Preventing arthritis is easy. Unfortunately, everything everyone does, or almost, promotes arthritis. But not just arthritis, all inflammatory degenerative conditions. The amazing thing is that what must be done to prevent any of them is quite well known. We have covered a lot of material relating to this already, and it was made clear at the start of Treating arthritis I, that natural healing, even when motivated by the healing of a particular condition, is done through healing the entire organism—all cells, all tissues, all organs, all parts—all at once. Therefore, we could just as well entitle this article “treating arthritis and all other inflammatory degenerative disease conditions” because the approach is fundamentally always the same.

Treating arthritis after it has already developed is not as easy as preventing it, but the extent to which it can be reversed and cured depends firstly on our own dedication and determination, and secondly on the state of the body and amount of damage it has sustained. The first article on arthritis was posted a while back. Its writing was motivated by my wish to help a friend who suffers from a highly debilitating form of arthritis for which conventional approaches are mostly inadequate—as inadequate as they are for all other degenerative chronic conditions.

It is useful for me to know that even if these efforts of were in vain in the sense that they were not acknowledged and didn’t motivate in them to make the recommended changes in lifestyle and diet, the article must have made some difference to some people because it has at this point been viewed more than 4600 times, and is the most viewed of all the posts on the blog after the Welcome page. If you are among the millions of people who suffer from arthritis, and also happens to be one of those who read Treating arthritis I, I hope you found it useful, and you are most welcome to let me and every other reader know how.

There is an obvious difficulty in overcoming any state of disease, especially one like arthritis. It is that everything about our success depends on our efforts to foster and nurture the conditions under which the organism can heal and repair itself. This is the only way to regain health. I want to emphasise this more explicitly:

It is only by creating, fostering and maintaining the biochemical, hormonal and physiological conditions under which the organism has the ability to clean, repair and rebuild its cells, tissues and organs that disease conditions—no matter what they are—can be prevented, overcome, reversed and recovered from. What we are required to do is provide the organism what it needs to do this.

The fundamental elements we concentrated on in the first part were: hydration, alkalisation, and magnesium. As was underlined, these are essential for everyone, but primordial for arthritis relief. The detailed recommendations were intended to help establish good habits. Their essence should be understood as follows.

Illustration of painful, inflamed, arthritic joints. (Image taken from Everyday Health)

Every day, from the moment you get out of bed, your primary concern should be to hydrate and alkalise. This is particularly important in the morning and the first part of the day. There is a natural daily cycle governed by the circadian rhythm which controls all processes in the organism by a delicate balance of a vast number of different hormones. A good example relating to the hydration-dehydration cycle, is that the hormone calcitonin whose role is to put calcium from the bloodstream into bones and teeth, is active at night as dehydration sets in: as the water content of the blood decreases, the kidneys release renin and angiotensin, calcitonin is activated, and can thus do its work for fixing calcium where it is needed, subject to adequate amounts of the all-important fat-soluble vitamins D and K2. There are surely many more hormonal processes that depend on the diurnal cycle than those we currently know of. The point to remember is that we have to make hydration and alkalisation a priority in our life, and repeat this every day, while allowing dehydration during the night by typically having our last drink of water between 19 and 20 hours and nothing else until the morning.

Hydration and alkalisation are most effectively done when there is no food in the stomach, and both depend critically on maintaining a balanced intake of water and unrefined salt. An easy way to keep track of both and ensure optimal balance, is to prepare capsules filled with unrefined sea salt, taking one capsule for every half liter of water tea or green juice. This is particularly useful when doing a cleanse. In normal circumstances, it can also easily be achieved by having watery veggies like cucumber, celery or kohlrabi with liberal amounts of salt a couple of times a day. It is ideal to finish drinking about 30-45 minute before eating and not drink for two to three hours after. This leads to a natural rhythm of drinking, waiting, eating, waiting, and repeating this pattern throughout the day.

