. So salads work. Some tubers are okay, but mostly not, and grains are out.

JESSICA: Yeah, grains are out, and meat is in, because we're hunters. Well, A negative blood type is no hunter. A negative blood type is a farmer, yeah?

JESSICA: Yeah. And so we had it. I was trying to follow this paleo Terry Wahl style of diet, where I wasn't having dairy, I wasn't having grains, really, I was eating a lot of meat and a lot of vegetables while doing my degree. And everything that was in my degree was based on the Canadian Food Guide.

MARTIN: Right, which is where I was just saying the mainstream of nutrition is nothing like natural science nutrition. That's stuff has been designed by industrial agriculture marketing boards, not by science. 

JESSICA: Yeah. And so every assignment that I had to do, I had to compare my diet and what I was eating in my food diaries to the Canadian Food Guide. And I don't know, It's been years, It's been almost a decade since I graduated, so I'm sure it's changed. And the Canadian Food Guide has actually changed since.

MARTIN: It's not much.

JESSICA: I think they got rid of dairy. They're not saying that everyone has to have dairy now, but it is like,

MARTIN: Yeah, it's sort of in your face that blood type O's do not do well with grains and dairy. That's a known fact. If you open Peter D'Adamo’s, “Eat Right for Your Blood Type”, which everybody should read. It's right there. It tells you.

JESSICA: And it was one of those things, I got really tired of just defending my diet that I was trying to do for a disease,

MARTIN: Because the mainstreamers are telling you, you must be mainstream.

JESSICA: And I said you don't have my disease. I will say that while I was on the diet, my MS did not stop progressing, obviously.

MARTIN: No, because you were on the wrong diet.

JESSICA: And so my MS was still active. It wasn't working for me. I am also, my friends tell me they're like, “You're a bleeding heart.” And I said, I do. I met animals. And I was like, it doesn't compute to me. And so when I graduated from that, I looked in, and we have the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition. So I got certified through them, and I started going the opposite way. And so I'm kind of this weird mix of science and holistic, because I take, I did take medications. I believe there's some great things that the medical environment does. There's also some things that I don't think that they,

MARTIN: You know, here's the tragic thing: you are an N of one. You cannot know whether you would have done better knowing the natural stuff, going all natural, and never having done the chemical stuff. We don't know. 

JESSICA: Yeah.

MARTIN: You might have done just fine, right? Like if you met me back when at the beginning at 15, and if you believed in somebody like me who would be telling you things. Well, let's detox you, and let's correct your nutrition, and let's push really hard in the direction that your ancestry would have you. You might have done fine, right?

JESSICA: And we never know. And I love my life, I have a great relationship with all my doctors, and I, finally, I will say my neurologist that I have now, he's very big on diet. He's the first neurologist that I've had, and he said, I wish more people would focus on what they're eating like you do. And he's asked me, he's like, if people have questions, am I allowed to send them to you and send your contact information? I said, by all means, please do, because I ended up finding, I went plant based, so, I’m plant based.

MARTIN: Well, yeah. So this is through your studies of your natural nutrition, right? Did that ever come really loud and clear for you that Blood Type A's are going to make a great vegetarian?

JESSICA: No, I did not look into it from a blood type. What started and it was kind of over, so I did my holistic degree. I met my fiance, and we both were like, “We don't need meat.” We wanted to cut down our meat consumption, so we just started cutting down our meat consumption. And I was lucky, because I have this degree. I know how to cook tofu. Part of my nutrition degree is I had to learn how to prepare food and cook food properly. And so it's not scary for me trying to cook these new foods.

MARTIN: So you went vegetarian then, yeah?

JESSICA: Yes, we did. We basically, we slowly went vegetarian. And the kind of the kicker for me was one again, I met, I pet cows, and I go and hang out with the animals, and so I didn't want to eat them. But also, when I was going through my stem cell transplant, what I will say is, again, the hospital was great. The people there were great. I'm very grateful for the stem cell transplant. It was life changing. But while I was there, the food choices were terrible.

