Change your eating habits to combat arthritis

A special kind of fasting (eating sparingly or not eating certain foods) is an effective way to treat rheumatoid arthritis, but most people tend to have relapses when they start eating normally again.

Now, you might be able to sustain the benefits of fasting with a special diet. Here’s what worked for some other people during a scientific study.

Researchers studied 27 people on a special diet and 26 people who ate normally. Those on the special diet fasted for over a week, and then were put on a vegetarian diet for a year.

The diet includes herbal teas, garlic, vegetable broth, watered-down potatoes and parsley, and juice extracts from carrots, beets and celery.

During the next phase, they were put on a gluten-free vegan diet for three to five months. A vegan diet is a vegetarian diet that omits all animal sources of protein.

Gluten-free means that they didn’t eat any food containing wheat, rye, oats or barley. During this diet, they were asked not to eat food that contained gluten, meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, refined sugar or citrus fruits, salt, strong spices, alcoholic beverages, tea and coffee.

Gluten is vegetable albumin – prepared from wheat and other grains.

The diet was then changed to a diet consisting of dairy products and vegetables (lacto vegetarian diet) for the remainder of the study.

After only four weeks at the health farm, the diet group showed a significant improvement: fewer tender and swollen joints, less stiffness, and more grip strength. These benefits were still present a year later.

The special-diet group also lost more weight than the regular-diet group. But the reduction in weight explains only a small portion of the improvement, the report says. Some people’s arthritis might be triggered or aggravated by food allergies.

Talk to your doctor about what kind of diet is best for you.

Medical Source:

The Lancet (338, 8772:899)