Osteoarthritis - 36

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalised, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. Bone on bone osteoarthritis can be excruciating and disabling. But is surgery the only answer? Stay tuned. SPEAKER B Healthy Living is a production of 3ABN Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person, body, mind and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical health solutions for overall good health. SPEAKER A It seems that most, if not all, diseases respond significantly to lifestyle medicine. Our daily lifestyle choices. And who better than Dr. John Clark to share the lifestyle medicine benefits for osteoarthritis? Welcome, John. Lovely to have you on the program. There are different kinds of arthritis. What are they? SPEAKER B There's two that are the big ones. One is rheumatoid arthritis, which is an inflammatory arthritis or an autoimmune disease. It's really not an arthritis at all. It's really a disease of soft tissues. But since the joints are soft tissues, they are largely affected. And then there's osteoarthritis, which is often referred to as wear and tear arthritis. You just wore it out. SPEAKER A Oh, I see. Have you ever actually treated someone with osteoarthritis? SPEAKER B My whole career was largely treating osteoarthritis. As an orthopedic surgeon, I was replacing hips and knees, and so I had a lot of opportunity to treat it surgically. But then I started working my way out of a job as more and more we were treating it with natural remedies. SPEAKER A That's not a good idea, working yourself out of a job. But yes, that's your focus now, isn't it? SPEAKER B That's my focus now, yes. And so I would take a whole different approach at this point. In fact, when I was in residency, we had a patient came in that I knew quite well because she was also the babysitter for my child at the time, and she was 73 years old. She had serious arthritis in her knees, and she came in for a set of X rays. We looked at her X rays. She had bone on bone arthritis. SPEAKER A I can't even imagine that. But what I imagine is awful, very. SPEAKER B Painful, and not looking good on the X ray with osteophytes and what we call bone spurs and just sort of worn out knees. Well, she learned some very good, practical, natural home remedies, some good lifestyle practices that we will go over here that totally made it so she could, without surgery, get around. She could hike the mountain behind our house. She could hike all over creation and not have any pain. SPEAKER A And she couldn't do that before. SPEAKER B Couldn't do that before. But if she got off her good diet, she'd be laid up. SPEAKER A How disabling was it before? What was her mobility like before she changed her lifestyle? SPEAKER B She was quite a person to hobble little short steps and stiff knees and yeah, she was a thin 73 year old and looked apart, but once she was fixed up, we'd find her hiking on the trails far and wide. SPEAKER A What a difference that must make to her life. Just amazing difference. And so many of these things, it's not just the illness itself, it's the impact it has on who you are and what you can do and on your family and everything affects your oh. SPEAKER B Yes, it's one of the most disabling things to have is arthritis. It's the number one thing that will take people out of work. SPEAKER A Really? SPEAKER B Yeah. Workers disability. SPEAKER A So this is an amazing transformation. How did it happen? How did it happen? SPEAKER B Yes. And what did we do for her that made a difference? Well, there's a number of things that are important for arthritis, but understanding the nature of the disease to begin with will help you understand why we choose to do what we do. One of the things about the knees, particularly, or any, I should say any of the joints, is that they have cartilage in them. Cartilage is very spongy. It's a bit hard and it's very slick and it's like 70% to 80% water. And it needs nutrition, but it doesn't have blood vessels going through it because it's so impacted by your walking that they would be destroyed. So it is dependent upon nutrition soaking into it or diffusing into it from outside tissues like the joint capsule or the underlying bone. And then it's dependent upon diffusion of waste products out of the cartilage back into the bone or back into the joint capsule to be removed from the joint. So it's very vulnerable to anything that affects the flow of fluids, especially blood. And so you need good blood supply to your joints. SPEAKER A Right. That makes a lot of sense. And thank you, good that you explained it so clearly. SPEAKER B And so in order to keep the blood flowing well to the joint, we need to have blood flowing through the blood vessels well. So really, you could say that osteoarthritis is almost a vascular disease in a sense, because poor vascular supply, poor blood supply to the joint and you're in trouble. So if we look at different foods that people commonly eat and their impact on helping the joint to either be healthy or not healthy, we want to look for things that will make it healthy. For example, eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. They thin the blood, they