Eat to Treat: Reduce Joint Pain and Inflammation With a Healthy Diet
If you suffer from joint pain and inflammation, you know how much it can dominate your life. The discomfort takes many different shapes. You may feel bloated after eating certain meals. You may feel swelling around your ankles or other joints. You may feel it in your sinuses, or a headache may flare up out of the blue. Your pain may come and go unpredictably, or you may feel it persistently.
These symptoms are all incredibly difficult to deal with. Maybe you’ve tried everything, including medication, but you just aren’t getting the pain relief you are looking for. Believe it or not, the foods you eat may be causing or intensifying your pain.
Many people don’t associate joint pain and swelling with the foods they eat, but I’ve found that many people can find relief with simple changes to their diets. I’ve worked with parents who tried everything to treat their child’s sinus conditions. No matter what they tried, from neti pots to medication, their son’s runny nose persisted. I suggested removing dairy products from the child’s diet and tracking the symptoms afterwards. As it turns out, the child was allergic to dairy, and his sinus issues vanished once milk and cheese were eliminated from his diet.
Changing your diet can help in many cases, but the advice you’ll find in this article is not intended to be comprehensive. Dietary changes won’t relieve every case of joint pain and inflammation: Those issues can be caused by many things, and we are only focusing on a few of them here. Your bloating and pain may be caused by a serious medical issue that cannot be addressed by dietary changes alone. As always, it’s important to consult your doctor before implementing any major changes to your life.
However, if you are interested in exploring how dietary changes might alleviate your symptoms, read on. Let’s dive into a few common ways your diet can intensify the pain and discomfort associated with joint pain, bloating, headaches, sinus pressure, and inflammation – and the dietary adjustments that may relieve those symptoms.
Foods high in purines (uric acid) can intensify joint pain and swelling
In some cases, joint pain is intensified due to a buildup of uric acid in the body. Uric acid is a waste byproduct of purines, organic compounds that do play an important role in our biology. Our bodies use purines as building blocks for DNA and RNA, and purines also help our metabolic processes work efficiently.
However, you can consume too many purines, and it can cause a build-up of uric acid that has negative effects on your health. Uric acid is very toxic to our body, and it is usually released through our urine. However, when we overload our body with too many purines, the uric acid may try to escape the body by traveling to our hands, our feet, and other extremities. In some cases, this causes extreme and painful swelling known as gout.
In other cases, uric acid crystallizes and causes severe pain. Diseases such as arthritis, kidney stones, and some forms of diabetes can all be caused by a build-up of uric acid in the body.
Thankfully, you may be able to reduce or prevent these issues with relatively simple changes to your diet. Try eliminating or reducing your consumption of foods and beverages that are high in purines — mainly certain meats, certain types of seafood, foods with added sugar and salt, and sugary beverages and snacks. Alcoholic beverages, especially beer, also contain high levels of purines.
In addition to avoiding high-purine foods and beverages, you should also consume an abundance of leafy greens, fish oil tablets that may help alleviate inflammation, plenty of water, and pure fruit juices with no added sugar. This game plan can help you flush excess uric acid out of your system, alleviate bloating and joint pain, and reduce inflammation.
