Do you have to put up with 'Arthur'?

I had a question the other day about arthritis. In fact I get many questions about arthritis – it is a common and often debilitating disease.

I know this from personal experience. Three years ago I really though I’d be in a wheelchair by the age of 70 – with a combination of osteo-arthritis and psoriatic arthritis (and given that my grandmother had severe rheumatoid arthritis and my dad suffered from arthritis and gout) I was looking down the barrel of the full house of pain.

Three years later and three years of a whole food, plant predominant lifestyle, and I can report that I have very little pain. I still have swollen and knuckley fingers, and they hurt like hell if I bash them…and my fingers are very weak. But they don’t hurt on a daily basis. I’m not trying to find a position to hold my hands to ward off the pain. And I can do just about anything that requires dexterity (except open jars).

And the psoriatic arthritis seems to have gone and parked itself as a tiny annoyance in my left shoulder. Oh, and the psoriasis has largely gone too – my hands, which were a mosaic of scars and scabs and raised sores (sounds gross, was gross) are healed.

So what happened?

Well, by complete luck, (I'll write that story one day) I started eating a whole food plant-based diet. I cut out all processed foods and kicked the animal products to the kerb (for the most part, if it’s a family dinner I still eat the cauliflower cheese!).

As luck would have it, it was just the thing to do to bring my arthritis under control. Though I didn’t know it at the time my body was a wasteland of inflammation. My immune system was so busy attacking itself that it wasn’t getting on with all the other things it should be doing – like making sure I didn’t get sick!

It wasn’t just the arthritis and the psoriasis, I had multiple other auto immune issues too (which are nasty and don’t make good reading). I was under the care of a GP, a rheumatologist and a skin specialist and taking a cocktail of drugs, including some pretty nasty ones.

Interestingly, while I was researching this article I found one which advised me to “become best friends with my rheumatologist because I’d be seeing him (sic) all the time..”.

I’m pleased to report that this is not the case. He sacked me three months into my WFPB lifestyle. And, now I don’t take any drugs at all; no need for pain killers or other nasties.

So why is this the case. How has my body managed to overcome what surely must be a hereditary disease that can’t be escaped?

To back up a bit. Arthritis is a general term that means inflammation or swelling of one or more joints. There are many causes, and many types under two basic headings: osteo and inflammatory.

Essentially, osteoarthritis is caused by the wear and tear of the joint over time or because of overuse, while so called ‘inflammatory’ arthritis (which include psoriatic, gout, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and scleroderma) is caused by the body's immune system attacking the body's own tissues.

Some forms of arthritis can be linked to genes but….and this is always the but with genetics…those genes don’t have to get “expressed” or turned on. If our lifestyle if “clean” it’s much more likely that the genes that predispose us to diseases like arthritis won’t get turned on.

And, if we live a “clean” lifestyle, we are keeping inflammation at bay, so that will have less impact.

Oh, and we’re most likely not going to be overweight – and, in terms of osteo-arthritis, carrying excess weight stresses the bone and joints. It is estimated that for someone with arthritis in the knee, “for every kilo of weight lost, there is a two-kilo reduction in mechanical load exerted on the knee during daily activities”.

So, once again the clean diet can help as it usually leads to weight loss. In may case more than 20 kilos and it’s been gone for years now. I eat lots and enjoy many different foods…but I enjoy not being in pain too.

When you have arthritis, your body is in an inflammatory state, which can trigger pain and other symptoms. And what you eat may increase inflammation and set you up for other chronic conditions such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

A literature review on plant based food and knee osteoarthritis notes that “After analyzing the different treatment options to alleviate the pain of and possibly cure arthritis, it is apparent that the whole food, plant-based diet has the most promising results. One on this diet must not eat any animal proteins in order to maintain a low level of arachidonic acids to prevent or reduce inflammation…”*

*Citation: Zhaoli Dai. A literature review on plant-based foods and dietary quality in knee osteoarthritis. Eur J Rheumatol 1; 1: - DOI: 10.5152/eurjrheum.2022.21134