improve the blood flow, they increase the oxygen in the blood. They make it so that the blood vessels are more responsive to relaxing signals or tightening signals from the autonomic nervous system. Fresh fruits and vegetables are the answer, particularly things like pineapple berries. And then there are certain foods that are antiinflammatory, like turmeric, for example. And so there's very good foods that will help the joints to be more responsive and get better blood supply. SPEAKER A Those fruit and vegetables seem to be a recurring theme. It seems like they're good for everything. SPEAKER B Well, you know, it's sort of dated information and dated. I mean, it comes from 6000 years ago, back when Adam and Eve were in the garden. SPEAKER A That's right. SPEAKER B They came off the assembly line. Well, the assembly line from God's hand. Perfect. And with the manual saying your food options are fruit and your other food option is vegetables and a few other things nuts and seeds and grains and so forth. But they ate largely fresh. Fruit and fresh. Well, it may not even been a lot of vegetables until after the fall but at least they ate lots of good things out of the garden. Unprocessed uncooked. Essentially, at least. I don't know that Eve had a microwave. I could be missing something there. SPEAKER A Yes. Good thought. Maybe. Where would she plug it in? SPEAKER B Well, a current bush, of course. Oh, very good. Foods that are particularly damaging for the joints are foods that make all the little red blood cells stick together. We know this from looking at blood flow under a microscope. And we discover that if people eat oils we're talking vegetable oils or animal oils, cooking oils that it makes all the little red blood cells stick together in chains. Now, normally, one red blood cell at a time goes down the smallest blood vessel in your body called the capillary. And those capillaries have a diameter that's smaller than the diameter of a red blood cell. So that when the red blood cell goes through there, it gets squeezed. But you can imagine if all the red blood cells are stuck together like a stack of pancakes they're not going to go through those little blood vessels very easily. They won't give off their oxygen. And so the joints get starved for oxygen. Anything that's highly refined, be it sugar or anything that would give a diabetic a high blood sugar or oils, anything that would give you a high cholesterol, a high fat in the diet will cause this problem, making it so that you're more likely to get arthritis. Because the joint isn't going to repair after daily wear and tear. SPEAKER A No, they're really important things that you've talked about. But if you had to pick the one that you would put as number one right up there at the top, what would that be? SPEAKER B If people would drink more water, really be a big help. SPEAKER A That would be it. SPEAKER B It would dilute out any of the other things. SPEAKER A Oh, wow. SPEAKER B But water is very important in that the joint is largely water. The cartilage is as much as 80% water, at least in some folks. Some folks it's almost zero, I think. And the water helps carry the nutrients from the bloodstream through the capsule of the joint into the joint space and down into the cartilage and then carries the waste products from the cartilage back into the joint space across the capsule into the bloodstream. SPEAKER A It's a vehicle, really, isn't it water? SPEAKER B Yes, it sure is. SPEAKER A And so be like us trying to get to work without a vehicle, right? SPEAKER B That's exactly right. The next thing I want to talk about is slow transit foods. Those affect whether you have arthritis. Here's what happens. You eat this food that has a slow transit. By slow transit, we mean it takes a long time to get from one orifice at this end of your body to the orifice at the other end of your body, maybe three days. And slow transit foods are slow, usually because they're high in fat and high in refined products and low in fiber. SPEAKER A So what would they be? SPEAKER B This would be anything like white flour, white pasta, white rice, anything that has had the fiber taken away. And it would also be like meat, which has no fiber, milk has no fiber. Foods with no fiber go slowly through the intestines. When they go slowly through the intestines, the bacteria overgrow. When the bacteria overgrow, they start putting off toxins. Toxins that mediate inflammation, toxins that cause constriction of the blood vessels, toxins that increase the thickness of all the walls of the blood vessels. And so you end up with a poor oxygen supply to the joint because of the overgrowth of bacteria and the toxins they put off. On the other hand, eating more fiber. Now, what's people's favorite dried fruit for getting fiber? For good stools. SPEAKER A Favorite fruit? Dried fruit, did you say? SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER A Maybe dates. SPEAKER B How about prunes? Oh, yes, a favorite one too. And we have this saying that with friends like prunes, who needs enemas? SPEAKER A Oh, very good. SPEAKER B So high fiber diet keeps the transition of food going through your body. Good. It keeps the bacteria from