MARTIN: No joke, institutional food is about, 

JESSICA: Oh, they were so bad! I did not eat a single meal that was prepared for me while I was in the hospital. My mom would call me up every morning, and she would ask me, “What is your body telling you that you need? Tell me, I will cook it for you.” And she would bring me breakfast. And I was lucky, because my house that they were staying at was only 10 minutes from the hospital. So then they go back to my house, and then she calls me for lunch, and she's like, “Okay, what do you want for lunch?” And my parents would bring it for lunch, and then “What do you want for dinner?” And they brought every single meal. I'd be like, “I really want broccoli.” Or “I'm craving this. I'm craving it.” Because I believe when you're craving foods, your body's telling you what you're missing.

MARTIN: That is correct, that's the messaging. 

JESSICA: There was this poor guy, and he would come, because at the hospital, if you don't pick a meal, they still prepare you one because they're like, we have to. And he would walk by my room every day, and he would pop his head in, and he would be like, “I have a meal for you. Do you want it?” And I was like, “You need to get it out.” The smell alone was making me so sick. “Take the chicken. Take whatever it is, I do not want it. Leave it. Go away, please.” And he would pop in every day and he's like, “I just want to make sure you don't want the meal.” And I was like “I'm good.” My parents brought me my own meals. And that was kind of the nail coffin for me, where I was like, my body is physically telling me it doesn't want meat when I'm going through what is probably the most traumatic thing my body will go through, right?

MARTIN: Yet, this is interesting, right? When you reduce your resilience down to nothing, your body type really comes through loudly.

JESSICA: Yeah. And my body was like, “You really want some broccoli right now.” And I was like, I do. I really want some broccoli. I want some hash browns. I want some potatoes, comfort veggies. Please just bring me, “Mom, can you make me homemade hash browns and bring me vegetables and peppers in them?” My mother in law would bring me, she's a baker, so she would make cookies for me, even then nothing was pro set, everything was homemade, and I got through the whole thing. And we always tease my dad because my mom ended up having to go back to work. So the second month, my dad was the one with me, and I said to him, I just want some kind of pasta. And at the time, I wasn't fully plant based, I was still having a little bit of cheese, so I was like, I really want some tortellini. And so my dad went across to the road, and he was like “I'll get cheese tortellini, and I'll make you dinner.” But my dad went shopping without his glasses and accidentally grabbed chicken tortellini because it was right beside the cheese, and he didn't see it. He couldn't read it. And I was very violently ill, and that's the last time that I had meat. My body is telling me “No.”

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MARTIN: Because at your weakest, your preferences are the most obvious and visible. Well, yeah. If you asked me at the outset, I'm A negative. What would you have me eat? I’d say “Well, let's start from a salad.” So what's the ratio of raw versus cooked in your world?

JESSICA: Well, right now, last week it was minus 35 here. 

MARTIN: You're in Canada, right? 

JESSICA: Yes, I'm in Canada. So I'm by the Rocky Mountains. I'm in Calgary, Alberta.

MARTIN: Okay, beautiful.

JESSICA: It's beautiful. I absolutely love it. I go hiking all the time. I would say,

MARTIN: Calgary, just in case people don't know this is a major metropolitan area, but it's super close to the most wonderful outdoor playground like you could not imagine. In US, probably Denver comes close to that, but Calgary is better.

JESSICA: Calgary, and it's beautiful, so when I say minus 35 that's minus 35 Celsius.

MARTIN: Well, that happens to be 30 something Fahrenheit. 

JESSICA: And so every morning right now, I love my oatmeal. I have oatmeal every morning because it's hearty and it's hardy and it's warm and it fills me up. I would say it's probably 50/50, cooked to raw. It depends on the season, too. Like I said, right now we're in winter. Right now we're having a Chinook. So it's 12 degrees and we had a major swing, and it's 10 degrees.

MARTIN: And there goes another story from Calgary, you can have a major swing. You go from the deep, depth of winter to the middle of spring in six hours. 

JESSICA: In one day. On the same day. Yeah, the day that I moved here, when my dad and I pulled into town, it was minus 40 out. The air hurts your face. My dad's like, “This is going to suck. We're going to have to move you in minus 40. Why are we doing this?” And by the time we pulled into the city to unload my van, it was plus 10. Which is 50.

MARTIN: Something like 90 degree Fahrenheit swing.

JESSICA: Yeah. And that's in like four hours, that was us driving.

MARTIN: Yeah, you’re going from one climate to another, because the wind has just brought it over.

