Diet-one of the simplest treatments

[prasanth5]

Cinsuming an anti-inflammatory diet is recommended as a treatment for RA.This consists in omega-3 fatty acid containing foods, water fish and vegetables. Selected fruits are good. This is what is called as the anti-inflammatory diet.

[kageyd]

Please give a URL or other reference to your definition of an anti-inflammatory diet --- or is that just your own idea?

[crimson]

It is becoming increasingly clear that a host of illnesses - including heart disease, many cancers and Alzheimer's disease - are influenced in large part by chronic inflammation. This is a process in which the immune system becomes off balance, and persists unnecessarily in its efforts to repair the body and repel pathogens. The prolonged process results in damage to healthy tissue as well. Stress, lack of exercise, genetic predisposition and other lifestyle factors can all promote inflammation, but poor diet is perhaps the main contributor, and the ideal place to begin addressing inflammation. (Find more details on the mechanics of the inflammation process and the Anti-Inflammatory Food Pyramid.)

More on this with this link: http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART02012/anti-inflammatory-diet

[kageyd]

Crimson, thanks for the URL. For many reasons (years ago I had a mild but troubling number of years with celiac...) I have followed the literature on all kinds of diets. A good friend has worked professionally with the Pritkin dietary program (see their cookbook) for many years. And lots of good, healthy people swear by the "Mediterranean Diet." When you carefully examine all three of these, including the anti-inflammatory diet, they are remarkably similar, with only small differences.

Whole grains in bread and elsewhere
LOTS of fresh fruit and lightly cooked vegetables, and lots of salads. Citrus fruits for your Vitamin C
easy on meat, no more than 6-8 oz a day (and especially easy on fatty meat)
and eat enough fish only to get your omega-3's
eliminate trans-fats as much as possible (which means virtually no fast foods, no drive-in hamburgers, no fast-food french fries, very limited processed foods of any kind (no chain store packages of cookies!)
drink lots of water, and keep the wine to one or at most two 4 oz glasses per day. No soft drinks, or at least a minimum of diet soft drinks if you must. Unsugared fruit juice is best for a treat.
limit salt intake (which also means no fast foods, and watch out for things like canned soups and vegatbles, which are heavy in added salt)
If you're not in sunlight, take some Vitamin D supplement

All of these are what our mothers told us lead to "a balanced diet," which is continually being rediscovered and offered under different names. Read any one of those three diets, and stick to it as best you can, and you'll be doing all that science tells us about a healthy diet.

(...and do give yourself a little "treat" every now and then, just for old times' sake...)

[Lily]

A mostly vegan diet has given me so much relief. I am off my meds right now. I have been eating some halloween candy and have had some stiffness come back. I am by no means 100% vegan, but predominantly so. Chicken, eggs and fish are the only things I very ocassionally eat.

I have to say diet is a huge huge thing for most diseases but big pharma will not ever tell you that. Doctors wont either. My doc laughed a tme when I asked if diet could be responsible. Well, guess what, it definitely causes flare ups to eat dairy and packaged ****,.

[lglavish]

I'm glad that some people can help their RA by diet. For me though, I didn't have enough time to try things like that. My RA took me from normal to needing assistance to dress, get on and off the toilet, even brush my hair in less than three months. I went the big pharma route and started Humira which gave me relief in less than a week. A year later I switched to Enbrel which I've been on for almost 7 months. I'm now in low disease activity and I expect that my doc will consider it remission when I see her in a couple of weeks. I've got my life back, and I'm finally off prednisone. So for me.....well I don't mind pharma getting rich, because what their medicine gave me was priceless.

[lglavish]

Also on the diet thing....before I got sick we grew 90% of our food organically. We have a large garden and a small orchard. We raised pigs and chickens- all organic. The 4 pigs we raised had one square acre to romp on. Our chicken gals have a 5 star coop with a run plus we let them out to do as they please. So for me I just don't believe that diet can be reliably responsible for cause, or treatment. I understand if dairy makes someone flare...I believe them...but it doesn't make me flare at all, so I like to stick with what my very kind and compassionate rheumatologist suggests for treatments. At the end of the day it was the medicine she prescribed that gave me relief....and a lot of it.