How to reduce the amount of uric acid in your system
Start with a two-week cleanse:
Eliminate all dairy, pork, and beef
Eliminate all salty, fatty, and fried foods
Eliminate all salty and processed meats, including lunch meats
Eliminate all caffeinated, carbonated, and sugary beverages
Eliminate alcoholic beverages, especially beer
Eliminate all sugary snacks and junk foods
Eliminate all snacks and foods made with salt and oils
Reduce starchy foods and vegetables
Consume lean poultry and fatty fish like salmon
Increase consumption of non-starchy vegetables, especially green vegetables
Take 1 fish oil tablet in the morning and another at night
Flush daily with 50-60 ounces of water
Flush daily with 12-24 ounces of 100% apricot, pineapple cranberry, or dark cherry juice
After your two week cleanse, adopt a new dietary pattern:
Reduce or eliminate dairy, pork, and beef
Reduce or eliminate salty, fatty, and fried foods
Reduce or eliminate salty and processed meats, including lunch meats
Reduce or eliminate caffeinated, carbonated, and sugary beverages
Reduce or eliminate alcoholic beverages, especially beer
Reduce or eliminate sugary snacks and junk foods
Reduce or eliminate snacks and foods made with salt and oils
Reduce starchy foods and vegetables
Eliminate daily consumption of all fruit juices
Consume lean poultry and fatty fish like salmon
Increase consumption of non-starchy vegetables, especially green vegetables
Take 1 fish oil tablet in the morning and another at night
Flush daily with 60-75 ounces of water
For ongoing maintenance, add one or more of these:
Turmeric, garlic and/or ginger. Turmeric is better utilized by the body when cooked with olive or coconut oil and black pepper.
Wobenzym N for Joint Health
Mobili-T Healthy Joints
Zyflamend Inflammation Support
Water weight: Bloated feelings due to excess carbs and salt
When you eat whole and unprocessed fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains, you will provide your body with the healthiest forms of carbohydrates. These are “good carbs,” formally known as complex carbohydrates. They differ from “bad carbs,” also known as simple carbohydrates, in a few important ways.
Complex carbohydrates are primarily composed of starches, along with nutrients, vitamins, and fiber. It takes your digestive system a longer time to break these carbs down, and as a result, you tend to feel full or satiated for a longer period of time after eating complex carbs. Feeling full helps you keep your caloric intake in check, and because complex carbs take a longer time to digest, they have a more gradual effect on your blood sugar.
Simple carbohydrates, on the other hand, are just sugars. They are digested quickly, and they cause your blood sugar to spike quickly – and then drop just as fast. They may provide you with a quick burst of energy, but they provide little to no nutritional value. Simple carbs don’t offer the same range of nutrients and fibers provided by complex carbs – they are empty calories.
Whether you eat good carbs or bad, you may feel bloated after a meal rich in carbs. For most people, this happens after going overboard on simple carbs – a large meal of pizza, pasta, and wine, for example, is likely to leave you feeling bloated. This bloating may affect your joints and extremities, reducing your range of motion and causing pain.
Even after a healthy “good-carb” meal such as lentils, sweet potatoes, and roasted carrots, some people may still feel bloated. The reasons for this are that the body can only process what it can process at any given time. Your body wants to convert carbs into energy that you can use immediately through exercise, but if you are not physically active, it stores that energy for later.
This results in excess water weight. When we consume a lot of carbs and don’t use the energy they provide right away, all the carbs we eat turn into little water-storage sponges in the body. They are incredibly efficient at that job: For every gram of carbs you eat, you may store three or four times that weight in water!
When my students come to me for advice on how to keep those bloated post-meal feelings at bay, I usually run them through a simple process. The morning after a high-carb day, I ask them to step on the scale. They often find that they have gained three to five pounds in a single day!
The good news is that this is just water weight – and water weight is relatively easy to get rid of. This may sound confusing, but one of the best ways to flush out that water weight is to… drink more water. That’s because when carbohydrates turn into water-storage units, they need to pull all that water from somewhere – and that makes us dehydrated. When we stay properly hydrated, the body sees no need to store all that excess water, and it starts flushing the system of all that stored water weight. After a high-carb day, be sure to drink 60 to 90 ounces of water the next day – and try to drink that much water as part of your daily routine.
For similar reasons, eating too much salt or sodium in your diet can be a major cause of bloating and joint pain. This is also due to water weight. The ratio of sodium to water in our bodies must be kept in perfect balance, so whenever we eat salt, our body does everything it can do to balance it out with water. This is why we feel so thirsty after eating salty foods and snacks!