JESSICA: And it's whatever comes in off it. So it's absolutely for me, it also depends on the season. Right now, when I wake up in the morning and it's cold, I want my oatmeal. I want warm and comforting. I've always been a big oatmeal person, since my grandfather made it for me.

MARTIN: Again, blood type A, awesome.

JESSICA: Yeah. Give me my oatmeal. I also do a lot of veggies, a little harder right now, depending on where the veggies are from, but we have vegetables I just cut up and I have. I'm very lucky. I don't know his blood type, I said we should figure out your blood type, because he loves eating veggies too. He doesn't eat meat. And some of the time, I will just cut up a bunch of vegetables and have dips that I've made, and we'll sit and have that for dinner and just munch together. This is all we want. I do a lot of soups.

MARTIN: Yeah, awesome, yeah. I am also the CEO of a superfood manufacturing company, Exsula brand, so you would probably relate to it. We make blends of things like sprouted barley and sprouted kamut and alfalfa, chlorella, spirulina, all of that greenery. We just put it in a bottle, concentrated and ready for people, so we understand how or who it's good for and who it's not good for.

JESSICA: And even we have, there's a company in Calgary that I love. They're called Micro Green YYC. So they grow all these local micro greens, and they come and they give me a delivery of two packs every week, and they take the containers back, and it's very sustainable. And so we eat. I do smoothies.

MARTIN: And, yeah, the future of urban nutrition, if there is one, is in indoor sprouting. 

JESSICA: Yeah.

MARTIN: You can do that in a high-rise under LEDs, which is what they probably do in some hangar somewhere.

JESSICA: I'm getting a tour on Thursday.

MARTIN: Yeah awesome.

JESSICA: I’m getting a tour tomorrow.  

MARTIN: And anyway, so that's really the best of nutrition is sprouts. Because it's rich in enzymes. The enzyme is that which is the most important component, and in the sprout, it has the highest level of that. So you would know it as a nutritionist.

JESSICA: Yeah. I absolutely love my microgreens. I got my delivery yesterday, and I'm a weird person, one of my favorite foods is broccoli. So I get really excited whenever I have the broccoli microgreens.

MARTIN: They are the best. Well, if any one of you has not heard of DIM, Diindolylmethane is one of the most important anti-cancer and whatnot else nutrients, and it comes to you thanks to broccoli sprouts.

JESSICA: Yeah, I and I tell people, whenever I talk to people, they'll be like “What's one thing you think people should eat more of? And I'm like broccoli or cauliflower, brussels sprouts, the same family every day. We have them every day in our house. Yeah, I'm very lucky to have a partner who eats or wants to eat the way that I eat. For the people who don't know, Calgary is also called Cowtown.

MARTIN: Steaktown. 

JESSICA: Steak town, Cowtown, Alberta is very much known for our beef industry.

MARTIN: Yeah, well, Alberta is a lot like Texas in that sense, because it has oil and cows.

JESSICA: Yeah, we're called Texas Canada. But I will say we also have a thriving plant-based community here. I believe people find like people. So a lot of my friends are more plant-based. And we have some great, even restaurants that I can go to now that are plant-based, 

MARTIN: Absolutely. That's the beauty of a big city. You will find every sort of a thing.

JESSICA: I don't, I think compared to some American cities, we have 1.8 million people. Last I checked. So everything is relative, but it is. It's huge. I'm actually living in a house that my partner and I built last year, and so right now, on my window, there's a crane, because they're building the house next to us. And it's growing huge here in Calgary, it's a huge area.

MARTIN: Let's not get into the politics of it. But Alberta is the most American province in Canada, which in a way, is a good thing in its own way. But it's definitely not popular to be a vegetarian. It's not the “in” thing in Alberta, you will be the “in” thing doing the steak, as you mentioned.

JESSICA: Yeah, I always call my partner my Alberta unicorn, because we don't often fall in line with a lot of the politics that are seen here in Alberta. We do not eat meat. We have solar panels and electric cars. 

MARTIN: That's a weird thing, an electric car in minus 40, but okay.

JESSICA: It does work. I have a car that probably most people still can't drive. I've got a standard gas car. And most people I know can't drive a standard or a manual transmission anymore. But he does have an electric car in minus 40. It just affects the range, so you have to charge it every other night instead of every third night.

MARTIN: Okay, so here we are. We're looking at a woman warrior who has proved to herself that with the help of both technology and nutrition, here we are. So, okay, you're advocating for people to what? Explain it in your words.

