Arthritis: Over 60 Recipes and a Self-Treatment Plan to Transform Your Life

Over 60 recipes and a self-treatment plan to transform your life

Marguerite Patten, O.B.E. and Jeannette Ewin, Ph.D.

Chapter 1 You can beat arthritis!

During an awards ceremony, American comedian Jack Benny reportedly said: Thank you for this honour, but I don’t know what I did to deserve it. Then again, I have arthritis, and I don’t know what I did to deserve that either.’

If – like Jack Benny – you suffer from arthritis, you know it is no laughing matter. Pain can dominate your life, and its effects are insidious. You don’t sleep well at night because your joints hurt. Backache plagues you while you are in bed. Knees and hips ache when you get out of bed. Slowly, you begin to feel depressed by the lack of sleep. During the day you begin avoiding exercise. Taking a walk, swinging a golf club, or doing everyday household chores cause discomfort and pain and, as a result, you find yourself moving less. Muscles that were once firm and strong begin to weaken from lack of use. Not burning off calories as quickly as you once did, you find yourself gaining a bit of weight. The problem of wakeful nights becomes compounded because the exercise you now avoid is an important part of getting the body ready for sleep. Overtime, arthritis begins to dominate your life, and you find yourself in a slow physical and emotional cycle of decline.

The above scenario is not inevitable, however. You can prevent it happening to you. By changing your diet and lifestyle, it is possible to regain a sense of physical and mental wellbeing. Arthritis leads to negative changes in your life: The Eat to Beat Arthritis Diet is your guide to the positive changes needed to overcome them.

Unfortunately, many arthritis sufferers never find a way of overcoming the debilitating symptoms of the disease. They may seek help from their doctor, and find that the medication they are prescribed causes unpleasant side effects such as stomach pain. Others try various forms of alternative therapy only to find them ineffective. In the end, they all too often submit. After all, they may reason, everyone who reaches a certain age must suffer from some form of aches or pains. As time goes by, their condition gets worse. All too soon the activities they once enjoyed – like playing with the grandchildren, gardening, or keeping up with a favourite hobby – cause too much pain to bear.

Don’t give in to arthritis. By learning to select and enjoy the foods that uniquely suit you, and by following the lifestyle advice in this book, you can continue enjoying life. Think positive. Be positive. Make the changes that release you from the negative cycle of arthritis.

The Eat to Beat Arthritis Diet is based on a simple, three-part strategy to healing and health:

The details of this strategy are outlined in the chapters that follow, but here is a brief summary of what is involved.

Know your enemy

Strip away the mystery of arthritis by understanding what it is and why it occurs. When an illness is diagnosed and given a name by a doctor, it has power. It is the unknown, and we are its victims. By learning something about an illness, or disease, and why it makes us suffer, we gain control. Knowledge replaces doubt, and hope replaces fear.

The basic facts outlined in Chapter 2 demystify arthritis. More detailed information is presented in the section of the book called ‘Questions and answers about arthritis’. Additional help is also provided by a glossary, a selection of good food tips and a list of helpful resources (this includes a number of websites for those of you with access to the internet).

Know how to defeat your enemy (gain control over arthritis in seven weeks)

This book is your guide to seven weeks that can change your life. Once you understand an illness, you can build a strategy to defeat it. If its total defeat is not possible, you can still find ways to minimize its symptoms and learn to live a brighter, fuller life.

In the early parts of this book you will learn how to alter your diet and lifestyle to break the negative cycle of arthritis. You will discover why good nutrition can rebuild failing tissues, block pain and revitalize aching joints. It will also become clear why certain foods should be avoided, and how everyday favourites – like tomatoes and aubergines (eggplants) – can cause joint pain and swelling.

You are unique, and your requirement for food is unique. Not only do you need to know which foods you should eat, but how they can be balanced to help you live a full and active life – despite having arthritis. This is explained in Chapter 3, where you will find an outline of the basic rules of nutrition, and information about how the substances in food affect your health. The basic rules of nutrition hold for everyone, but the amounts of individual nutrients you require for optimum health are not the same as those needed by others.

During the seven weeks of this diet, you will learn how to listen to your body and recognize when specific foods are doing harm. Simply by avoiding all foods containing wheat and all drinks containing caffeine, many arthritis suffers find their lives changed forever.

If all this is beginning to sound a bit too restrictive – take heart! In Part Two you will find a long list of foods you can eat. And to help you enjoy a delicious (and very modern) approach to cooking with these ingredients, Marguerite Patten has devised over 60 easy-to-prepare recipes.

Marguerite’s recipes are a vital part of this book. In them she not only explains what to cook and how, but also shares her own experience with the diet. Day by day, step by step, she takes you through the diet and discusses why she chose one ingredient over another. These personal insights give invaluable information and encouragement as you begin to experiment with a style of cooking that is fresh and tasty as well as healing and healthy.

Enjoy life

This is the third proclamation of the Eat to Beat Arthritis Diet. Unfortunately there are no simple recipes to help you with this part of the programme. Some suggestions are offered later on, but no one can prescribe what is best for you. Just remember:

Chapter 2 Know your enemy (understanding arthritis and its causes)

The costly epidemic of arthritis

‘People ignore arthritis both as public and personal health problems because it doesn’t kill you.’ So said Chad Helmick, a medical epidemiologist at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. He continued: ‘But what they don’t realize is that as Americans work and live longer, arthritis can affect their quality of life and eventually lead to disability.’ According to the FDA Consumer (May–June 2000), who quoted Dr Helmick, the current annual cost of arthritis to the U.S. economy is nearly $65 billion – a sum large enough to have about the same impact as a moderate recession.