As this is so, it is easiest to hydrate and alkalise thoroughly each day by adopting a regime based on having only one big meal in the late afternoon or early evening, leaving the rest of the day before that to focus on these crucial aspects of our optimal health without the constraints of the timing surrounding eating. Snacking on raw veggies and salt is perfect and can be done at any time regardless of drinking, because it is also a kind of drinking: watery veggies are basically water with minerals, enzymes, phytonutrients and some fibre. Intermittent fasting, as is called, has many metabolic and physiological benefits not least of which is natural detoxification.

We have looked at some of the key aspects of this practice in The crux of the intermittent fasting, and I plan to deepen this investigation in the future, but maybe the most useful consequence of it, which should also come across as a rather obvious, is that if the body is getting food of any kind that requires processing, then it will immediately engage in doing just that: processing it to extract what it can from it.

Food processing is prioritised and mobilises much of the body’s energy and resources: blood supply (directed to the stomach), secretions from the digestive organs (acid and enzymes from the stomach; insulin, bicarbonate and more digestive enzymes from the pancreas; and bile produced by the liver and stored in the gallbladder), active transport across the intestinal wall into the bloodstream, increased workload on kidneys and liver in filtering metabolic wastes out of the blood, and although you don’t feel it, you can be sure that this does indeed require a lot of energy and bodily resources.

Allowing the body to rest from all this food processing related physiological activity leaves all this energy for other tasks which generally fall in the category of “clean and repair”. This is the natural detoxification that the body desperately needs to engage in as often and regularly as possible but unfortunately cannot because we are, from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed, almost constantly eating. As soon as we take the foot off the gas pedal and give the system a much-needed break from food processing, the organism immediately begins to clean and repair itself. This is why fasting is so good.

Now, if you, in addition to that, provide the organism with a supply of vital nutrients—enzymes, vitamins, minerals—in a form that requires no digestion and is immediately absorbable from the intestines into the bloodstream in the form of vegetable juices, this becomes an amazing way to bring about self-healing in what will indeed look like a most miraculous manner depending on how sick we are at the onset. This is what happens during a juice fast or cleanse, and although fasting has been practiced for centuries, and juice fasting for many decades, both with awe-inspiring results, one recent and vocal advocate of juicing cleanses for healing is the Englishman Jason Vale who runs the Juicy Oasis retreat and healing centre in Portugal (see Superjuice Me on FMTV).

Arthritis sufferers would do extremely well to consider doing such a juice fast as well as adopting intermittent fasting as a long-term daily practice. These measures—in and of themselves—could resolve the problem permanently in a relatively brief period of time.

The importance of magnesium was also emphasised in Treating arthritis I. The best is to have baths with one cup of nigari and one cup of baking soda at least once a week (a couple of times is great, and in some circumstances you may want or need to have them every other day). We should soak the whole body for 45–60 minutes. Magnesium oil, a saturated solution of nigari in water, is also very effective. Putting it on the skin of the arms, upper back and neck, chest and belly, legs and bum, avoiding sensitive skin of the armpits and genital area, and leaving it at least 30 minutes before showering. It can work wonders to loosen tight, achy or cramping muscles, and will often do this quickly from the first application. It doesn’t need to be done every day, but it can for several months without risking overwhelming the system with too much magnesium. Oral supplementation with liposomal (fat-bound) magnesium is also a very good idea.

Once we have understood the importance of these elements of health, healing and recovery that are hydration, alkalisation, magnesium, juicing green vegetables and intermittent fasting, and incorporated them into our life as fundamental pillars of optimal health, then we can and must turn to the question of what to eat when we do eat.