overgrowing. And when the bacteria overgrow, they cause problems. The next foods we want to talk about are the plaque forming foods. You know, when you get a heart attack, it's usually because plaque formed in the blood vessels of your heart. And we worry about the heart because when that thing stops ticking, so do we. But we don't realize that the same thing is happening to our joints. In fact, when you take an X ray of somebody's leg or knee and you're looking to see what the joint looks like, sometimes you'll see more calcium in the blood vessels than there is in the bones, because they also have osteoporosis, which is thinning of the bones and atherosclerotic plaque or hardening of the arteries. And so this is a problem because if the blood vessels get filled with calcium and get stiff, the blood doesn't flow by there as well. The oxygen doesn't move from the bloodstream through all this calcified blood vessel wall into the joint space, and it doesn't make it into the cartilage. The cartilage is sitting there starting to get drowned in its own waste products, unable to repair the damage that's done due to daily living. SPEAKER A That makes so much sense, what you're saying. SPEAKER B Yes. And so foods that cause the plaque to build for the joints is the same that caused the plaque to build in the heart, which is animal products, especially high fat animal products, milk, anything that is oxidized in the way of animal products. How do you oxidize an animal product? Oh, go put it in the Barbie cook. It heated up in the presence of oxygen, and you get massive amounts of oxidized oils, and these create free radicals, which in the heart and in the joints, causes problem. Now, there's a favorite food of some people that they like to eat after their meal, which is cold, and it's made from milk or cream. SPEAKER A Oh, I wonder what that might be. SPEAKER B And it's often brightly colored and flavored. SPEAKER A Ice cream covered in chocolate. SPEAKER B Covered in chocolate. And this food has air blown into it or whipped into it so that it melts in your mouth. Ice cream. But when that air is in that product, the oxygen in the air gets next to the cholesterol in the milk and eggs and cream that's in the ingredients, and it causes that cholesterol to oxidize. And they've done studies to show that within 24 hours of eating this kind of food, oxidized, milk, cream or eggs, it will cause lesions in the blood. SPEAKER A Vessels of the body in 24 hours. SPEAKER B Within 24 hours. Lesions that if they were not cleaned up by the body, would end up in causing big plaque. In fact, most time they aren't cleaned up and you get plaque. And so ice cream is a big cause of coronary artery disease, blood vessel disease, arthritis. It's not a great food. And it also raises your cholesterol and makes your cholesterol stay up all day instead of just going up after a meal and coming down. SPEAKER A That's a bit scary, isn't it? I think probably there's a popular belief out there that it takes years to have plaques form. But you're saying it happens in a day? SPEAKER B Oh, especially under lots of stress. In studies of Vietnam veterans we don't have stress. No. In studies of Vietnam veterans who had died under high stress, they found majorly developed plaque in their hearts. SPEAKER A And they would have been, what, young. SPEAKER B Men, 18 to 20? Yeah, very young. Very highly fit for their being in the military, having gone through boot camp and so forth. Another type of food that will affect your joints is anything that creates inflammation. Now, this is something we covered a bit when we talk about rheumatoid arthritis, but it also affects osteoarthritis. And anything that raises the inflammation in your body will raise the inflammation in the joints. Inflammation tends to thicken the blood vessel walls, making it harder for oxygen to cross the blood vessel wall and make it into the joint. Inflammation also makes it so that the blood doesn't carry the oxygen as efficiently. It tends to affect the lungs, causing thickening of blood vessels there, so it's hard to pick up the oxygen as well. It also thickens the blood vessels in the kidneys, making it so it's harder to get rid of toxins out of the kidneys. Inflammation is an enemy to good health and especially the joints. SPEAKER A So you were talking in another program about the importance of air and getting enough oxygen. But it's one thing to take it in, it's another thing for it to be delivered where it's needed. SPEAKER B Yes, it has to make it to the joint. Otherwise it doesn't matter how much is out in the room or how good of oxygen you are breathing. So foods that create inflammation are usually foods that aren't fresh either. They're processed. In other words, they've been to the factory and had things changed about them, had chemicals added or had nutrients removed. They're also foods that are created through rotting fermenting, aging, spoiling. You think, I don't eat spoiled food, do I? But a lot of people eat spoiled food, and they love it. Why? Because they've got a taste for it. What's an example? Vinegar. Vinegar is in tomato sauce. Vinegar is in salad dressings. Vinegar is in most commercial bread you can buy down