Can Arthritis Pain Be Reduced With Food? Dr Ekberg

The best diet for arthritis. Is it high carb, low carb, high fat, low fat, is it

keto, is it vegan, is it junk food, is it DASH or Mediterranean? Well we're gonna talk

about the principles so that you can sort it out all for yourself coming

right up. So I saw a study recently great one done by the University of Alabama

they put out some good research lately one study they did was on arthritis

where they found that people with a low carb diet did much much better when they

had arthritis they had lower pain scores they had less swelling they improved

their quality of life they could do more things with less pain great so let's

just talk a little bit about arthritis and then we'll go from there

so there's two types of arthritis most people think about and one is called oay

or osteoarthritis and the other one is called RA and rheumatoid arthritis and

traditionally the RA is considered inflammatory and the O a is considered

non inflammatory this is not correct even though the RA is more inflammatory

there is still inflammation in the osteoarthritis but in RA they also have

what's called a rheumatoid factor which is strongly in flama Tori and it's

indicative of an autoimmune disease so your own body's immune system attacks

the the joint itself I just want to mention them to contrast but we're going

to talk about osteoarthritis today which is considered a mechanical problem but

it has an inflammatory component to it which is very important to understand

and traditionally we they think they describe the osteo arthritis as a wear

and tear disease it's like you you have these body parts and over time they just

wear out and this is a very very limited kind

of backwards concept and this really confuses us when we try to understand

how the body works because they describe it as if you get this one body and it

slowly wears down and when it's worn enough then you can't use it anymore

that is just not how it works there is a constant balance between break down and

repair break down repair so when it wears down faster then your body can

repair it then it looks like wear and tear but it forgets that part about

repair that your body is supposed to heal so the osteoarthritis any kind of

thing that they call a wear and tear disease is not primarily a wear and tear

problem it is primarily a repair problem there is something that is not allowing

the body to repair so they like everything else in the allopathic world

in the mainstream view of things they consider every degenerative disease

irreversible because in their world it only goes in one direction because they

forgot that the body is supposed to repair and they don't have the tools to

do anything about it so when they did this not this study I looked at another

study actually where they said and this was on on my so I don't take them very

seriously but it's a good curiosity and they found that the worst culprit in the

degeneration of joints in mice was sugar and carbohydrates and one of the

researchers explained that wow we always thought it was just a mechanical problem

but now we have to rethink this it seems like diet actually has something to do

with it so again we're making some progress when people are realizing that

it is a diet can have a huge influence but the wear and tear why does that

happen why does that what are the factors

create wear and tear so one that we look at as a chiropractor is poor mechanics

that the joint can only be as stable and as balanced and as mobile and controlled

as the muscles controlling the joint and the muscles can only control it to the

degree that the brain understands it so we have to have good feedback we have to

have good signals coming into the brain processing and going out from the brain

then of course the muscles have to be strong enough which is usually never

really a problem it's more of a signal issue so if we have poor mechanics now

we have uneven weight bearing on that joint so if your knees start buckling

inwards now you're gonna wear more on the

outside of the joint and the other side is if they start going bowlegged

now you're gonna where you're gonna gap the joint on the outside and wear more

on the inside so poor mechanics will wear it's like you have a pair of shoes

where you're walking crooked you're gonna wear one heel the side of the heel

faster so that's what poor mechanics does it wears the cartilage much much

faster and then inflammation is going to speed up the process it's going to

create a swelling and a poor environment acute inflammation is necessary for

healing but chronic inflammation interferes with healing it can't

complete the process of course the body needs proper nutrition it needs building

blocks that needs repair part replacement parts so if we eat junk food

and there's hardly anything that the body can use obviously it's not going to

be able to repair it and if we have poor circulation because all these nutrients

that we eat they have to be distributed they have to be delivered to the joint

by the blood so if we have poor circulation poor nutrition then the the

stuff can't get there and then obviously the repair part is the opposite of all

these so in order to repair it we need good

mechanics we need to lower inflammation we need good nutrition and good

circulation so that's what holistic health is all about that's what every

video on this channel is about is how to create those those circumstances what we

want to focus on obviously the thing that you have the most immediate control

over and what these studies talk about is the diet so the diet you want to do

is low inflammatory foods because if you eat things that create inflammation then