When we consider what to eat from the perspective of eating to most effectively promote health, the considerations can be very different from what they might be were we to take any other point of view as to our primary motivation. For optimal health, the first and foremost important consideration is the old and well-known principle first do no harm. This means what it says, but more explicitly means to not eat anything that has or may have detrimental effects on the organism. Using “has” implies negative effects have been identified and demonstrated to a lesser or greater extent, whereas “may have” means that even though there may be little, inconclusive or no evidence, there are nevertheless reasons to be skeptical or at least cautious about its safety or health benefits. Simple examples include cigarette smoke that is well established to have multiple negative impacts on our health, and industrial pesticides demonstrated to be endocrine disruptors or neurotoxic: a new brand of cigarettes or a new yet untested agricultural pesticide should therefore also be considered as potentially harmful. This is just common sense.

Following this principle encourages us to eliminate industrial chemicals and additives from our food and drink, but also from our cleaning and body care products. This can sound as an obvious and simple first step, but it is not so easy nor so simple without considerable care and attention to detail. Moreover, it also implies, right from the start, no industrially processed products of any kind, and that is a major step for most people given the state of affairs and average dietary regime of the bulk of the population in industrialised countries.

Assuming you are reading this because you are already on the lookout for better ways of doing things, as well as already feeding yourself with real food, this is not such a big deal. And in practice, it means this: buy and eat only whole organically grown or raised food, use only the simplest and most benign organic cleaning and body care products, drink the highest quality filtered or natural spring or mineral water that is certified to be free of known major and minor pollutants, and take only the highest quality supplements. Doing only this ensures an already excellent base for a healthy lifestyle, and it is already enough to avoid and prevent a lot of potential health disorders.

It is, however, not enough if our goal it to be optimally healthy, never have any health disorders at all, and live strong and vibrant to 100, 120 or 140 years of age. It is, also, not enough if we are trying to stop progression, reverse already existing damage, and eventually recover from our own arthritic condition that may have been causing us pain for years or decades. In either case, we need to go further.

The statement in the opening paragraph about the universality of the natural healing approach to treatment and prevention of disease conditions is here both appropriate and necessary to emphasise:

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening arthritis symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening cardiovascular heart disease symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening cardiovascular brain disease symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening Alzheimer’s disease symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening multiple sclerosis symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening Crohn’s disease symptoms and degeneration is chronic systemic inflammation;

and, of course, the most fundamental characteristic of but also driver in progressively worsening type II diabetes symptoms and degeneration is also chronic systemic inflammation,

even if we know that the root cause of this diabetes is chronically elevated glucose and insulin levels, that this leads to systemic inflammation, which in turn leads to the pathological symptoms and degeneration, something that is underlined by the fact that diabetics suffer all other chronic diseases listed above 200-400% more than non-diabetics.

This was a forceful, repetitive, heavy-handed way to express and highlight this fundamental characteristic that is shared by so many disease conditions. But it is, I think objectively, the most important point to have in mind when our intention is to really understand health and to be ourselves, at all levels, an expression and embodiment of health. Because whether it is inflammation in the joints as in arthritis, in the arteries supplying the heart or brain as in cardiovascular disease, in the brain itself as in Alzheimer’s disease, in the nerves throughout the body as in multiple sclerosis, in the lining of the gut as in Crohn’s disease, or basically everywhere in the body as for diabetes, this inflammation—in all cases—is chronic and systemic. Hence, it is this which must be addressed and corrected, and it is addressed and corrected in exactly the same way in every case.

Taking into account differences and thus tuning the treatment, especially in what concerns reversing and repairing existing damage, is important. But it is definitely secondary with respect to the root cause of degeneration that is systemic inflammation. And even these differences whose importance varies depending on the specificity of the condition we aim to address, all of them—when working with natural, nutrition-based medicine—are useful and health-promoting for all conditions: none are detrimental to the treatment of any other specific disease.

For example, supplementing with organic silicic acid, collagen, vitamin C, and vitamin D is essential for repairing and rebuilding cartilage and soft tissues, and thus essential in the treatment of arthritis. It is, however, greatly beneficial for everyone to supplement with these micronutrients because all will benefit from it. It is essential to supplement with and maintain very high levels of vitamin B12 (>1200 pg/ml) when treating multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease, but it is excellent for everyone to do the same. It is essential to supplement with L-Carnosine when treating Crohn’s disease because it is particularly useful for healing the lining of the gut. But it is also very beneficial for everybody to take because it helps to stop and repair the damage caused by glycation, which affects everyone to a greater or lesser extent depending on circulating glucose and insulin concentrations.

