What Is Arthritis?

Arthritis is simply a term that refers to joint pain or joint disease. While it’s typically experienced by people as they get older, younger people can experience similar things.

When it comes to arthritis, there are 2 main types. The most common type is the one most often plainly referred to as “Arthritis” — it’s also known as “osteoarthritis” or “degenerative arthritis.”

The 2nd type of arthritis is Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) which is an autoimmune condition where your immune system begins attacking it’s own joints. If you suffer from RA, check out our article on autoimmune conditions that explains what causes a condition like RA and how to naturally reverse it.

Arthritis Signs & Symptoms

• Pain in your joints
• Joint stiffness
• Joint swelling
• Joint redness
• Decreased joint range of motion

Address THIS One Thing

Inflammation

The real CAUSE behind arthritis is INFLAMMATION. Inflammation causes joints to constantly wear down and reduces the body’s ability to heal them.

Every person has stress on their joints as they go through life. The question is whether or not your body is able to heal from that stress or if it will give in to the cascades of inflammation.

Gut health, fatty acid balance, and movement are all vital components here. If you get these things right, you can reverse the massive amounts of inflammation and finally experience pain-free joints again.

Note: certain pieces of these next sections are a little lengthy due to the vast importance of it. Nonetheless, Enjoy!

Gut Health

Our gut is of huge importance when it comes to our overall health and especially inflammation. If your gut is inflamed, your whole body will be inflamed.

There are a variety of things that cause inflammation and damage to our gut: inflammatory/destructive foods, infections, antibiotics, and artificial sweeteners are probably the most common ones.

Inflammatory foods you need to absolutely AVOID include sugar, vegetable oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, palm oil, artificial flavors, “natural” flavors, hydrogenated oils, and bleached flour products. Generally, if it’s processed, it’s prone to cause inflammation.

Infections go hand-in-hand with inflammation. This MAY be the most important topic in this whole article. Bacterial overgrowths, fungal overgrowths, parasites, and viruses are all very common infections – even in America. Infections eat up our much needed nutrients, leave behind their toxic wastes, and ultimately result in massive amounts of inflammation. All of these things also contribute to nutrient deficiencies.

It’s very important to address these things while also building up the “good bacteria” by eating the right foods. I never recommend antibiotics for addressing infections though because they are very harsh on the entire body (especially the gut), they usually kill our “good bacteria,” and sometimes they don’t even kill the problematic infection. The right herbal is a sure-way of killing an infection. I use Systems Health Care to test the exact herbal needed for a patient with a specific infection.

Artificial sweeteners you need to absolutely AVOID include high fructose corn syrup, fructose syrup, monosodium glutamate (MSG), sucralose, and aspartame. These are all used as sweeteners in products that have “zero sugar.” However, they’re insanely toxic to the nerves and nervous system. (Hint: check your chewing gum — most gums include these toxic chemicals and people have no idea!)

For way more information on gut health, check out our articles specifically pertaining to the gut here.

Fatty Acid Imbalances

Do NSAIDs tend to help your inflammation and pain? If so, you have a huge fatty acid imbalance. Fatty acid imbalances are often important sources inflammation.

When talking about fatty acids, I’m referring to omega-3’s (Alpha-Linolenic Acid, ALA) and omega 6’s (Linoleic Acid, LA), but I’m also referring to way more than that. Omega 3’s are important as they become EPA which then can become PG3 (very anti-inflammatory & healing). Omega-6’s become GLA which can then become either PG1 (anti-inflammatory) or PG2 (very inflammatory).

The problem is many people who struggle with arthritis and inflammation have HIGH levels of PG2 and low levels of PG1 and PG3.

NSAIDs stop your body from producing them which makes inflammation go down because PG2 goes down slightly. The problem with this is it also reduces PG1 AND PG3 which are both very anti-inflammatory and important.

The best approach is to reduce PG2 (naturally) and increase PG1 and PG3. A good EPA fish oil supplement can do this. If insulin resistance is present along with a lot of omega 6’s, you may need a good unrefined sesame seed oil. Grass-fed beef is also very helpful for increasing PG1 and PG3 and decreasing PG2. Of course, avoid all sources of omega 6’s as much as possible and increase sources of omega’3s as well. For the complete discussion on fatty acids, check out this article here.

Movement

Movement (of any kind) is one of the most beneficial and healing therapies in life. Food, relationships, laughter, and sleep are other big ones. With movement, several amazing things happen.

(1) Our blood and lymph circulates which moves oxygen, proteins, and other vital healing and anti-inflammatory components throughout our body.

(2) Our body detoxes unwanted chemicals and toxins by moving it out of the tissues and into the blood where it can then be excreted through either our bowel movements or through our sweat.

(3) Mechanoreceptors (receptors in every muscle and joint that sense movement) powerfully inhibit our pain receptors thus reducing pain. Thus, when you are moving your body and your joints well, this will neurologically decrease our pain–how cool!

(4) And lastly, movement causes a healthy type of stress on our body, muscles, and joints which promotes healing in those areas.

Now you may be thinking “but movement is painful for me because of my arthritis!” — that’s very understandable so let’s start small! Start with things like swimming, yoga, and walking which can generally be done without a lot of joint pain. If you can handle that, then try jogging, crawling, and biking. Next and most intensely, you would look at running (sprinting), climbing, and so on.

The idea is that movement is very healthy for the body! Now if you can be sure that you are getting at least 30 minutes total movement per day (a couple 15 minute walks), avoid the inflammatory foods mentioned above, increase anti-inflammatory foods, and kill infections, you will be well on your way to getting your healthy joints back. This can be a challenging process and that’s why we approach every patient with a personalized approach since every patient’s source of inflammation may be slightly different. For one, we may need to focus on gut health. For another, balancing fatty acids may be most important. And for some, we may need to focus on a little bit of everything.

Suffering From Arthritis?

At Freedom Health and Wellness, we address all of these things and more through a personalized and functional approach. We help people with chronic diseases and illnesses regain their health by getting to the source of their health concerns.