How to Eat Away Arthritis, Revised and Expanded

A guide to alleviating arthritis through diet, rather than expensive drugs and equipment. The method is based on the avoidance of certain inflammation-generating foods and their replacement with "restorative foods". Many case histories are included.

How to

Eat Away

ARTHRITIS

Lauri M. Aesoph, N.D.

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Introduction

The food you eat can make your arthritis better or worse. This is not folklore or fiction—it is a scientific fact!

Using food as medicine is an ancient concept. For thousands of years healing traditions from around the world have relied on food to treat various conditions including arthritis. Today, scientists continue to uncover the medicinal and arthritic-fighting force of cayenne, fish, and other everyday foods. The foods have not changed, we just understand more.

Of course, battling arthritis is more than preparing select morsels; your diet must be full of health-building foods, too. In fact, using nutritious, wholesome foods to calm aching joints is a fundamental step still used by natural health practitioners everywhere to treat arthritis and gout. This book will teach you how to simply and inexpensively take this first nutritional step on your own.

If you want to stay on the road to recovery, you must also purge your meals of health-destroying foods—this idea has not changed. Removing these and other causes of arthritis, not merely masking symptoms with painkillers and other potentially harmful medicines, is the key to regaining robust health.

Caring for your entire body, not just swollen joints, is another vital part of treating arthritis. Did you know an ailing digestive tract can contribute to arthritic joints? Were you aware the immune system is tied to arthritis pain? Learning how this works and what to do about it is what natural medicine and this book are all about.

Many natural health experts shared specific therapies they use to treat arthritis patients for this revised edition. Also added are new scientific discoveries affirming the benefits of arthritis-eliminating foods. Read the still inspiring tales of men and women who have used nutrient-rich foods to repair and heal swollen joints . . . and more.

Are you surprised that, in this highly technological age, changing a basic habit like eating is such a powerful arthritis therapy? Don’t be. Food and how we eat it forms the foundation of our well being.

This book will help anyone interested in improving their health. For the stories and information written here are not just about how diet can heal arthritis. On page after page, former arthritis victims and doctors reveal how vital, whole foods not only calm arthritis, but can unexpectedly relieve constipation, indigestion, and other chronic problems.

Nutrition is not the whole answer to treating arthritis, nor are bad eating habits the entire cause of this difficult disease. Long-time arthritis or even habitual use of certain medications may cause irreparable physical damage. But using our very basic, simple, and inexpensive up-to-date dietary suggestions can help improve or even eliminate your arthritic pain.

Happy reading and good eating.

Lauri M. Aesoph, ND

Chapter 1

How Restorative Foods Reverse Arthritis the Natural Way

You can eat away arthritis.

This is the message of the rapidly growing system of healing called natural medicine.

In fact alternative healing is becoming so popular that a 1990 survey estimated that one out of three Americans had used natural therapies in the past year to the tune of $13.7 billion1.

Many conventional physicians consider a book suggesting that you can eat away arthritic disease scientifically unsound.

For years, the Arthritis Foundation has been warning Americans that arthritis is an incurable disease. The symptoms can be suppressed by drugs. But the disease is always there, ready to flare up again at any time. To make matters worse, the Arthritis Foundation warns us that “arthritis will be the epidemic of the future unless appropriate actions are taken now to limit its impact”2.

According to the Foundation’s rheumatologists—medical doctors specializing in arthritis—the cause of arthritic disease remains unclear—although theories continue to mount. Arthritic disease is a collective name for the hundred or so different varieties of arthritis, one of which is gout. According to the Foundation, no drug can permanently cure any one of these diseases.

The Arthritis Foundation admits that excess weight provokes osteoarthritis and includes food allergies, fasting, and fish oils as possible arthritis treatments3. However, it has flatly stated that with the possible exception of gout, no diet or food has any important beneficial or causative effect on arthritic disease4.