JESSICA: I said I'm very lucky to have a partner who also thrives on a plant-based diet. He doesn't want meat. It wasn't always the case for him, when we first got together, he joked that he used to live off Wendy's and tortellini. And so he would have burgers and he ate. But when we live together and I'm creating these meals for him, I do know how to balance a plant-based meal. So he goes “Well, this is so much easier.” He's like, “I feel way better than I did eating Wendy's, but I'm also not getting the cravings.” And so I said, “Well, that's good.” So his diet and nutrition has greatly improved.

MARTIN: So he actually felt better on your diet?

JESSICA: Yeah. He feels a lot better eating a plant based diet.

MARTIN: So he probably is very likely to have a similar blood type as you. You should get it typed, just to be sure.

JESSICA: Yeah. But he seems to do really well, and we've always had, I just say, just because I'm plant-based doesn't mean everyone has to be plant-based. My parents, we call them flexitarians, they still eat meat a couple times a week. My sister is vegetarian. And so what I always say is, I want people to eat the way that feels good for them, but also, even if you are someone who wants to eat meat every day, I always tell people, just to make sure you don't forget the plants.

MARTIN: There goes the Paleo, right? You have to eat plants because, well, no, you don't have to. There are people who are full, hardcore carnivores, the most popular are Albertan being Jordan Peterson, and he's full in beef only. 

JESSICA: Yeah

MARTIN: I don't advocate for it, because that really is for people whose microbiome is in free fall. I could work with it, but he doesn't know me.

JESSICA: I don't advocate for it. I worry about my health. You're missing a lot of,

MARTIN: Oh no. Some people are really fine on it.

JESSICA: I don't advocate for the general population. I was like, you're probably,

MARTIN: No, listen, let's just unpack it here on the spot. If your ancestry is really Northern or Southern, the extreme away from the equator, like the Eskimo, would be a great example of it. They really are bred specifically for eating seal meat raw and whale blubber raw. They don't cook anything, and they don't have wood up there on the shores of Baffin Bay. I don't know the Geographic Names of things, probably Hudson Bay. But anyway, the other thing would be if your Norwegian ancestry tells you that you should be eating cod and salmon and reindeer, don't be afraid. But not everybody is from these extreme genetics.

JESSICA: Yes. 

MARTIN: Therefore, understand that there's a full range of full-on fruitarians, which is really extreme. For example, imagine someone from a North African oasis. They eat dates, figs, pomegranates, camel milk. That's carb, carb, carb, fruit, fruit. 

JESSICA: Yep, right. 

MARTIN: That's not right for everyone. But it’s possible.

JESSICA: No, oh, for sure. The people that I’ve met who do the carnivore diet, what I'll say is they don't do it with the research that they need to do.

MARTIN: Fortunately, with Metabolic Typing, if anyone wants to find out, we can just do the test, administer the questionnaire, and I'll get you your answers. You can be anywhere on the two extreme poles, all protein and fat, or somewhere in the middle and whatever. And then, depending on your endocrine dominance, you will push toward fats, push toward carbs, push toward organ meats. There are these three polarities, and depends on your genetics, which will do right for you and which will not? 

JESSICA: Yeah.

MARTIN: There it is. The answer is, it's individual.

JESSICA: And it is. It's one of those things also, I found out my Blood type after all of these switches. And I was like,”Huh! that makes me feel great. I did the right thing.” But it's because I was also listening to what my body was telling me and what it was craving. And so I stopped. My body was very blatant. You do not want meat, you do not want dairy. We do not want these things in our system. I said, sounds good to me. I eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, oats. I do have tofu. I love my tofu.

MARTIN: Yeah, at some point you need to decide whether you will be eating healthy soy or unhealthy soy, because, unfortunately, soy has been industrialized in a serious way, so you will need to watch for that someday.

JESSICA: Yeah, but we do find, depending on the season in Canada, it's easier to get things, healthier things than others, but trying to find stuff as close to the natural or organic and not super processed, for sure, is really important to us here too.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, we have the grain industry that's in free fall because of glyphosate. So people should know and should watch for that. Wheat, lentil and chickpea is grown with glyphosate, and if you continue to be eating glyphosate, you're killing off the microbiome within your body. So, sidebar for anyone, watch for that. Okay, so your story, so you're now helping people, you're running a coaching business is that what you do?

