How can diet reduce the pain and symptoms of arthritis?

Sounds crazy, I know. It’s easy to understand how the right diet can reduce the pain and bloating of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) because that takes place in the stomach: if you eat the wrong food, obviously your stomach is going to protest! But how could what we eat affect joint pains and backache?

I’d suffered from joint pains and stiffness for years, along with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and I would never have believed it would be possible to eliminate the joint pains with a diet. I was always told they were growing pains, or that I’d slept in a draught, or that I had repetitive strain injury. I used to control the pain reasonably well, by having cortisone injections and pain medication. But you can’t continue having cortisone injections for the rest of your life, so I resigned myself to a certain amount of joint pain and stiffness. When it got to the stage that backache forced me out of bed in the morning, or that I couldn’t do up my bra or put my arms into a coat without help, or turn my head to look for oncoming traffic at cross-roads, I’d have another jab of cortisone. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it made things worse.

However, the one problem in my life that I couldn’t control in any way, was cure for my IBS symptoms. I went from doctor to doctor for years, and no doctor could help me, or even tell me the cause, apart from saying it was Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). It was by pure accident that I turned on TV one night and heard the words, “irritable bowel syndrome”, spoken by a white-coated doctor. I had tuned into a documentary about Addenbrook’s Hospital in Cambridge, and they were talking about their latest research, which showed that giving up all wheat based foods in your diet, would help eliminate the symptoms of IBS.

I gave up all bread, cakes, pastries, pasta from that very night, and almost miraculously, the terrible IBS pain and bloating that I’d been suffering for years – disappeared. The next day I was pain-free, and the next and the next … I could hardly believe it, but it worked! So I stayed on the wheat-free diet for about 18 months … and then the symptoms began to creep back.

But having had such dramatic relief of symptoms for the first time in my life, I knew it was something to do with what I was eating – perhaps something more than wheat? What did wheat have in common with other foods? It took me weeks, and a lot of reading up about the digestive system and what foods are made up of, and how different foods are digested, before I decided to try eliminating all foods containing starch. This meant potatoes (which I loved) rice and other starchy vegetables. The only way to be sure which foods contained starch, was to test with iodine. Simple test – you may have done it at school in basic chemistry. Just drop a little iodine on a piece of food. If the iodine drop turns from rusty-orange into dark blue/black, the food contains starch.

Within days of giving up everything that contained starch, I was back to blissful freedom from pain. Amazing to feel so “normal” – although in fact, it wasn’t normal for me – I’d couldn’t remember ever feeling this good! There was no doubt in my mind that starch was the cause of all my years of IBS gut pain, bloating and bowel problems.

As for all the back pains, neck pains, shoulder pains, elbow pains – I forgot about them, as you do when pain disappears. They’d simply faded away. I guess it had happened more slowly than the dramatic relief of IBS pain, because I don’t actually remember thinking about them at any time. I accepted the fact that my morning backache was gone and I could now do up my bra and put my arms into a coat, as just one of those things. However, I was permanently mindful of my wonderful relief of the IBS symptoms – so mindful, that I decided to write a book to tell other sufferers. The Sinclair Diet System, telling of my experience, and how to test for starch in your food was published in 1995. This was later re-printed under the title, The IBS Starch-Free Diet.

It wasn’t until 1999 when I found out that my IBS was one of the symptoms of an arthritic disease called Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS for short), that I discovered how the diet worked. AS causes inflammation and pain throughout the body – even in the gut. The AS is triggered by a bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae, which lives in undigested starch in the gut. We all have undigested starch in our gut – we all have lots of bacteria there – both good and bad. Klebsiella is bad. For one thing, as it thrives on the undigested starch in your gut, it causes fermentation, which causes bloating, which causes pain.

But if you also have a gene called the HLA-B27 gene in your body, you’ll get inflammation all over, because the HLA-B27 gene resembles the Klebsiella bacterium, and when the immune system tries to get rid of the Klebsiella, it mistakenly attacks the look-alike B27 genes, too.