at the shop. Bread often is preserved with vinegar because bacteria won't touch it. Well, we made that stuff. SPEAKER A They're not silly, are they? SPEAKER B Not silly. And other fermented foods are cheese. Cheese is a huge one. I've had people tell me, yeah, I quit eating my cheese and my arthritis. SPEAKER A Went away just for that one thing. SPEAKER B I've had people tell me I quit eating my cheese and my asthma went away. I've had people tell me I quit eating cheese and I quit having pain in my back. Cheese is a big problem because it's got high levels of oxidized cholesterol, high levels of oxidized fats, high levels of toxins from bacteria and molds. It's not fresh by definition, and so it doesn't have lots of antioxidants. It's not a part of the solution. It's got loads of oxidized stuff, so it's part of the problem. And so cheese is a big cause of arthritis and poor blood flow. It's a big cause of deterioration of the brain. Oh, we're not talking about the brain, are we? And so you don't want to eat lots of food that is not fresh. Soy sauce is fermented, chocolate is fermented. Coffee chocolate is fermented, chocolate is fermented. SPEAKER A Dare you say it. SPEAKER B I'm going to be in trouble now. Maybe we better skip this program. SPEAKER A Because of the milk in it con. SPEAKER B Oh, well, the chocolate bean is fermented. If you look at the World Health Organization and foods that are fermented, it's right there on the list. And it's a whole process of fermenting. One of the reasons why it's brown and then other things that are going to create inflammation are oils that are fried. If you take oil in its natural state, say you take a linseed flax and you look at it. Oh, bright, shiny, brown coating. It's impermeable to oxygen. So you don't get oxidized oils in it, but you grind that flax, you extract the oil, and within six weeks, without any preservation, it's totally rancid. It's that fast. And so you don't want to eat oils that are rancid, that are fermented. If I want to make it go rancid or fermented even faster, all I have to do is heat it up in a frying pan. I will make acrylamide. I will make trans fat. I will make oxidized lipids. And those all go to the blood vessels, cause inflammation. Make it so the blood vessels don't carry oxygen as well. Make it so the joints are more likely to inflame, more likely to have inflammation and arthritis. And so you don't want to eat something that isn't fresh. SPEAKER A Well, that's a very scary thing because there's a lot of fried foods. Fast foods are mostly fried. And I don't know how this is going down, actually. SPEAKER B Well, you know, Trish took a hold of this and thought about it, and she started eating really good food. And she discovered that as long as she stayed on a good diet, she could hike up and down the mountain behind our house. And we lived up at about 8000ft, so we were quite high, quite high. And the peaks went up above us and down below us. And so she would hike all over creation, but if she got off her diet, so she decides, I'm going to eat some stuff that creates inflammation because I like the taste of it. Okay, she has to decide, taste hike. Taste hike. Which will it be? And so this is where the Bible says, eat for strength and not for drunkenness. It's a challenge because our taste buds tell us, oh, I want that. Mom used to make that, and I love it. We tend to get arthritis like our parents got arthritis because we adopted or inherited their lifestyle, their dietary choices. I mean, we love the foods they made. We want wife to make the same stew that mom made and make it taste the same, and she never can, probably. And then we're upset because it's not what we like, because we inherited this food taste. SPEAKER A Yeah, the little taste buds, they're tiny, but they're in charge very often, aren't they? SPEAKER B Right. Yes. And so one of the things that's important also in this is in choosing foods. You don't want to choose foods that will help you put on extra weight. You see, your joints are made to haul a certain amount of weight. Just like maybe if you had a ute, a pickup truck, it would be made to haul, let's say, one ton. But if you put two tons on it, it's going to wear out. Its warranty will probably be void, and it'll get arthritis. Same is true with a person. If a person was supposed to weigh 50 kilos, and now they weigh 150 kilos. Their joints will probably wear out three times as fast because they weigh three times what they're supposed to weigh. Your joints don't necessarily get bigger as you gain more weight. They just have to take on more wear and tear. And so number one as far as a lifestyle choice in reducing wear and tear in your joints is making sure you're not overweight. In fact, it makes such a big difference that some bad lifestyle habits that tend to drop the kilos also help the joints. But that's not necessarily the best way to remove the weight, like through smoking or other bad lifestyle habits. Now, another thing that's important for the joints and diet is making sure you're eating lots of foods with vitamin C. SPEAKER A Citrus, things like that. SPEAKER B Citrus kiwi we mentioned pineapple, but also red cabbage has more vitamin C than