JESSICA: Yeah, so there's a couple of things. One of the side effects that I had from my treatments is I went into ovarian failure at 27 because of all of the chemotherapy. And they knew, they told me they were 95% sure that was going to happen. So I do work with people who are going through menopause. Most people don't go through ovarian failure.

MARTIN: But are you supplementing estrogen and progesterone topically, or where?

JESSICA: Yep, I take hormone replacement therapy every day, just because at 27 you have not reached peak bone density. Even right now, at 32 I have not reached peak bone density, and I need those hormones to do so.

MARTIN: So you have been menopaused artificially. So we need to just artificially allow you to reach your 52nd birthday before we change you back out of the cycle, so to speak, right?

JESSICA: And at some point I'll be doing IVF, because I do want to have kids, so I've got 27 eggs.

MARTIN: Oh, yeah, right. Well, congratulations on a very large family. 

JESSICA: Oh god no. We’re going to use two. I want to use two kids. I don't want more than two kids. But they did successfully harvest 27 in one go. And so I do work with people. One of the other things that I had struggled with is the diet industry and what women are supposed to look like. So I do coaching for women about menopause. I do coaching for women about figuring out how your body feels the best. Not everybody is supposed to be the same size. Not everyone's supposed to eat the same food. So what does healthy look like for you and how are you thriving? So I do that kind of coaching, and I give talks on it and my story.

MARTIN: Yeah, in my world, we call it the endocrine dominance that drives the body type, nutritional preference, and we also teach hormone replacement, because that is these days, it's an issue. Especially with the ubiquitous availability of plastics in our world, they seem to dysregulate us pretty bad.

JESSICA: Yeah, so that's kind of like the coaching I do, and I've also become a big advocate for women's health. That's the other thing that I write about. I started a Substack, and I write every day on different topics that interest me, nutrition being a big one of them, women's health being the other.

MARTIN: Let's tell them where they find you. So let's dictate the substack address.

JESSICA: Yeah, so people can just find me at my website. It’s just www.JessicaFaulds.com

MARTIN:  It's Jessica, you know how to spell it, Double S, and that F-A-U-L-D-S.com.

JESSICA: Yes. My substack is there. My nutrition stuff is there. My story is there. And I talk a lot about women's health and different symptoms. I have found over the last 19 years going through this that there's a lot of things that people are embarrassed to talk about. 

MARTIN: No kidding.

JESSICA: So embarrassed to talk about, I wrote a post,

MARTIN: All of the functions from below waste.

JESSICA: Yes, I actually wrote a post yesterday on my Substack. It was called: ‘Vaginal Dryness - The Dirty Term that Nobody wants to talk about.

MARTIN: Well, that comes with estrogen deficiency. And especially as you progress through the toward menopause, the estrogen level drops and the labia thin out, and the dryness shows up.

JESSICA: And nobody wants to talk about it. 

MARTIN: Well, why would you want to talk about it? I can't have fun intercourse anymore.

JESSICA: Yeah, nobody wants to talk about any of these things. Nobody talked about it even when I was going through menopause at 27. I was lucky I could ask my mom how she was feeling, because she was going through menopause at the same time as me. 

MARTIN: Oh lord. Okay.

JESSICA: Okay, but nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that there are things you can do for the symptoms that women are having. And so I talk a lot, and I do a lot of work as well in advocacy. There is an unfortunate trend in our healthcare system where women's pain is not seen as serious.

MARTIN: Now this is surprising to me, because there are more female doctors than male doctors now, 

JESSICA: Yes.

MARTIN: And yet they treat their sisters badly?

JESSICA: No, I wouldn't say that. I just think there’s a bias, even with all the medical studies that are happening.

MARTIN: Well, yeah, okay, medical studies are based on a woman is a man who menstruates.

JESSICA: Yes. And there's, I know someone who it took them 13 years to get their MS diagnosis, because it took them 12 years to get the MRI, so they had to advocate for themselves for 12 years to get that MRI.

MARTIN: Oh my God, okay.

JESSICA: And it doesn't matter. I think whether you live in Canada or the US, I think this is like a cross border.

MARTIN: It’s the Carnegie Rockefeller model of medicine driven by the pharmaceutical companies.

