Diet
Diet for Still’s Sufferers
This part of the website will probably not tell you a lot that you don’t already know. There isn’t really a secret to a healthy diet - what you learnt in grade school about fruit and vegetables and the importance of a balanced diet still largely holds true today.
There is a great deal of debate around “eating for arthritis” and whether food has any direct effect on the symptoms of rheumatic disease. Whether or not the research has been done, I speak from experience when I say what goes in your mouth significantly affects the symptoms of Still’s Disease, as well impacting on your general wellbeing.
We’ll start by looking at the foods to avoid when you have Still’s Disease, before looking at some of the most popular ‘anti-inflammatory’ diets that are on the market.
Foods to avoid
Sugar
Processed sugar is just about everywhere. If you’ve bought something in a packet, tin or jar, chances are that it is packed with sugar. The amount of sugar in the modern western diet has serious health implications, most commonly seen in its role in obesity and diabetes. As if this isn’t enough, sugar has added implications for you and your Still’s Disease.
When you have sugar (especially white, processed sugar), your blood sugar levels increase and your pancreas secretes insulin to try and balance out the change in blood chemistry. Insulin also has an inflammatory effect and is linked to increased cortisol - one of your body’s inflammatory agents. It’s a simple equation: more sugar leads to more inflammation.
Here are some simple tips that you can use to reduce the amount of sugar in your diet:
1. Cut out the soda. If you are going to cut one thing out of your diet and one thing only, make it soda. Soda is packed full of sugar - in fact just one can of cola has TEN teaspoons of sugar in it.
2. Learn what sugar is called. Sugar is seldom called sugar on food packaging. It also goes be the name of sucrose, fructose, dextrose and corn syrup. Don’t worry how they’re different - they’re all have a similar effect as one another.
3. Switch your treat. Try switching from milk chocolate to dark chocolate when you are after a treat. Not only do you get a reduced-sugar sweet, you also get the added anti-oxidant benefit of dark chocolate.
4. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t aim to eliminate ALL the sugar in your diet. As I said before, sugar is everywhere. When you’re starting out, just aim to eliminate the big sources of sugar like soda, candy and milk chocolate. You can move onto eliminating ‘hidden’ sugar later on.
5. DON’T switch sugar for artificial sweeteners. That’s like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. These chemical-laden sweeteners have a range of negative health effects and should be avoided at all costs.
Saturated and Trans Fat
Fat is an essential part of staying healthy and needs to form a part of your balanced diet. The trick is to make take your fat intake from the right sources. There are two main types of dietary fat; omega-3 that comes from some seafood and some plant oils and omega-6 fat that is found in vegetable oils and animal fat. In a healthy diet, you should try and balance your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio at about 1:1. In your average western diet, however, the ratio has become more like 20:1.
Not only are we consuming much too much omega-6 fat, we are also doing horrible things to it. Deep frying oils, Crisco and margarine are all hydrogenated fat - meaning that they have been super heated in order to stabilise them and increase their shelf life. Did you know that heart disease was almost non-existent prior to the existence of publicly available hydrogenated fat? Now heart disease is Western society’s most wanted killer.
Hydrogenated, saturated and trans fat exist in a high percentage of processed foods. Food makers love trans fat because it makes food look good, taste good and last longer. Your body’s inflammatory responses, however, see these types of fat like a red rag to a bull. Saturated and Trans fat increase inflammation, are closely linked to the onset of obesity and are thought to increase cholesterol levels, leading to heart disease.
Here are some simple tips that you can implement to balance the good and bad fats from your diet:
1. Increase the amount of deep sea fatty fish and take a high dose fish oil into your daily diet to increase your intake of omega-3 ‘good’ fat.
2. If you are after a convenient fast food meal, stay away from your deep fried chicken joints and fried meat patty burger houses. Choose a tastier, healthier option like a sandwich bar or a lamb kebab.
3. Doughnuts are packed full of trans fat, sugar and salt. Do yourself a favour and just say no.
4. Avoid deep frying anything at home. Opt for shallow frying food (in moderation) in a good quality olive oil.
5. Choose healthier options from the Chinese take-out menu. A lot of stir-fries, sweet and sour and fried rice meals are prepared using a lot of fat. Choose fish, vegetables or roasted dishes.
As you can probably tell, I am not advocating a sin-free diet here. You don’t need to There are just a few foods that you should try and avoid that significantly up the level of inflammation in your body. While it takes a little while to get used to life without sugar, it’s well worth the effort.
With that said, the better your diet, the better your general health will be. In addition to a healthy balanced diet low in fat and sugar and high in fruit and vegetables and unprocessed foods, there are several ‘anti-inflammatory’ diets on the market that have a loyal following with many sufferers of rheumatic diseases. While the idea that food triggers the symptoms of illnesses like Still’s Disease is still under debate by the medical community, the anecdotal evidence supporting these diets is widely positive.
Anti-inflammatory Diets
The Non-Nightshade Diet
There is a widely held theory that the acidity in a certain group of vegetables triggers the body’s inflammatory mechanisms. These vegetables are found in the nightshade family and include most famously tomatoes, capsicums, potatoes and eggplants.
In the 1940’s an uncontrolled study of 5000 patients suffering with rheumatoid arthritis were asked to eliminate nightshade related foods. After seven years, almost 75% of the group reported that their pain and disability had steadily declined since starting the diet.
While this diet is lacking scientific proof, the results seem positive. You can’t really get into too much trouble with this diet, and may be worth trying. You need to make sure that you are on the diet for several months before you can accurately evaluate its effectiveness.
The Dong Diet
This diet is based on a traditional diet from Chinese medicine and is much more stringent that the non-nightshade diet. People that undertake this diet can eat all vegetables apart from tomatoes, and must avoid all fruit, meat, dairy, herbs, alcohol as well as all preservatives, sweeteners and preservatives.
In the early 80s a group of arthritis sufferers were asked to go onto the Dong diet. While the results were positive, there was no discernable difference between patients that followed the Dong diet and those that ate a healthy, balanced diet.
The most concerning this about the Dong diet is the absence of fruit, which provide the body with anti-oxidants that are proven to be beneficial in managing the symptoms of illnesses like Still’s Disease. I would certainly recommend discussing this diet with your doctor before eliminating such a wide range of foods from your diet.
Metabolic Typing
Dr. Joseph Mercola developed the Metabolic Typing diet with the idea that there is no perfect diet for everybody. After you conduct the survey on the www.mercola.com website, you are armed with a better understanding of how your body is hard wired to respond to food and you are labelled as either a ‘Carb Type’, ‘Protein Type’ or ‘Mixed Type”. Depending on your type, you will follow a diet that maximises your body’s response to certain foods.
For people with autoimmune diseases, it is more a diet for ultimate wellbeing. With that said, this well established and well researched and documented diet has been trialled with rheumatoid arthritis sufferers with positive results.
I hope you can start to see your management plan taking shape by now. You need to pay equal attention to all of the sides of the treatment: the therapeutic use of medication, the advice of a qualified complimentary practitioner, a healthy diet and a high performing supplementation regime to see real and positive change in the intensity of your symptoms.
The final part to the jigsaw is tweaking your lifestyle to accommodate for your illness. Now don’t get me wrong - this isn’t about “giving in” to your illness - this is about changing the way that you do a few simple things that will reward you with profound positive change. [...Next]
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