Inflammation is a sign that the body is at war with some foreign invader. In fact, the immune system produces anti-bodies to try to destroy the invader, and in so doing, causes the inflammation. This inflammation means that the body is trying to cure itself, but the inflammation also causes pain. This is the reason for the arthritic symptoms of AS, and is what we call an autoimmune disease – when the body’s immune system turns on itself, because it can’t tell the difference between the body cells, and the invader.

If you can find out that the foreign invader is bacteria, and where it is living in the body, you have a good chance of targeting it with antibiotics – that is, if it doesn’t become resistant to them. But there’s another way of getting rid of it – eliminate the source of it’s food.

In the case of AS, it has been recognised since 1980 that the Klebsiella bacteria is strongly related to the arthritic symptoms. There’s also the possibility that other bacteria might be involved, but when tested, the majority of AS sufferers have anti-bodies to Klebsiella, so it has been concluded that this bacteria plays a major part in the disease.

Usually AS is treated by drugs, many of which have been developed to subdue the immune system and have bad side-effects. In fact, some of the most frequently prescribed new ‘miracle’ drugs – the Anti-TNF drugs, or TNF alpha-Blockers – have been given Black Box Warnings by the FDA for a number of possible dangerous complications, including TB. These side-effects are considered so serious in the US that the packs have to contain a ‘black box’ warning. (Look it up on the web). Some of the strong anti-inflammatory drugs have been withdrawn because it was discovered they caused heart problems.

The simple idea of removing the food source of the Klebsiella means that it can be controlled on a long term basis in a perfectly healthy and safe way. I’ve been on the diet for over 25 years, and apart from controlling my symptoms, I’m a lot healthier than most other people my age. I am not overweight – I don’t have diabetes – my cholesterol levels are in perfect balance – I don’t have any heart problems. I believe all this is due solely to the Low-Starch Diet.

I didn’t make the scientific discovery behind this breakthrough method of treatment – I just independently discovered the diet. The science was done by a Professor of Immunology, Professor Alan Ebringer. Professor Ebringer is a Consultant on Autoimmune Diseases to the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Washington. He’s also an Hon. Consultant in Rheumatology.

When a group of his patients contacted me via the internet to tell me that mine was the only book they could find about the problems of eating starch, how to cook low-starch meals (over 200 recipes) and live a low-starch life, they told me about the professor and their disease, AS. I was stunned. To think that someone in the medical world was actually validating my diet, was amazing. But I still didn’t know that I had the same disease – not until Professor Ebringer told me the about the arthritic symptoms, and I realised that I had had them – but they’d disappeared after I went on the Low-Starch Diet.

I have had the blood test which confirms that I am HLA-B27 positive, and Professor Ebringer has investigated my family history, which I discovered is littered with AS suffers. My father and grandmother both had the symptoms, and other living members of my family have been diagnosed with AS. All this confirms that although I’ve been on the diet for over 25 years and have no bone degeneration visible on X-rays – which are still the final diagnostic proof – I have the pre-AS condition. If I went off the diet I would develop full-blown AS.

It is such a pity that rheumatologists will not even get their AS patients to try a completely safe, drug-free method of treatment. Unfortunately they have no incentive to do so in the UK, because the NHS is so drug orientated, and medication for serious conditions is subsidised or free for patients. But in Australia and New Zealand, where patients have to pay for their medication, doctors are now beginning to recommend the Low Starch Diet.

You can try it yourself, whether you’re on medication or not. If it doesn’t work after a couple of weeks, you can just go back to your normal diet. My book, The IBS Low-Starch Diet tells you all this and much more. You can buy it from the website, www.lowstarchdiet.net, or order it from bookshops Even if you’re skeptical after reading this far, about how diet can eliminate arthritic symptoms, I urge you to get the book and give it a try. You won’t be sorry.