Is arthritis pain just a matter of luck as you get older?

So many people I know have arthritis. One says her toes are all misshapen gnarled and twisted from it, another told me I was lucky I didn’t have any arthritis pain and yet another told me about her sore shoulder and the fact that the other shoulder already had a joint replacement. My neighbour had a knee replacement last year and goodness knows how many people I know with hip replacements. And we oldies take it all for granted, as though none can be prevented. The hospital waiting lists are long and the cost to the country keeps growing.

Well I didn’t know whether to say it on any of those occasions, but my arthritis pain in my fingers, sternum disappeared very soon after  I adopted a fully plant based diet early last year. If I had no doubt they would say I was just lucky or it was just a coincidence.

I understood from something I had seen on youtube that the lumps don’t disappear, the better diet doesn’t reverse the damage that has already happened but at least I was getting no more pain. But also, ringing in my ears is always the rhythmic sentence that Dr Michael Klaper says so fast. “When we adopt a wholefood, plant-based diet  the obesity melts away, the arteries open up, the blood pressure comes down, the insulin reception clears out, the asthmatic lungs stop wheezing, the skin clears up and the joints stop hurting.”

So today I was curious to find if there were any appropriate scientific papers. I went to nutritionfacts.org. There was one that said those who ate more dairy products were more like to need hip replacement surgery. Then I went to the site of the Physicians Committee on Responsible Medicine and found one on the effect of fibre. “Those who consumed the highest amounts of fiber from the OAI and Framingham studies had a 30 percent and 61 percent lower risk for knee arthritis, respectively, compared with those who consumed the least. Researchers contribute the reduced risk to fiber’s role in lowering both BMI and inflammatory compounds in the blood”. (Not surprising when you realise that meat, dairy and eggs have absolutely no fibre.)

Then I did a google search on “osteoarthritis whole foods plant based” OK  –so it now looks as though there have been at least one study on the effect of a plant based diet on osteoarthritis. There is  one in 2019 published in an Arthritis journal lists all the anti-inflammatories and anti-oxidants in various plant foods which could explain the reason pain is reduced on a plant based diet and the disease doesn’t advance so fast. It concludes “A whole food plant-based diet (WFPBD) has been shown to reduce the symptoms of osteoarthritis by reducing risk factors such as obesity, metabolic syndrome and Type II Diabetes.”

No doubt there will be more studies published.