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 billion. 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

According to the Foundation's rheumatoloeists—medical doc¬tors 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 per¬manently 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 treatments. 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 disease.

But beginning in the late l970s a veritable explosion of new sci¬entific information begar to emerge from research institutions, med¬ical centers and universities that first caused us to re-evaluate every-thing we previously knew and believed about arthritic disease This research continues in full force today. and its ideas are seeping into conventional arthritic treatment

A Modern nutritional miracle: 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 vet. we already have at our disposal convincing proof that certain foods are a contributing cause of arthritic disease More impor¬tantly. 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 osteoarthntis—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 arthri¬tis 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

It's been noted numerous times that arthritic symptoms may clear 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 theo¬ry during the past decade. Drs L. G. Darlington and N W Ramsey. British rheumatoloeists 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 it hat'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.

Excerpt from: "How to Eat Away Arthritis" by Norman Ford & Lauri Aesoph