Two doctors at Wayne State University in Detroit Michigan made a remarkable discovery while working with obese patients on low fat diet. Two of the group had active rheumatoid arthritis. After just five days on special diet their symptoms of arthritis disappeared and did not return as long as they remained on diet.
“Now I do not believe this diet affects the basic underlying rheumatoid diseases”, says Dr. Lawrence Power, co-developer of the diet. However, the body needs fat to produce the intermediary products like prostaglandius that fuel inflammation. You take away the fuel and you take away the inflammation.
Dr. Power and his colleague Dr. Charles P.Lucas have had encouraging results with this diet. It all began with one patient who had arthritis for a long time. Her condition which was critical mostly in hands, cleared up on this diet. After a while she returned to her work routine. The symptoms reappeared, when her diet included fat. Later Dr. Power and Dr. Lucas borrowed 6 patients from a rheumatologist and got the same astonishing result. They are confident that ninety per cent of the patients on special diet will improve.
Nathan Pritikin, the inventor of a diet for the obese watched the improvement in many patients having rheumatoid arthritis, some of them had severe pain in fingers and their arthritis had lasted sometimes for 35 years. He was surprised at the recovery made by an 81-year-old lady with severe deformities in her fingers. Her arthritis in the knee was also bad and she could not walk. After one year of this diet at the age of 85 ? years she entered Senior Olympics and won two gold medals.
Unlike Dr. Power, Pritikin believes that his diet strikes at the disease itself and not just the inflammation. He claims that “the disease is not the misery. Fat and salt are the primary causes with fat the major factor. On a low fat diet, the blood has substantially better circulation. Fat coats the red blood cells so that they cannot get through the small blood vessels. This limited circulation lowers oxygen levels and indirectly destroys certain cells of immune system, and powerful enzymes then leak into the joint. The result is rheumatoid arthritis”. Salt, Pritikin explains causes the tissues to become flooded with water which also lessens circulation”.
Pritikin says it works on 90 per cent of the people who have arthritis in their hands, fingers and wrists and 50 per cent of all people who have arthritis in their knees and hips. “May be we get it too late after serious joint damage has already occurred,” he said. You will know fairly soon if the diet is working. Most people begin to improve in one or two weeks and feel better in two to six weeks.
“It is not a matter of being overweight, but eating too much fat”, he warns. Dr. Power also agrees that we love food which is moist, rich and buttery “but we never meant to eat fat the way we do- we were meant to eat it as it is found naturally in whole food”. Look at this way. You would have to eat a lot of corn to get one table spoon of corn oil. It is important to adjust your thought about food so that when you are hungry you want an apple instead of a samosa.
Thus if you follow Dr. Power’s line of reasoning you would stop eating fried foods, butter, cheese, whole milk, red meat, pork, most nuts and seeds, cakes and pastries etc. Instead you will prefer cereals, grains, skimmed milk, fruits, salads, vegetables and fish. You will sense the intensity of your arthritic pain going down. It would have nourished you well, aided digestion, unclogged the arteries and slimmed the body. Surely there is no harm trying it.