Best Diet for Nerve Repair: What to Eat for Faster Recovery

By Dr. Valerie Monteiro Last updated Mar 10, 2025

The right diet can change your life. While it may not fully repair your nerves, it can help kick your nerve pain to the curb and help you feel better quicker.

5 Key Dietary Factors for Nerve Repair

Your diet affects everything in your body. It determines how fast you recover and various other aspects of your recovery.

When it comes to nerve repair, these five factors are key:

1. Healthy Fats

Healthy fats repair nerve membranes and the myelin sheath. Without enough of them, you experience signal distortion, resulting in nerve pain, burning, or tingling.

2. Anti-Inflammatory Effect

Since chronic inflammation wrecks the nerves, your diet must extinguish the fire. You do this with a anti-inflammatory diet. More on this later.

3. Nutrient Density

Nerves need B vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants for regeneration.

4. Blood Sugar Regulation

Even if you do not have diabetes, 40% of the adult population is insulin resistant. Stable blood sugar is essential for preventing further nerve damage.

5. Gut Health

Lastly, a healthy microbiome influences inflammation and nutrient absorption, both critical for nerve recovery.

Top Nerve-Healing Diets: Paleo, Keto, Carnivore, and

AIP (Autoimmune Protocol)

While many diets claim to be the best, we will focus on the heavy hitters: the carnivore diet, the healthy keto diet, the paleo diet, and the AIP diet.

Each of these diets has strengths and weaknesses. We have used all of these diets for our patients based on their individual needs and medical profiles. The focus is on what supports their nerve recovery.

Paleo Diet

The paleo diet is like that of a hunter-gatherer, not a drive-through enthusiast. It focuses on real, whole food with no processed junk.

Some aspects of the paleo diet include:

Eggs
Gras-fed lean meats
Wild-caught fish
Fruits
Vegetables
Nuts
Seeds
Healthy fats

The diet excludes processed foods, grains like wheat, corn, rice, quinoa, beans, legumes, and most dairy products. However, paleo followers often allow fermented dairy products like kefir or yogurt due to their health benefits.

Paleo helps with nerve repair thanks to the following:

Nutrient Density

The paleo diet is packed with proteins, b-vitamins, magnesium, and zinc, crucial for nerve tissue repair and growth.

Anti-Inflammation

Because the diet eliminates processed foods and is high in antioxidants, it reduces chronic inflammation.

Omega-3 Fatty Acids

The diet is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids which are imperative for nerve repair.

Blood Sugar Levels

The Paleo diet helps to balance your blood sugar levels.

Autoimmune Protocol Diet (AIP)

AIP is like paleo on steroids. It is more extreme with the elimination diet, designed for people with autoimmune-driven nerve damage like:

Multiple sclerosis
Guillain-barre syndrome
Myasthenia Gravis
Neuromyelitis Optica
Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy
Autoimmune encephalitis

The diet is also excellent for anyone else with autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s, or type 1 diabetes.

The diet includes:

Grass-fed meats
Wild-caught fish
Healthy fats
Fermented foods like kimchi or kombucha
Bone broth
Fresh herbs

AIP cuts out all processed foods, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, dairy, and nightshade vegetables like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers.

Legumes, nuts, and seeds contain anti-nutrients like phytic acid and oxalates, which can interfere with nutrient absorption.

While it sounds like a lot, the AIP elimination diet involves phases, from the strictest elimination to a reintroduction phase in 90 days for certain foods.

AIP is effective for nerve repair for a few reasons:

Reduces Inflammation

Reduces inflammation by eliminating autoimmune triggers like dairy, grains, and others mentioned above.

Nutrient Density

The diet is packed with protein, B-vitamins, omega-3s, and antioxidants.

Promotes Gut Healing

The AIP diet promotes gut healing and restores the gut microbiome, reducing inflammation.

Stabilizes Immune Reaction

Lastly, the AIP diet stabilizes the immune system’s reaction, preventing further nerve damage.

Healthy Keto Diet

The healthy keto diet, a low-carb, high-fat diet, focuses on food quality.

The goal is ketosis, where your body uses ketones instead of glucose for fuel. This change supports nerve repair because ketones provide more fuel for nerve cells than glucose. Ketones produce far less free radicals than glucose, lowering oxidative stress. Furthermore, ketones reduce neuroinflammation (inflammation around the nerves).

