The simple rheumatoid arthritis diet outlined here may not be one you have heard of before. Yet it is easy to implement and can have profound effects.
Many Asian people (that is before they became so influenced by the Western way of life) don’t consume dairy as part of their diet. And they rarely suffer from any form of arthritis.
The West has many strange dietary customs, most based on misinformation.
Dairy is one of them.
Dairy is a wonderful food – for baby cows. It’s rich in calcium and all the other essential nutrients for a growing baby cow. But only a baby cow can properly absorb and utilise it.
Once you are weaned, you can no longer digest milk properly, as your digestive enzymes alter to cope with more complicated foods.
A different species has very different growing requirements. Cows grow to full maturity in about a year, whereas it takes a human about 17 years. This means the nutrients in cows milk are in the wrong proportion for human needs.
A cow is a strict herbivore and a ruminant. Humans are omnivores, albeit it at the herbivore end of the scale, but with only one stomach.
Couple the inappropriate nature of dairy for human health and the lack of arthritis in the Asian countries where dairy wasn’t consumed, and it seems a reasonable connection to make. (Now Asians are consuming Western style cooking, they are getting the typical Western diseases!)
There are other reasons why dairy is not the right food for anyone and they include the processing: the pasturisation and the homogenisation. One cardiologist in California considers homogenisation to be the main cause of heart attacks.
However, perhaps the strongest reason not to consume dairy is ethical – in that to obtain it, we humans have to do the worst thing you can ever do to a mother – remove and/or kill her newborn.
Energetically, the enormous grief of the mother is, I suggest, a totally unacceptable process we put her through every year. And what imprint will this have on the milk?
Many rheumatoid arthritis sufferers have simply taken dairy out of their diet and completely resolved all their symptoms. To the point where they have not only stopped all their medication, but also resumed a full and active life.
It is possible.
Using the simple rheumatoid arthritis diet outlined here, you might wonder where you would get your calcium from, without dairy.
The same place you have always got it, bearing in mind your body couldn’t use the calcium in the dairy you were consuming. It’s not just about food containing the nutrient you need. You also need to digest and utilise it.
The calcium rich foods that you can easily digest and utilise are in green leafy vegetables (such as spinach, silver beet, kale, broccoli, brussel sprouts), nuts, seeds and blue green algae.
You might be wondering how to manage without dairy in your diet. There are many good alternatives, but also some bad ones.
Avoid soy as a milk substitute as that has different problems. Oat or almond milk are great substitutes and some like rice milk.
Margarine is not a healthy alternative to butter. Try coconut oil instead.
If you’re a cheese or yoghurt fan, perhaps you can just abstain from them for a trial month. It is possible, that when you are completely free of symptoms, you might be able to indulge in the occasional piece of cheese without suffering.
This simple rheumatoid arthritis diet may just be the one to heal all your symptoms. But it may take a month before you start to see results, and possibly another month to be rid of all the symptoms, so don’t expect overnight results.