And thus, the first principle is to eliminate from our life what causes inflammation: everything that triggers an inflammatory reaction in the body. This obviously includes all allergens which, even if there are some well-known foods that have been recognised as causing allergic reactions, mild or severe, in a large fraction of the population, and could, therefore, be eliminated from our diet directly in order to minimise unnecessary exposure to potentially harmful substances, it is nevertheless ultimately an individual assessment and testing of food intolerance that is needed.

The foods most likely to cause an inflammatory immune system response are gluten-containing grain products and animal milk products. Estimates of intolerance for these two classes of foods—grains and dairy—range between 50 and 75% in most countries, although evolutionary adaptations can have an important effect. Good examples are the indigenous Swiss mountain dwellers and the African nomadic tribe called Masai, who, by consuming most of their daily calories from milk and milk products for thousands of years, have developed the genetic adaptations for the immune system to tolerate the proteins in milk that cause mild to severe allergic reaction in close to 75% of the world’s population, with the most extreme proportions of 90-95\% in the Chinese and other Asian populations that have never, throughout their history, consumed milk products.

The other two classes of foods that are established as inflammatory—highly inflammatory—even if they rarely cause intolerance or allergic reactions, are insulin-stimulating carbohydrates and omega-6 fats. In the case of these substances, it is not inflammation triggered by a reaction to them of the immune system. Rather, they themselves trigger inflammatory biochemical pathways: several hundred inflammatory pathways! These foods should therefore be eliminated from the diet: all simple and starchy carbohydrates, and all vegetable oils. Nuts and seeds, which contain omega-6 oils, can be had whole in small quantities. Olive oil is mono-unsaturated and is the best vegetable oil to use for salads. No omega-6 rich vegetable oil should be used.

I don’t think it’s necessary nor useful to discuss the inflammatory effects of industrial chemicals because we already know that they only cause harm and should be eliminated from our food supply, avoided at all costs in all their other forms by everyone who is even superficially concerned with their health.

This is our first conclusion: to minimise inflammation, it is essential to eliminate inflammatory foods; and the most inflammatory classes of foods are dairy, grains, insulin-stimulating carbohydrates and omega-6 oils. To overcome or prevent inflammatory disease conditions, arthritis but also all others, we have to stop eating these foods. It is as simple as that. And although it is true that we could potentially supplement with adequate types and amounts of enzymes to try to ensure that all types of proteins found in these foods are actually broken down properly during digestion in order to avoid triggering an immune response, it does seem silly to eat or drink something that we know cannot be metabolised correctly and which is, for this reason, harmful to the organism, but still try to mitigate the harm it causes by taking a supplement of those enzymes needed to digest it that do exist even if our body’s genetic and evolutionary makeup doesn’t produce. This reflection applies to dairy and grain proteins to which we are intolerant. It doesn’t apply to insulin-stimulating carbohydrates or omega-6 fats, because these seldom cause allergic reactions in people, but are nevertheless universally inflammatory.

The second principle is to consume anti-inflammatory foods. It should not be a surprise to find out that the most anti-inflammatory foods (think of them as soothing to the body), also tend to be the most alkalising: raw, green, chlorophyl-rich plant foods, and especially green vegetable juices. The most anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant fat is the miraculously beneficial, highly saturated (96%), and medium chain triglyceride-rich (50%) coconut oil. Hence, without any additional considerations, we already know that an optimally anti-inflammatory and healing diet should be based on mostly raw vegetables and salads, in particular green ones, green juices, and lots of coconut oil from all coconut products.