they're also usually the ones that are low in nutrition and you're kind of

stuck you're you're never going to get out of that vicious loop of of wearing

and tearing faster than you can break it down so remember there's nothing in the

body that is purely mechanical there's always a process of building and

breaking down building and breaking down any each is equally important that's how

we have quality tissues by getting rid of the old cells and replacing them with

new cells and it was really funny because I found a half a dozen I just

glanced real quick I didn't do anything in-depth but I found half a dozen

studies that kind of said the same thing that they have found that low-carb diets

seemed to reduce symptoms of osteoarthritis and then there was one

study that said high-fat diets are associated with increased osteoarthritis

I was really curious that didn't sound like anything I'd I could make sense of

so I started looking into it and it said oh yes indeed the high saturated fat the

high fat diet cost more and then it turned out what they had tried to do was

to mimic junk food so they gave the people a high-fat diet high in saturated

fat and high in sugar the way that you would find it to mirror junk food so

they were basically doing a study to show what junk food did to

osteoarthritis right so that that's what the study was what does junk

food do to osteoarthritis guess what the title was it was high-fat diets cause

saturate caused osteoarthritis so how often does that happen where they just

pick one thing for the headline and that's all we see and that's all we

focus on obviously if you eat junk food that's gonna have the worst possible

combination of poor nutrition inflammatory foods and and deficiencies

so again be careful I just had to laugh about that one so what is the best diet

and we don't want to put a name on it necessarily we just want to talk about

what are the principles how do you reduce the bad stuff and increase the

good stuff so first of all you want to lower the sugar the sugar is just evil

in the processed sugar is evil in every form in fruits and berries you could

have a little bit here and there but don't do too much if you're trying to

reduce insulin resistance or something like that you also want to do low grain

because grains are probably the most inflammatory foods that we have there

are so many people reacting to it that have sensitivities anytime you react to

something you're going to have an increase in inflammation process dairy

is the second most common thing that people are sensitive to and react to

anything else that you're allergic to you want to reduce so this is very

different for different people and some people are very sensitive they might

have a sensitivity to nightshades like bell pepper and eggplant and tomatoes

and then those people need to avoid those foods even if they're going to be

perfectly healthy for someone else so one man's food could be another man's

poison and this is where there's not a set in stone rule for everybody because

we are different a good idea might be something called the

I diet which some people call that the anti-inflammatory diet and some people

call it the autoimmune diet and they're very much the same thing because the

autoimmune is all about reducing the inflammatory foods and that would be

just continuing avoiding the grain the process theory the nightshades and then

anything else that you might be sensitive to so there's a lot of trial

and error in this if you have a good doctor who does kinesiology or muscle

testing then they can assist you in figuring out what what those foods are

overall you want to focus getting rid of this and then you eat whole foods so

they mentioned in here somewhere they mentioned the Mediterranean diet would

be a good diet that's relatively anti inflammatory and why is that because

they eat mostly whole food a very large portion of their diet is olive oil they

get as much as a third of their calories from olive oil and it is cold-pressed

and unprocessed so they're getting a whole food that's very anti-inflammatory

so on that note you want to eat meat fat and veggies because they are low

inflammatory there's very very few reactions to these foods and on that

note one of the best fats is saturated fat because it is very very neutral in

terms of inflammation there's very few reactions but of course you can't eat

the saturated fat that they have in fast food because that's very often

hydrogenated and there's frying fats and there's all these terrible terrible

processed fats so when we say whole food and we include meat fat veggies and

saturated fat we're talking quality food we're talking grass-fed we're talking

organic cold-pressed etc and guess what if

a low carb low inflammatory diet helps osteoarthritis

it's not about treating osteoarthritis it's about getting the body healthier

when the body works better when you irritate it less when you provide more

of what it needs then it is better able to handle and heal and do the things

that's supposed to so when osteoarthritis gets better so does

everything else because it's not about healing different pieces of the puzzle

it's not about healing symptoms or treating symptoms it's about making the

body work better so the symptoms go away so if you have any experience with these

please let me know I'd love to hear from you if you have any concerns any

questions any requests for additional videos or more detailed explanations let

me know we'll be more than happy and share the videos with as many people as

you can thanks for watching