Arthritis can strike at any age, and the number of arthritis sufferers increases each year. During a person’s lifetime, arthritis is more likely to restrict activity than cancer, diabetes or heart disease. World-wide, arthritis inflicts a terrible cost. In the United States alone, currently about 42 million people are afflicted by chronic forms of arthritis: according to the Center for Disease Control, that number will rise to 60 million by 2020. More than 11 million of those people will be crippled badly enough to be classified as disabled. And the U.S. is not an exceptional case – the social and economic impact of arthritis in the United States is mirrored throughout the Western world.

Why should more people suffer from arthritis today than in the past? And why do various forms of arthritis appear to be increasing at a greater rate in Westernized countries than in the rest of the world? Many experts believe the answer must be related to our lifestyle and diet.

When you consider the vast amount of money spent on medication to treat the symptoms of arthritis, and on surgical repair of crippled hips and knees, you get some idea just how much could be saved if people would eat and live according to the simple rules suggested here.

Arthritis comes in many forms

The word ‘arthritis’ refers to any process that causes inflammation of joints and surrounding tissues. Depending on which expert you believe, there are between one and two hundred different conditions that can be classified as ‘arthritis’. Some of these are common (osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and gout), while others are relatively rare (ankylosing spondylitis and systemic lupus erythematosis are examples). In Eat to Beat Arthritis we focus on those types of arthritis that affect the most people, although the anti-inflammation diet described here will help almost everyone.

Two key words need explanation: ‘inflammation’ and ‘joint’.

Inflammation is a natural process in which the body’s immune system reacts to infection, injury or any abnormal form of irritation. The area of inflammation becomes red, swollen and abnormally warm. When inflammation takes place around a site of infection or injury its role is to kill any invading organisms and speed up the removal of debris from dead bacteria (or viruses) and tissue. In other words, inflammation is a healthy part of the normal healing process. Unfortunately, there are times when the immune system mistakes the body’s own normal tissues for the ‘enemy’, and attacks them. This is known as an auto-immune reaction. The immune system may also attack parts of the body where concentrations of abnormal substances occur – such as joints in which bony nodules form after injury; or in places where abnormal deposits of uric acid form, as is the case in gout.

Inflammation is the real culprit in arthritis, so the diet described in this book is designed to help control inflammation. Even if you are on medication for your condition, changing the way you eat will help break the painful bonds of inflamed joints and tissues.

A joint is a place, or ‘join’, in the body where bones meet. Some joints are stationary, or fused, and have no motion; the joints between bone in the skull are examples. Other joints may allow a limited degree of motion, such as those in the fingers and toes, while others allow extensive motion. Hip joints are a good example of a place where there can be considerable movement at the place where bones meet.

As a general rule joints are formed from fibrous tissue, a pad of cartilage at the end of each bone within the joint, a thin lining of synovial membrane (which secretes a thin lubricating fluid into the joint to aid its motion) and, sometimes, a ligament, or strong band of fibrous tissue binding the bones together. Ligaments are also found supporting other parts of the body, including some internal organs.

OSTEOARTHRITIS

Almost everyone suffers from some degree of osteoarthritis. The older you get the more likely it is that injury or constant use has damaged one or more of your joints, and osteoarthritis has set in. Many athletes suffer this form of arthritis at a fairly early age owing to injury to cartilage and the bones within much-used joints, such as the knee. In less athletic people the pain experienced in knees, hands and hips by the time they reach retirement age is as a result of simple wear and tear on the internal structure of joints. In both cases, cartilage can wear so thin the ends of bones become exposed within joints. This causes pain and inflammation. To make matters worse, bony nodules may collect in osteoarthritic joints, adding to the pain and inflammation. And as anyone who suffers from pain knows, it can be mentally exhausting as well as physically debilitating.

Medical treatment for osteoarthritis usually involves analgesics (painkillers) and – in some cases – drugs that support the body’s attempts to rebuild damaged cartilage. Most of these drugs not only effectively reduce pain, they also reduce inflammation. The problem is that many analgesics (including aspirin and ibuprofen) cause stomach irritation that can lead to bleeding, and they do nothing to help rebuild worn tissue. During the past decade research has shown that there are natural compounds that support the rebuilding of damaged cartilage: glucosamine holds the greatest promise at present. You can learn more about this healing compound here.

RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS

The stiffness, pain, swelling and loss of function associated with rheumatoid arthritis results from inflammation of the lining that secretes lubricating fluid into joints. The disease can affect other parts of the body, but treatment is most often sought for the condition when it involves joints. In most cases this form of arthritis affects the same joint on both sides of the body: both knees, or both hips, or the knuckles of both forefingers. In severe cases deformity and loss of function result.

The medications used to treat rheumatoid and osteoarthritis are similar, and are selected to block pain and reduce inflammation. However, there is strong evidence that certain foods, such as oily fish, and food supplements, such as fish oil, help reduce the causes of the inflammation without endangering the delicate lining of the stomach.

More information about rheumatoid arthritis can be found here.

GOUT

Gout is frequently lampooned as a rich man’s illness, associated with too much fine wine and fatty food. In fact it strikes people from all walks of life: beggar and king. It can be very painful, and it is common to hear sufferers describe how they cannot bear to have even the weight of a bed-sheet rest on an affected toe. (Big toes are frequent victims of this illness.) Mercifully, gout is far less common than either osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis.

Gout is caused when too much uric acid collects in the blood. Uric acid is a by-product of normal metabolism, and it is usually collected and discarded from the body by the kidneys in urine. However, when the kidneys are not functioning normally, or when the diet contains an excess of certain foods, blood levels can rise to the point where the excess uric acid crystallizes in joints, the kidneys, or even the soft tissue of the ear. These stone-like residues cause pain, damage surrounding tissues, and trigger the biological processes that lead to inflammation.