But beginning in the late 1970s, a veritable explosion of new scientific information began to emerge from research institutions, medical centers and universities that first caused us to re-evaluate everything we previously knew and believed about arthritic disease. This research continues in full force today, and its ideas are seeping into conventional arthritic treatment.

From such widely varied branches of medicine as endocrinology, immunology, biochemistry, and nutrition, a mass of clinical evidence became available about previously unexplored areas of human nutrition. Although the answers are not all in yet, we already have at our disposal convincing proof that certain foods are a contributing cause of arthritic disease. More importantly, healthy joints seem dependent on gastrointestinal well-being.

Typical of the early research linking arthritis with a nutritional cause was the double-blind study conducted in 1979 by Dr. Anthony Conte, a Pittsburgh nutritionist, and his associate Dr. Marshall Mandell, a nationally-known allergist. According to reports, their study provided evidence that arthritis can be in many cases, an allergy-related disease that may be treated by simply avoiding certain common foods.

The study was conducted under rigorous scientific method using test subjects suffering from both rheumatoid and osteoarthritis—two main types of arthritic disease. Of these, 87 percent were found to have allergies that cause such typical arthritis symptoms as swelling and pain. The study results were presented to the American College of Allergists and published in the January 1980 issue of Annals of Allergy.

In the following weeks and months, identical reports that arthritis is a nutrition caused disease began to filter in from physicians and scientists who were conducting similar but separate studies of their own.

For example, Dr. Robert Stroud, a prominent rheumatologist at the University of Alabama School of Medicine, is reportedly one of many scientists to have done pioneering work to show that patients with arthritic disease respond very favorably when certain foods are eliminated from their diet.

Even more dramatic is the fact that for many people, arthritis symptoms completely clear up during a fast. This proves that food plays an important role in the development and treatment of arthritis. However, you can’t fast forever.

Fortunately, scientists have expanded on the food allergy theory during the past decade. Drs. L. G. Darlington and N. W. Ramsey, British rheumatologists from Epsom General Hospital, wrote a letter to The Lancet, a respected English medical journal, describing their successes using diet to treat rheumatoid arthritis. One-third of their 100 patients were still well after seven and a half years of diet-only treatment (that’s not to say that diet didn’t help others). Besides food intolerance, the doctors said the foods you eat can influence your digestive tract, the bacteria in your gut and inflammation—all which ultimately affect arthritis 5.

As we stand on the threshold of this exciting new knowledge, it is becoming increasingly clear that arthritis is not the incurable diseases we once believed.

What these doctors and scientists are now saying is that many forms of arthritis are aggravated by foods. While food allergies don’t cause arthritis, they may, along with poor eating habits and genetic susceptibility, encourage your body to attack its own joints.

For further confirmation that arthritis is a food-linked disease, consider the results of recent studies drawing a connection between what scientists called the “leaky gut syndrome” and autoimmune disorders, like rheumatoid arthritis. Some arthritic individuals have sieve-like gastrointestinal tracts that allow partially digested food and other substances to seep into their bloodstream. This is how food allergies and possibly allergy to your own body, called autoimmunity, happens.

Thus medical science has at last confirmed what old-time folk healers have said for years—that certain health destroying foods are a primary reason for arthritis. By replacing them with certain health restoring foods, we definitely can encourage remission of this disease together with elimination of stiffness, pain, and inflammation.

These important new advances have outdated orthodox medicine’s capability to treat arthritis. We now have available a mass of new data linking arthritic disease with nutrition that simply did not exist when several present doctors were attending medical school.

But instead of welcoming these discoveries, as you might expect, conventional medical practitioners have almost totally ignored them. For most doctors and rheumatologists are too busy, overworked, and locked-in by their own medical school training to keep abreast of new discoveries.

