These form of arthritis are inflammatory and are auto-immune diseases meaning that your own bodies normal inflammatory system is attacking itself and damaging tissue in your joints.

Having something like Rheumatoid (RA) or Psoriatic arthritis (PA) can be very debilitating and there are new medications becoming available to help manage the conditions but there are things that you can do outside of medication to help manage the symptoms.

I have found the most beneficial to be altering your diet away from inflammatory foods. This may be a difficult concept to understand how eating certain foods can actually increase general systemic inflammation which, then affects other parts of your body but much of the recent research is pointing in that direction. The following study looks at various dietary interventions that have helped with RA (Shweta K et al, 2017).

Nutrition is an incredibly complex subject on an academic level and I find that this is a barrier to actually helping people to change their diets so they can help themselves. In an endeavor to make it simpler and easy to understand I look at nutrition in 2 parts:

Part 1: Remove the things from your diet that are harmful and inflammatory.

 The gold standard way to remove inflammatory foods is by the use of an elimination diet. In practice this means removing a group of foods entirely from your diet for a period of time, then reintroduce them and see what affect it has on you. I like this approach because it is not a prescriptive diet but helps you to design the diet that suits you, it is important to remember that we are all individual and react to different foods differently, so what works for one may not work for the other. 

When I am helping patients with this I will always start with a Autoimmune Paleo Protocol, you can download you free copy of our Ebook here.  This is a very extreme diet but should be treated like a test so that you are able to work out what foods are affecting you and which ones are not.

This needs to be done methodically otherwise the results become unclear.

Part 2: Add in things that can help your body to function at its best and fight inflammation.

The other side of the coin is to add in substances to your diet that have an anti-inflammatory effect. Probably the one with most evidence and I have written about this supplement before is Omega 3. In nature this comes primarily from oily fish like mackerel and salmon, nuts and seeds, olive oil and avocados. You can get many variations of this supplement from cod liver oil to krill oil or one made from marine algae which is suitable for vegans.

Other food substances are also of possible benefit such as ginger, turmeric and cinnamon though the levels of evidence for use of this is not as good as omega 3 they will not do you any harm and are easy to add into you diet either as teas or directly in your cooking.

If you are suffering from RA or PA I would encourage you to take a look at you diet and make a change the results can be really quick, within weeks reducing joint pain and improving function, what have you got to loose?

References

Shweta K, Kumar SJ, Bhawna G,(2017) Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis with Dietary Interventions. Frontiers in Nutrition 2017. Free access here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5682732/