To optimize our sodium-to-water ratio at all times, our body retains as much water as it can. The result is excess water weight – not to mention a number of risk factors associated with high-sodium diets. Consuming too much sodium is a leading cause of many potentially fatal diseases, including hypertension, heart disease, stroke, and osteoporosis. Processed and prepared foods are often sky-high in sodium content, which is a huge reason why a whole foods, plant-based diet can work wonders for your health.
How to reduce joint pain and discomfort associated with water weight
Eliminate all refined grains, such as white flour, white rice, white bread, and pizza dough
Eliminate all processed and prepared foods, which are often high in sodium
Eliminate all sugary and salty snacks and junk foods
Eliminate all salty and processed meats, including lunch meats
Eliminate all caffeinated, carbonated, and sugary beverages
Eliminate alcoholic beverages, especially beer
Drink 60-90 ounces of water daily, especially after high-carb or salty meals
Exercise every day – aim for at least 7,500 steps daily, and ideally more!
Identify Your Trigger Foods: Take the Elimination Diet Challenge
In addition to the pain and discomfort associated with uric acid and water retention, many of us struggle with diet-related difficulties that are uniquely ours. We may have sensitivities, allergies, and aversions to certain types of food, and eating these “trigger foods” may intensify body aches and pains, headaches, mood swings, insomnia, and other unwanted symptoms.
Many people suffer from painful symptoms caused by specific trigger foods, and they may live the entirety of their lives without realizing that certain foods are the source of these ailments. That’s because making the connection between foods and their effects on our health can be difficult. We may even enjoy the foods that are causing us discomfort, distress, and disease!
For example, dairy products are a common trigger food – even if cheese and ice cream rank among many peoples’ favorite foods. More than 40 million people in the U.S. suffer from lactose intolerance, which is a common cause of feeling uncomfortably bloated and gassy. Lactose is a simple carbohydrate found in milk, and people with lactose intolerance lack the enzyme needed to break down lactose. As a result, the bacteria in their digestive system goes to work on the lactose, producing a lot of gas and discomfort in the process.
Because lactose intolerance is common, it’s easier for many people to make the connection between eating dairy products and feeling unwell afterwards. However, there are many foods that can cause similar symptoms, but we don’t make that connection. It takes a structured, methodical approach to determine whether certain foods are trigger foods for you.
That’s exactly what the Elimination Diet Challenge is designed to do. It’s a medical challenge that identifies common food triggers that may secretly be causing you pain and discomfort. The format for the Elimination Diet Challenge is the gold standard used by health professionals to pinpoint sensitivities, allergies, and aversions to specific types of food.
Here’s how it works. During the first 28 days of the challenge — the Elimination Phase — participants are asked to eliminate a list of foods from their diets. This list includes common food triggers that can cause a variety of symptoms:
Dairy
Eggs
Gluten grains (barley, rye, spelt, wheat)
White sugar
Processed meats
Soy
Shellfish
Beef
Pork
Corn
Caffeine (coffee, tea, sodas, and chocolate)
Alcohol
During the final 28 days of the challenge, participants are asked to reintroduce each food on the list, one by one, for 24 to 72 hours. During the reintroduction phase for each food, they are asked to observe their body’s reaction to each food on the list. The results can be surprising, enlightening, and provide relief from many of the symptoms you may be experiencing!
For example, some of my students who have taken the Elimination Diet Challenge have found a connection between the things they eat and seemingly unrelated symptoms, such as middle toe pain, respiratory issues, and mood swings. Other students have been able to find relief from body aches, stomach pains, sinus problems, irregular bowel movements, fatigue, insomnia, and skin rashes due to food sensitivities they discovered during the Elimination Diet Challenge.
Are you ready to become a dietary detective and solve the mystery of your own personal trigger foods? I encourage you to sign up for my Elimination Diet Challenge! It’s totally free, and after signing up for the challenge, I will deliver a steady stream of education, inspiration, and support to your email inbox that guides you through the challenge. The things you learn during the Elimination Diet Challenge can last a lifetime – and inform the best possible diet for you.
