Use dietary changes

[andyswarbs]

With dairy being a very common trigger it makes total sense to cut it out altogether. However to truly remove a rigorous elimination process of checking ingredients on your own body is key. Hard work but results can be had.

[Rosedail]

Turned out to be mainly wheat/flour and sugar for me. Alas, also wine. I can still have a bit of cheese, milk or yogurt with no ill effects.

[Hidden]

I still don’t know what triggers my flare-ups. I’m vegetarian and don’t have much dairy products. I eat honey though. Maybe I should stop that.

[andyswarbs in reply to Hidden]

I remember one person found that just a small sprinkle of some cinammon on a potato caused a flare. My point is not to argue that cinammon per se might be a challenge, rather that for arthritis it needs to be a complete abstinence: even traces of an offending food can cause as much problem as a big dish.

I found this out with egg. I have not had egg since early 2015 until a few months ago I ordered a pizza from a restaurant in Cheltenham. I have got used to ordering pizza - no tomato, no cheese (even vegan), no oil, no other things. Unfortunately whilst the restaurant had one pizza base without egg, there was no easy way to see from the menu about that. Unfortunately the waitress did not mention this either, despite discussing veganism as an introduction to my dietary needs. The egg in that dough took me down for three painful weeks.

[Hidden in reply to andyswarbs]

Oh dear, I just had a lot of cinnamon lately! And that was years without eating it! Do you have any sources where I can confirm this or is it from personal experience?

[MossAT]

my mum reckons it might be dairy but i don't even eat a lot of dairy products - the reason she says that is because i love cheese & i munch on it sometimes and thats when i notice a itch/flare up

[andyswarbs in reply to MossAT]

Did you know that cheese is addictive - it contains concentrated casomorphine which is in all dairy milk. This is the reason most people find cheese in particular difficult to give up. Add to casomorphine a good slug of salt & the highest concentration of saturated fats and it is easy to see why the world is addicted.

(The purpose of casomorphine is to bring the calf back to its mother to ensure they get plenty of milk to help them grow. Sadly in today's modern farming the practice is that calf are specifically removed from their mother cow on their day of birth because farmers want to sell that to humans. So the calf associated with all milk in the supermarket never gets any.)

[MossAT in reply to andyswarbs]

If you want to get people off cheese/dairy, tell them stories like this about calves getting separated from mothers for commercial gains 😭

[andyswarbs in reply to MossAT]

I try very hard to focus on health rather than animal advocacy since these are health forums. That may be a false or wrong line to draw on. The HU group "Vegan Foods for Life" is different. There animal advocacy is allowed if not encouraged. But then the members of the group tend to be vegans, and a vegan by definition removes animals from their plat for animal advocacyreasons.

Personally I am not sure whether to call myself a vegan. Yes I don't eat meat or dairy or fish or eggs. But I do that for personal health reasons. However that does not stop me advocating for animals, and in that sense I consider myself a vegan.