citrus. SPEAKER A Is that right? SPEAKER B Yes. There are certain vegetables that are higher in vitamin C than even fruits, but also, as far as vitamins go, vitamin D is just as important. And so getting out in the sun the sun increases the vitamin D by changing cholesterol in your skin into the pre vitamin D, which then gets changed to the active form of vitamin D later on in your body. SPEAKER A Would that be a good way of getting your cholesterol down, too? SPEAKER B It is. It definitely is. People who work out in the sun. SPEAKER A It'S significant, then, the amount that it's used when it's translated into vitamin D, is that would be yeah. SPEAKER B Significant change. Yeah. And helps out the joints. And also there's an important factor for blood flow to the joints in how warm the joints are. Now, I see a lot of Australians running around with clothing only on their trunk. They're wearing shorts, and they're wearing a T shirt, and the joints are out in the wind. And unless the temperature outdoors equals the temperature of your body, like 38 degrees, then the coolness of the limbs, both from the ambient temperature and from wind chill factor, the breeze, will make it so the blood doesn't like to go down to the extremities or to the legs. It stays up in the chest, abdomen, pelvis, and head. And so wearing clothes that keeps the joints equally warm with the trunk is key to keeping the blood flowing down to all the joints that you're trying to keep from wearing out. If they don't have good blood flow, it's like your car not having oil going to some part of it. SPEAKER A Makes sense, doesn't it? SPEAKER B Yes. I had a friend who decided to get out his bulldozer. It was night, and he couldn't get the lights to turn on in the dash, and he's going up a steep mountain, and he decided to go ahead and go up the mountain. Even though he couldn't see the dash. Halfway up the mountain, the thing stalled and quit running and then it figured out that it had dumped all its oil and there wasn't any oil getting to all the bearings. All the bearings got arthritis badly. And we ended up rebuilding his motor in his garage after that. But it was a problem. The same is true of your joints. You don't keep them warm, you won't get good oil pressure. No, we're talking blood, blood pressure down there, and you will end up with arthritis in your joints. So long pants, long sleeve shirts and equal amount of clothing as your chest. This is very important for keeping the joints good. Now, a car, maybe you can get 300,000 k's out of it and then you're starting to get trouble. You suppose I should hold off on how much I wear on my joints and save them for when I get retired so I'll have some miles left? SPEAKER A Not by what you've just said. SPEAKER B It's interesting that if you don't use them, you lose them. The cartilage, since it doesn't have any blood supply, requires that you walk and it pumps the cartilage. It helps to pump the nutrients in and the waste products out. If you don't use them, they get stiff. They did a study on people. They compared people who sat in chairs and worked at computers to those who walked around at work. They looked at their joints, they looked at their spine, which has cartilage in between each of the vertebra, and we call them discs. And so they took and gave them a food that would show up in their discs as a radioactive element. But it was a test experiment, not. SPEAKER A Something you have breakfast every day. SPEAKER B No, not usually, unless you want to glow. And so they had them eat this food and then they had them pursue their different activities for the day, those that sat and those that walked around. At the end of the day, those who sat in the chairs, no nutrients made it to their spines. SPEAKER A None. SPEAKER B None. SPEAKER A None. SPEAKER B No nutrients made it to the cartilage in their knees. But when they had them walk around, the people who walked around, they had the nutrients showing up in the discs of the spine and in the cartilage of the knees. Activity pumps the nutrients around so that the person can get the nutrients they need to. SPEAKER A That's terrible. I mean, none. I mean, if you'd said it was half, it'd be bad, but not to get any is just failful. Words fail me. We ought to be standing up, walking around doing this talk. SPEAKER B Yes. So we might just sort of summarize a bit. That number one would be water. It keeps the blood flowing, keeps the blood vessels full of nutrients. The next is good diet, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. I mean, if you just state fresh fruits and vegetables, it'd be easy to avoid. All these things we've talked about that have been a problem. And then there's a few herbs that are helpful, like turmeric, that help reduce inflammation. SPEAKER A Well, thank you so much. That's a wealth of information, and if we can remember most of that, we'll be on a really good course. Thank you so much. And if you'd like to watch our programs on demand, just go to our website. That's 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the watch button. See you next time and God bless you. You. SPEAKER B You’ve been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia Television.