The Surprising Truth About Arthritis

We’ve all heard of or experienced the painful symptoms of Rheumatoid Arthritis. It can make the simplest of day to day activities painful and hard to carry out.

However, it has a very surprising truth that few know about…

It’s actually an autoimmune condition and is therefore heavily linked to the health of our gut!

Because of that, what you eat is very important when it comes to relieving symptoms of arthritis or other related conditions.

Here are 5 foods to avoid when aiming to do just that:

• Excess sugar: Excess sugar in the diet has been linked to increased inflammation in a number of studies. In fact, the Arthritis Foundation warns that research has shown us that processed sugars trigger the release of inflammatory messengers called cytokines in the body.

• Hydrogenated oils and trans fats: Definitely stay away from fried foods, fast foods, margarine, processed snacks, unhealthy coffee creamers, and conventional baked goods to avoid trans fats and hydrogenated oils.

• High omega 6 oils: In addition to hydrogenated oils, you’ll also want to avoid inflammatory-increasing oils that are too high in omega 6’s rather than having a healthy balance of both omega 6 and omega 3. We are talking about oils like soybean, cottonseed, corn and canola oil. These inflammatory oils should all be avoided.

• Conventional grains: It’s smart to avoid overly processed and gluten-heavy conventional grains that may increase inflammation and make arthritissymptoms worse. Excessively refined white flour products like bagels and rolls are some of the offenders that should be cut out of your diet.

• Artificial sweeteners: Avoid artificial sweeteners, especially aspartame. It’s also recommend avoiding sucralose, acesulfame K, saccharin, and sorbitol.

• MSG: Another one of the worst ingredients that we recommend avoiding is MSG. The ArthritisFoundation also specifically instructs avoiding mono-sodium glutamate (MSG) if you have arthritis because "this chemical can trigger two important pathways of chronic inflammation, and affect liver health." MSG can be commonly found in fast food, prepared soup and salad dressings as well as deli meats.

As you can see, what we’re aiming to do is reduce inflammation and inflammation-inducing foods.

The good news is reducing or cutting the above foods shouldn’t restrict your diet too much.