Plant-Based Diet and Vitamin B2 Might Help in Managing Parkinson Disease

Back in Novem­ber 2009, I wrote a blog post about a study that sug­gest­ed that a hered­i­tary prob­lem in the metab­o­lism of riboflavin (vit­a­min B2) and the heavy con­sump­tion of red meat could both con­tribute to the cause of Parkin­son dis­ease. The researchers did blood tests for riboflavin for 31 con­sec­u­tive Parkin­son patients who entered their clin­ic. Every sin­gle one of them had abnor­mal­ly low blood lev­els of riboflavin. In com­par­i­son, only a few of the patients with oth­er neu­ro­log­ic dis­eases had low riboflavin lev­els. The Parkin­son patients also tend­ed to be heavy con­sumers of red meat. After the riboflavin defi­cien­cy was cor­rect­ed and the Parkin­son patients stopped eat­ing red meat, their motor skills improved dra­mat­i­cal­ly.

I thought that this study was impor­tant. It sug­gest­ed that cheap and gen­er­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial inter­ven­tions could pro­vide sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits for peo­ple with Parkin­son dis­ease. It should have been fol­lowed up with larg­er stud­ies. Keep in mind that Parkin­son dis­ease is a major cause of dis­abil­i­ty among elder­ly Amer­i­cans and ranks 14th among caus­es of death in the Unit­ed States.

Since then, I’ve seen a few stud­ies in which inves­ti­ga­tors assess riboflavin sta­tus by ask­ing peo­ple what they’ve been eat­ing, instead of doing a blood test! This is a big mis­take because the Parkin­son patients in the 2003 study had riboflavin defi­cien­cy even though they were eat­ing nor­mal amounts of riboflavin. Their bod­ies just weren’t han­dling the riboflavin effi­cient­ly. We need more research to show whether Parkin­son patients should rou­tine­ly be screened for riboflavin defi­cien­cy. Of course, if you or a loved one has Parkin­son dis­ease, you can just ask for the riboflavin lev­el to be test­ed. If a patient has a vit­a­min defi­cien­cy, it should be cor­rect­ed, shouldn’t it?

Anoth­er study, pub­lished in Jan­u­ary of 2011, found that Parkin­son patients improved when they switched to a plant-based diet. This came as no sur­prise to me because sim­ply eat­ing less pro­tein, espe­cial­ly dur­ing the day­time, can dra­mat­i­cal­ly improve the patient’s response to L-dopa, which is the drug of choice for treat­ing Parkin­son dis­ease.