JESSICA: And so I do a lot with women's advocacy, and I've started posting pretty openly about everything that I've gone through and saying, “Hey, we need to talk about this. When I was going through talking about the fertility harvest, I didn't talk about it with my stem cell doctor. He left the room, and my nurse came in, and the nurse did all the fertility conversations with me.”

MARTIN: Well, in some way, not that I would wish it on anyone, but you were lucky in the sense that you got so sick so early, that you actually studied and learned so much by the time you were 25.

JESSICA: Yeah, I learned how to very quickly advocate for myself. I always joke. I said, “I'm probably a doctor's worst nightmare, because I can read the studies, I can read the literature. I know how to do that.”And I would come in and say, “This is what we're going to talk about today. This is what I want to do. Let's have a discussion about why or not I should do that.

MARTIN: The difficult thing is that the doctor may know less than you at that moment.

JESSICA: I've been very lucky with my doctors. I will say, the doctors that I have had in my life, the doctors I've been exposed to for the most part, have all been very open. And have had those conversations with me, and we have a very good debate.

MARTIN: That's great. Good debate. I remember this funny conversation where the doctor says to the patient, “Well, don't think that reading on Google for an hour is going to replace what I know.” And patient’s response is, “Well, I've been with this for 20 years, so don't you be trying to put your six weeks of lectures on the topic over top of me.”

JESSICA: I have had doctors tell me in all stages of my MS journey, like I said, I'm very lucky to have one right now who is very kind of progressive, and he's up on nutrition, and he believes in all these things. But I have had doctors tell me that they don't believe nutrition will make a difference for my MS.

MARTIN: And I don’t believe that you will make a difference in my life. I'm parting with you.

JESSICA: Yeah, and that's what I tell people all the time. You have the right to ask for a different doctor. Because I have always done the treatments. I've talked to people, I've done the research and I have chosen treatments that work for me. But I'm also going to see a physiotherapist, I see an osteopath, I see an acupuncturist. I see all of these other natural…

MARTIN: Yeah It's awesome that you are now so open-minded. I guess you are forced into being open minded. But had you stayed in the mainstream model box, you would have results that are much less whatever you call them, positive as you are now, right?

JESSICA: Yeah, I actually, I'm probably the only person in the world where I have a letter that says that I don't have MS anymore. 

MARTIN: Yes!

JESSICA: It's a little scary. In Alberta, if you have MS, you have to get a driver's medical every five years to keep your license. So every five years, I would have to go and I would have to pay $180 for my family doctor to sign a piece of paper that says I can keep driving.

MARTIN: Yes. You’re damaged goods and you need to be renewed.

JESSICA: Things could go wrong. And last year my it was up. I was supposed to do this, and I took the letter to my neurologist, and I said, I don't want to pay the $180. Can you just sign off on this for me? Because my family doctor will just charge me the $180 even if they don't have to do anything. And he said: “I can't, because I can't sign off on your heart, and I can't sign off as a neurologist, I'm not allowed to, but I'll do one better.” And he actually wrote a letter to the Alberta government, and he said, Jess had a stem cell transplant in 2019 for the sake of this driver's medical you can consider her cured. We will continue to monitor her yearly. If anything changes, we'll let you know. But she does not need this anymore. And so I still have that letter. I have it framed saying, “I won.” 

MARTIN: It’s a good letter.

JESSICA: And I'm like, this is a pretty good feel-good moment for me, but it double freaked me out, because the neurologist was like “You have to do this?” And I said, “Yeah, why?” And he's like, “If someone has a seizure, we don't make them do this.” And I was like, “Well, that's terrifying, because the seizure can affect your driving.”

MARTIN: Oh, really? You mean when your brain shuts down for a minute or so, it's okay?

JESSICA: But they don't  have to report it to the Alberta government if someone's had a seizure.

MARTIN: Isn't that funny.

JESSICA: And I was like, “That terrifies me.” But I was able to get this letter, and I have thrived. I don't worry about my MS anymore. Technically, they'll say I will never be cured. I will always have the diagnosis.

MARTIN: Yeah, right. You will always be an alcoholic.

JESSICA: But I was able to get life insurance again. I was able to, I don't have to do the driver's medical.

MARTIN: Now that's an interesting concept, life insurance, right?