Also not surprisingly, we can have as much of these nutrient-rich foods as we want, and the more the better. This, it turns out, is an extremely useful selection criterion to determine the level to which something can be good or bad: how much of it we can eat, and what are the consequences, if any, of having increasingly larger quantities; is there an upper limit in the sense that above a certain amount we can expect negative consequences, or is there only a lower limit below which therapeutic value is not noticeable? For what concerns green juices, greens and coconut oil, I would say that there are only lower limits to the minimum we should all intake in order to be perfectly healthy, and no upper limits within what can be considered reasonable through the body’s auto-regulation mechanisms of satiety and digestive function.

For instance, we can drink a 250 or 500 ml of green juice, and that’s great. We can drink 1000 ml and that’s much better. We can drink two or three litres of green juice per day, and that is truly amazingly therapeutic, something that would be done during a juice cleanse. For coconut oil and milk, we can have one or two tablespoons per day, and that’s really good (apparently enough to slow down cerebral degeneration). We can have five to seven tablespoons per day, and that’s far better (apparently enough to reverse early stage dementia and Alzheimer’s). We can have as much as 200 or 300 ml (between 13 and 20 tbsp) of oil per day, and that’s better still. In the case of coconut oil and milk, eating such large quantities amounts to a lot of calories, all from fat which makes us feel really full and not willing to eat anything. This is the body’s natural hormonal messaging system to prevent over-eating and it works perfectly well in this case. It also works well for protein. Only for sugars and starches does it not work so well because we evolved having very few carbohydrates and thus didn’t have to develop the mechanism to avoid overeating them—what pretty much the whole world is doing nowadays.

Most nuts and seeds can be considered as superfoods because of they are very concentrated sources of minerals, antioxidants, unique phytonutrients, vitamins, as well as fat and protein. Because they are seeds, they also have anti-nutrient—phytates and enzyme inhibitors—without which they would not keep for months on end as they do, and would spoil much more quickly. These are not as strong as they are in cereal grains, which have can keep for thousands of years, as they have in some pyramids, and then sprout after soaking in water for a while. This is nature’s very clever way to ensure dry seeds retain the nutrients needed to grow the plant when the conditions are suitable. But it implies that we must do something to them before we can consume them and know that they are wholly beneficial and health-promoting rather than only partially so.

The solution is simple: soak the dry seeds or nuts in water for 24 hours to hydrate them and activate the biological mechanisms responsible for sprouting—to get the seed ready to produce a new plant by making inactive the enzyme inhibitors and phytates—and making all of its nutrients fully available. Soaked nuts and seeds can definitely be eaten hydrated, and are much more filling that way because they hold as much water as their dry weight (they double in weight and volume when fully hydrated), but they can also be dehydrated after having soaked for 24 hours, and be preserved for much longer than the couple of days they can in the fridge before going bad when hydrated. This is what I do at home: 24 hours of soaking with rinsing and changing of the water a couple of times in between, and 24-36 hours of drying in the dehydrator at 45 C to keep all enzymes alive.

Roasting or otherwise heating the nut or seed also neutralises the anti nutrients, but this also destroys the enzymes, making it a dead food that will require the pancreas to produce the necessary enzymes for digestion, as well as cause digestive stress and acidification. Nonetheless, roasted nuts are nutritious and delicious, and thus great to have once in a while. Either way, sprouted or not, nuts and seeds are by their nature nutrient-rich concentrated food and should generally only be had in relatively small quantities (a handful or two). Doing this will also prevent excessive intake of omega-6 fats that make up about 50% of their weight, even if whole nuts and seeds have their own anti-oxidants that give additional protection from free-radicals in the body.

Having a somewhat different status as food, but being naturally most anti-inflammatory, are the trio of ginger, turmeric and garlic. Some may have difficulty digesting garlic (as is the case with onions as well), but ginger and turmeric are generally very easy to digest and actually digestive aids. It is important in the treatment of arthritis to consume them often, even daily, and in liberal amounts. Ginger is very easy to have in relatively large quantity by cold press juicing it in your daily green juice (that’s what we do), which guarantees you a good therapeutic amount on a daily basis. For turmeric, it is also possibly to find it fresh in some places, but it stains everything that it comes in contact with. Mostly for this reason, we take it in capsules, where it can even be concentrated further to be more potent still. The beneficial compounds in turmeric are most effectively absorbed when taken with plenty of fat (coconut fat is perfect).

