Controlling your Diet to Control your Arthritis
Diet Elimination TherapyDiet elimination therapy is a method of determining food hypersensitivities with patients. Elimination diets avoid a specific food or group of foods such as milk, meat or processed foods that are known to be prime allergy suspects. These foods are eliminated from the diet for a specific period of time. Foods are then gradually reintroduced one at a time, to determine whether any of them causes a reaction. Mainstream physicians generally do not believe that food sensitivities can contribute to osteoarthritis. But nutritional medicine expert Melvyn Werbach, M.D., an assistant clinical professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, cites several rigorous, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies that have linked arthritis to food sensitivities, notably to soy and dairy products in the publication Werbach, M. Nutritional Influences on Illness, pp. 568-9. Proponents of the Diet elimination approach general agree that it may take up to 6 months for the effects to be fully experienced. Given the difficulty of compliance in many of the dietary approaches, successfully developing controlled clinical trials, that could scientifically establish the effectiveness of the approach has not been completed for most the the proposed diets. A Case StudyThe study began with a seven to ten day fast. 27 patients were allocated to a four-week stay at a health farm. They began with a seven to ten day subtotal fast - taking only herbal teas, garlic, vegetable broth, decoction of potatoes and parsley, and juice extracts from carrots, beets and celery. After the fast the patients reintroduced a 'new' food item every second day. If they noticed an increase in arthritis pain, stiffness or joint swelling within two to 48 hours this item was omitted from the diet for at least seven days. If symptoms were exacerbated on reintroduction of this food item, it was excluded from the diet for the rest of the study period. During the first 3.5 months, the patients were asked not to eat food that contained gluten, meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, refined sugar or citrus fruits. Salt, strong spices, and preservatives were avoided - likewise alcoholic beverages, tea and coffee. After this period, the patients were allowed to reintroduce milk, other dairy products and gluten-containing foods in the way described above. The patients who did not use cod liver oil supplemented their diet with vitamin D during the first four months.A control group of 26 patients stayed for four weeks at a convalescent home, but ate an ordinary diet throughout the whole study period. After four weeks at the health farm the diet group showed a significant improvement in the number of tender joints, Ritchie's articular index, the number of swollen joints, arthritis pain scores, the duration of morning stiffness, grip strength, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, C-reactive protein, white blood cell count and a health assessment questionnaire score. In the control group, only arthritis pain score improved significantly. The benefits in the diet group were still present after one year, and evaluation of the whole course showed significant advantages for the diet group in all measured indices. Other Factors Influence EffectivenessFood allergy or intolerance is unlikely to explain the improvement in
all the patients who changed their diet. Interest has been drawn to
dietary fatty acids and their ability to modulate the inflammatory
process
A switch to vegetarian diet causes an extensive change in the profile of
the fatty acids of the serum phospholipids. These changes may favor
production of prostaglandins and leukotrienes with less inflammatory
activity. Food items that you should avoidWhile there are over 100 different types of arthritis, for believers in nutrition's connection to arthritis, they all have one thing in common. One or more of the food items listed will be an “allergy foodâ€
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