JESSICA: Yeah, for the longest time it was, I've had life insurance through whatever job I had, but it was really hard for me to get life insurance as someone with MS. But you'll give smokers life insurance. and people don't realize that most people with MS,

MARTIN: You know, I think the problem is the actuarial tables, because the trajectory for MS in mainstream is not so good. I mean, you're really not typical. 

JESSICA: Oh, from my research, the average person with MS, it doesn't necessarily shorten their lifespan. It does affect their quality of life, but we're not going to die earlier, right? But yeah, I've got about 30 friends with MS who are all my age. We met at an MS summer camp. 

MARTIN: Yes. Okay, so have you at any point come up on industrial age toxicity as one of the contributing factors?

JESSICA: No, we've never, I've looked into my family and we say I played the MS lottery and I lost.

MARTIN: From my perspective, number one, number one common factor is industrial age toxins, heavy metals and volatile organic compounds and plastics and you name it. So myself, I've had a huge amount of success working with people, helping them detox. Their symptoms revert pretty strongly and quickly.

JESSICA: Yeah. I never looked into that. I grew up in a very small town in Ontario, I grew up on the water, just love and life, and when we've looked at why I got MS, I've been a part of lots of studies, a lot of studies with my blood. They've taken my family's blood.

MARTIN: Yeah, you will never find the toxicity in the blood, because the body will push it out of the blood into storage, which will be fat. And fat is in your brain, in your nerve sheaths, and of course, on your belly and tush, but it goes into all of that, right?

JESSICA: But yet we never,

MARTIN: Anyway, if ever you want to talk about it offline after.

JESSICA: Yeah for sure.

MARTIN: I’m interested in having this conversation with you. But anyway, I appreciate the fact that you have found your way, that you are able to help people, especially women. There are a whole lot of things that are specific to women, that men can talk about, but not really understand,

JESSICA: Yeah, women are not little men. That's what I always say. We're not little men.

MARTIN: Right. Which is how medicine, mainstream medicine, has been treating women as I said. It thinks of women as men who happen to menstruate. 

JESSICA: And that’s because our hormones are too hard to control and would affect studies. If you're going to use those studies and then put it on women, don't you think that our hormones are going to affect whatever you're now doing to us?

MARTIN: There's one other thing that affects studies, and it's the metabolic type, which, again, you will get the outcome of the study skewed heavily by this distribution of the metabolic type through your sample of the population that you're studying. So if you have a small sample, which often they are. They do studies on 20, 30 people and it could easily be skewed, I don't know what, 80/20 in one particular direction, and totally mess up the study.

JESSICA: Yeah, I think there's a long way to go in developing some of these studies for sure.

MARTIN: All right. Well, good. So any one of you out there, especially females, who would like to get a really good perspective on life living with chronic, inflammatory, degenerative neurological problem. Here's your advocate. Jessica Faulds

JESSICA: And eat more broccoli. 

MARTIN: Who eats more broccoli to save herself. There is an important component to it, especially broccoli sprouts, if you really want to go.

JESSICA: Yeah, oh, this has been great. It's nice to hear the alternative. I call them alternative because we're not Western medicine normal. But I've always been someone who just from the moment I got started, I said, “I'm going to do everything I can, and unless you can show me that this is hurting me, I'm going to try it. So, unless there's proof that it's hurting me.:

MARTIN: I’ve had my health issues in Canada. Mine were mostly caused by mercury toxicity. I had a long decline into serious health problems, and they were all solved not because of Canadian health insurance. They were caused by the health insurance. Everything that ever helped me was paid for by cash. The mainstream had very little to help me.

JESSICA: I think I've been, I've had the opposite. I've been very lucky with the treatments that I have had. The cost of a stem cell transplant from when I asked them, was about $150,000, so I was very lucky. I didn't have to pay for any of that. But I do go see my natural health people and my physio, my osteo. I've been lucky. I don't have to pay for the nutrition part, because I do that myself.

MARTIN: Yes, the groceries. Alright, great. Okay, Jessica, it's been a delight meeting you and talking about all of this. I'm looking forward to our next encounter, whenever that may be.

JESSICA: Hopefully in the future. 

MARTIN: Yes, indeed. So Jessica Faulds. And this is Martin Pytela, Life-Enthusiast.com, thank you for staying with us all the way to the end. Thank you, Jessica.

JESSICA: Thank you.