Animal protein other than from dairy—eggs, meat and fish—is important for the body but also highly acidifying and therefore inflammatory. In addition, the proteins need to be completely broken down first by the acidic gastric juices in the stomach and then by the digestive enzymes in the intestines in order for the amino acids of which they are made to be available to the brain and other organs, but also prevent partially digested proteins from finding their way into the bloodstream and causing additional inflammatory immune responses.

Therefore, we have to eat only small quantities of the highest quality grass-fed or wild caught animal products, give the organism plenty of time to cleanse the metabolic byproducts of their digestion, and, I recommend, supplement with digestive enzymes when eating animal foods. In fact, I recommend taking digestive enzymes whenever you eat cooked foods: we do not want to get anywhere close to exhausting the pancreas’ enzyme-producing potential, because enzymes are far more important for all other molecular repair and rebuild processes than they are for digesting cooked food, and we need to keep them for these purposes if we aim to live healthy for a long time.

This is our second conclusion: to minimise inflammation and maximise repairing and rebuilding of damaged tissues, it is essential to consume the most powerfully anti-inflammatory, nutrient-dense and anti-oxidant foods. The diet should therefore be mostly raw, primarily green vegetables, green juices, special anti-inflammatory foods such as ginger, turmeric and garlic, unlimited amounts of coconut products rich in coconut oil, some sprouted nuts and seeds, and small amounts of clean animal flesh products accompanied with plenty of time for metabolic cleansing on a continual basis. The supplements most important in treating and reversing arthritis are organic silica, collagen complex (Reverse Aging), whole food vitamin C (from The Synergy Company), magnesium (L-Threonate; both from Mercola), B12 (Thorne), the fat soluble vitamins A-D-K (DaVinci), turmeric extract (Organic India and Gaia Herbs), niacinamide (Thorne), and the universally needed but universally deficient iodine (in Lugol’s solution). In addition, it may be really beneficial to take high doses (50000 IU/day) of vitamin D3 for at least three and maybe up to six months or more, in order to set the body on its course to intensive healing and recovery from years of arthritic degeneration. This has been found to be very effective in some people. Supplementing with proteolytic enzymes is also very important to accelerate healing and repair of damaged tissues.

Incorporating these principles and specific recommendations into one’s life, not as a special diet, but as a comprehensive way of taking care of this amazing organism that is the human body mind, will not only treat, reverse and cure arthritis to the greatest extent, and maybe even completely depending on the level of degeneration, but will do the same for all inflammatory conditions, which underlie all degenerative diseases. In addition, the immune system will grow to be so strong that no infectious diseases will be able to take hold or develop within your body: never get a cold, never get a flu, never catch anything at all.

Finally, there are two crucially important factors which are not related to diet, and that in many ways can overshadow all other efforts to heal and remain in optimal health: lack of sleep and psychological/emotional stress. They are more than important: they are foundational. Without good sleep and minimal stress it is impossible to become and remain vibrantly healthy, no matter what else we do or don’t do.

This shouldn’t be understood to mean that if we don’t sleep well or are overstressed there is no point doing anything else. On the contrary! It is all that much more important to do everything else we can. However, it means that if we are already doing everything else, then without correcting the conditions causing us stress and preventing us to get enough restful sleep, we will never reach our optimal health potential.

Having said that, you can be sure that they go hand in hand: optimal nutrition and biochemistry promote less stress and better sleep; better sleep and less stress promote more balanced biochemistry, digestion, cleansing, and cellular rebuilding and repairing. They are the two sides of the same coin, one that is measurelessly priceless: optimal health.

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