A healthy keto diet includes:

70-80% healthy fats ( grass-fed butter, ghee, tallow, lard, extra virgin olive oil, or coconut oil)
15-25% protein (grass-fed meats, pasture-raised poultry and eggs, and wild-caught fish)
10% low-carb veggies and fruits

The diet cuts out grains, sugar, high-carb foods, and all processed foods.

The healthy keto diet helps with nerve repair in a few ways.

Neuroprotective

The diet is neuroprotective, meaning the ketones lower inflammation and provide better energy for nerve cells to repair and regenerate.

Mitochondrial Function

The healthy keto diet improves mitochondrial health and recovery.

Blood Sugar Stability

It also provides blood sugar stability, preventing glucose-related nerve damage.

Carnivore Diet

As the name suggests, the carnivore diet is an all-meat diet–no plants or carbs.

It is common for those with severe gut health issues like IBS, Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, or celiac disease to thrive on this diet. It also helps those struggling with obesity, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes.

The diet includes:

Beef
Lamb
Pork
Poultry
Fish
Eggs
Butter
Bone broth

It excludes everything else (fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, and seeds). The carnivore diet falls short of nerve repair because it is nutrient-deficient. It lacks B1, B6, vitamin C, magnesium, and potassium.

Carnivore diets raise the risk of inflammation because they lack substantial antioxidants. They may also increase oxidative stress, resulting in more nerve damage.

It can also lead to omega-6 overload. If you eat primarily grain-fed meats and conventionally raise poultry and eggs, your omega-6 can skyrocket.

While it has various health benefits, it is not the best diet for nerve recovery. We recommend it for those with GI disorders who cannot digest vegetables.

We do not recommend this diet long-term. It is best done for 1-3 months to reduce inflammation and promote gut healing rapidly.

If you are on a carnivore diet for 6 months or longer, you must carefully supplement the critical nutrients to prevent deficiencies.

Which Diet is Best for You?

The two best diets are the healthy keto and AIP. They provide the best combination of healthy fats, anti-inflammatory foods, and nutrient density.

So, which one is best for you?

AIP (Autoimmune Protocol)

Any patient with any form of an autoimmune reaction or disease gets placed on the AIP diet. Patients on multiple medications (indicating systemic dysfunction in multiple systems, significant mitochondrial damage, or severe unrelenting symptoms) also gets placed on the AIP.

I also place any patient suffering from toxicity-induced neuropathy, like chemotherapy, molds, alcohol abuse, or heavy metals, on this diet.

Lastly, any patient with gut-related disorders like SIBO or leaky gut gets placed on AIP.

Healthy Keto

Any patient who is insulin resistant, overweight or obese, suffers from fatty liver, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol gets placed on the healthy keto diet.

We also use healthy keto for patients whose HDL (good cholesterol) is below 60.

Paleo Diets

While not as often used, I do use the paleo as a transitional diet when my patients have made a significant recovery and want a diet with fewer restrictions.

With the right diet, you can significantly aid and help prevent obstacles to your recovery. So, find the best diet for you and take your next step towards a life free from your neuropathy.

Struggling with Neuropathy?

Dr. Coppola and Dr. Monteiro’s dedication to combating neuropathy is deeply personal, stemming from Dr. Monteiro’s experience with her mother’s severe chemo-induced neuropathy. This personal journey fueled their commitment to develop a systematic, drug-free approach to reversing neuropathy.

They founded the San Antonio Neuropathy Center, where they’ve successfully treated over 18,000 patients over the past two decades. Their acclaimed book, “Defeat Neuropathy Now in Spite of Your Doctor,” along with their neuropathy product line, stands as a testament to their expertise and innovative solutions.

Recognized as leading neuropathy specialists in America, Dr. Coppola and Dr. Monteiro offer a beacon of hope for those diagnosed with this challenging condition. If you or a loved one is seeking relief from neuropathy, reach out to us at 844 400-0101 or email us through our contact page – Click here.

Your path to healing can start today.

REFERENCES:

Paul Saladino Carnivore Diet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz5PymNgnSY&list=PLReGC0hFyGTUBtQ1DXjNe2R2CYOJsWLni

Ketognic diet:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9102882/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209323/

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.1002266/full

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/23/5003

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo7639

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/molecular-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnmol.2018.00086/full

Carnivore diet & Microbiome