Ask Jack - Dining Out at Restaurants | S5E9

Welcome to Season 5 of Living Well with MS, the Overcoming MS podcast where we explore all topics relating to living well with multiple sclerosis (MS). In this episode we are pleased to welcome professional cook and writer, Jack McNulty as our guest!

You can submit your questions for Jack anytime by emailing podcast@overcomingms.org. Keep reading for the key episode takeaways and Jack’s bio.

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Bio

Jack’s career

Jack McNulty has been involved in food and cooking most of his life. He’s walked many paths during his culinary journey, including transforming himself from an interested home cook to a professional chef with classical training. He has worked for talented and knowledgeable chefs in high-end restaurants in Switzerland, Italy, and France. Jack operated his own catering business and cooking school for 15 years, while also finding time to write about cooking.

Jack’s current activities include operating myfreshattitude.com – a website dedicated to providing healthy vegan recipes and useful vegan cooking instruction and techniques. He also writes and distributes a weekly international newsletter – VeganWeekly – to inspire people to cook healthy vegan food.

Jack and Overcoming MS

Jack has followed the Overcoming MS lifestyle since 2009. He has actively worked on providing recipes and information to the Overcoming MS website, was the contributing editor to the Overcoming MS Cookbook, and authored the ‘Eat Well’ chapter in the latest Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis Handbook.  

Key Takeaways

The Overcoming MS diet will help manage inflammation
“If you look at it just purely on the dietary portion of the Overcoming MS program, if you follow the guidelines, it gives you a good chance of - over time - getting back to some sort of base level. And that may take somewhere between five and seven years for a lot of people. I know it did for me, it was around seven years before all my symptoms just vanished. The goal is to promote health in your body. So, [if] you want to decrease inflammation, you want to ingest foods that are going to play a role in decreasing inflammation.”

It’s helpful to research restaurant menus ahead of dining out
“If I'm going to a place I've not been, I turn to the internet first to see if there is a menu online. Maybe by looking online, you're just already going to say, ‘well there's only one thing I can have on this menu’ and that might not be good enough. But it's also possible that there are some possibilities here and you have some questions already in mind before you even get to the restaurant that you could ask the server.”

Don’t stress if you eat something by accident/not by choice when eating out
“Over the years, having an experience like that [eating something by accident/not by choice when eating out] is not going to have a huge impact. Now, having said that, I think it's probably not a good idea to just say, well, it's accepted because Jack just said so. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that sometimes those things come up and it's better to just not stress about them and then just go ahead and enjoy it and move on. And next day, be twice as healthy.”

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Related Links: 

• Read  the Overcoming MS Handbook
• Download the Overcoming MS Chef cards
• Listen to previous “Ask Jack” episodes S3E34, S3E35, S3E38, S3E41, E3E48, S4E51, S4E53, S4E65

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