Take the case of Arthur H. whose doctor had been treating him for rheumatoid arthritis for seven years. Arthur finally became so frustrated with his doctor’s lack of success that he consulted an allergist. Sensitivity tests revealed that Arthur had developed allergic responses to milk, wheat, and potatoes. When Arthur eliminated these foods from his diet, the arthritis disappeared within two weeks.

Arthur returned to his original doctor to tell about his success, but the doctor was unimpressed. He made no attempt to seek information about nutritional therapy from the allergist. Nor did he refer any of his arthritic patients there. Instead he simply went on prescribing drugs just as he had been taught in medical school.

Past experience has shown that the lag time between the discovery of an important therapy and the time that doctors actually accept and use it is often as much as 20 or 30 years. For example, it took almost 30 years from the time that diet and exercise therapy were demonstrated to be able to reverse heart disease until cardiac rehabilitation centers began to appear.

It’s been nearly 15 years since we first brought you this news. So hopefully your doctor is using some nutritional therapy to treat arthritis. If not, point him in the direction of the numerous published studies on the subject. Still, most doctors will continue to say that you must learn to live with your arthritis. And they will continue to prescribe noxious drugs as the main answer to inflammation and pain.

How can this plethora of new scientific findings help you reverse arthritis?

For at least 150 years (in some healing traditions, millennia), we’ve known that arthritic disease could be benefited and often permanently reversed by changing to a diet of fresh, natural, health-restoring foods. The disease usually disappeared for as long as the person stayed on the diet.

But not everyone was able to recover fully by changing their diet. Recent scientific discoveries have now revealed why.

Arthritis is not, as was previously thought, caused simply by eating devitalized, health robbing foods. Nutritional research has now discovered that food influences arthritic disease in two distinct stages. In the first stage, the nutritional deficiency caused by eating depleted, processed foods paves the way for a second stage consisting of one or more food allergies. It is these allergic reactions that may trigger our immune system to attack the tissue in our joints.

This explains why, in past times, some people who made a complete changeover from health destroying foods to health-restoring foods never completely got rid of arthritis. They still had allergies to one or more of the natural foods. We are also learning the tremendous importance of healing the gut and improving overall health.

We now have so much important new knowledge concerning arthritis that we are witnessing a whole series of modern nutritional miracles.

Among them is the discovery that you yourself can easily test and identify the exact culprit foods that are creating the allergy that may be causing your arthritis. You can use some of the identical tests that a professional allergist would make, and you can do it all easily and simply in the privacy of your own home without experience, equipment, or expense.

Other important discoveries show that the way you eat also affects the way you feel. Having a strongly positive attitude can halve the time it takes to recover from arthritis. Eat right and you’ll feel right.

But what really swings the odds in your favor is the discovery that the more you know about arthritis the more power it gives you over the disease.

The purpose of this book is to show how you can use this totally natural nutritional approach to lessen or even relieve the pain and inflammation of arthritis and to restore yourself to perfect health.

New knowledge has come from the research frontiers of psychology and behavioral motivation to show that when you change your diet, you simultaneously benefit your whole person on the physical, mental, and emotional levels.

Natural medicine, once the property of folk healers and fringe practitioners, is quickly gaining respect in this country. While natural health healers range from scientifically trained naturopathic physicians and chiropractors to self-taught herbalists, the principles of natural medicine remain the same.

The natural approach to health says that total health is possible only when the whole person is functioning smoothly. The natural approach is not merely to ease pain and swelling but to end arthritic disease altogether by removing the cause.

The natural approach to arthritis says that drugs are not the only option. Nutrition is one of several gentle, alternative therapies that have proven as equally—sometimes more—effective than conventional care.

As a result, the natural rationale is creating a revolution in our approach to disease. Simply because conventional medical treatment is the established way to treat an ailment, it is not necessarily the only way.

The reason is, of course, that arthritis is made worse by our own incorrect eating habits. It has also been amply demonstrated that our health destroying foods are largely the cause of a whole class of degenerative diseases that includes heart disease, stroke, atherosclerosis, hypertension, adu...