Effects
of a very low-fat, vegan diet in subjects with rheumatoid arthritis was just reported in the February 2002 issue of the Journal of
Alternative and Complementary Medicine. Patients with moderate to
severe arthritis were fed Dr. McDougall’s diet and they got much better,
with a decrease in symptoms and weight loss in less than 4 weeks.
COMMENT:
Inflammatory arthritis (the kind with swollen, hot, painful joints) is one
of the conditions I most enjoy treating. This is because these suffering
people get better so fast with a treatment that has no side effects and is
cost free. The benefits are not limited to rheumatoid arthritis. People
with Lupus, psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, and other
non-specific forms of arthritis are helped, in most cases almost
overnight.
This
treatment is particularly important because medical therapy is such a
miserable failure, and expensive, and burdened with serious side effects.
The sad fact is that within 20 years half the patients treated with the
best drugs available are dead or severely disabled.2
Drug therapy can cost much more than $10,000 a year.
The diet we
use for the treatment of most forms of arthritis is the McDougall diet,
which is based around common starches like potatoes, rice, corn, breads
and pastas with the addition of fruits and vegetables. If no improvement
is seen within 4 weeks then cereals (like wheat and corn) are removed. As
a last resort people are treated with the “elimination diet,” which
includes foods least likely to cause arthritis and other immune
reactions. This diet can be found at this address: https://www.drmcdougall.com/science/allergic.html.
You can read
much more about arthritis in the book, The McDougall Program – 12 Days to
Dynamic Health, and at this address on my web site: https://www.drmcdougall.com/Newsletter/may_june1.html
Anyone
needing a complete copy of my study can e-mail me at drmcdougall@drmcdougall.com. See below for abstract information.
References:
McDougall J.
Effects of a very low-fat, vegan diet in subjects with rheumatoid
arthritis. J Altern Complement Med. 2002 Feb;8(1):71-5. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11890437&dopt=Abstract
Scott D.
Long-term outcome of treating rheumatoid arthritis: results after 20
years. Lancet. 1987 May 16;1(8542):1108-11.
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