Well, perhaps I should have been more prepared for the reaction to yesterdays post... It was not an attack on anyone taking RA drugs - they clearly play a role, quite often a major one, in people trying to regain control of their lives.
I think my reply to helixhelix probably sums things up best:
Nowhere in my post did I say that everyone with an autoimmune condition would end up chucking their drugs in the bin! It is perfectly possible, yes, but for some they still need a little medication, but on a much reduced dosage - that in itself has to be a good thing, since none of the disease modifying drugs come without a price. Sulfasalazine certainly helped my wife, but that was a stepping stone to harsher stuff.
Nobody (least of all Clint Paddison or Dr. John McDougall) would advocate just stopping medication willy nilly and neither did I. The process is simple - alter the diet and after a while, if the condition allows (with medical supervision) slowly taper off the drugs to a point of balance. It may be that there is only a very little reduction whilst in others the reduction may be large or even 100%. Everyones journey is different. Thousands of people with a wide variety of autoimmune issues have reclaimed their lives by changing what goes one their plates.
In the end, where's the downside to eating the healthiest possible diet? The change costs nothing to try and you may reap a whole load of health side benefits.
I have no company and I'm not allied to any. As I said to Medway Lady, I am just one person at a computer, hoping that our experience may help others (even just one) with autoimmune diseases to return their lives to something close to normal - inflammation and pain free and a whole lot healthier all round.
Yes, act with benevolent skepticism, but do keep an OPEN MIND! We would never, ever have believed in the incredible power that the food we choose to eat has on our overall health had we not looked at the evidence. So, do your research - just watch out for those giving out good news about bad habits, since it rarely if ever correct!
Again, I wish everyone luck on their autoimmune journey.
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I would be interested to know what you define as the ‘healthiest possible diet’. As has been determined over the last few years and again more recently no one size fits all. Food affects a persons body differently even the same food in identical twins. What is good for one may be detrimental to another...
I think those of us who actually have RA are likely to understand the condition a little better than onlookers. And believe me Mr paulipauli it’s not simple in any shape or form,
At least you are observant enough to notice that drugs do pay a major role in most of our lives, if we want to continue living a life that is worth living.
None of us take drugs for the sake of taking them ...we take them to make life bearable...... If you think only a few of us need to take drugs you are living in a fool’s paradise.....so please don’t try to tell us if we just change what we eat.....all will suddenly be rosey .......if that were true this site would no longer exist.
Diet has never been clinically proven to help or hinder rheumatoid arthritis....... Eating what you enjoy helps this disease.
I would hazard a guess everybody in this forum takes their drugs from necessity.
I’m sure you mean we’ll...but most of us have highly qualified rheumatologists advising us & those Doctors that I have seen, over the last 20+ years give no credence whatever to the offerings from the likes of Mr Paddison.
So please stop patronising us as if we have never heard all this diet waffle before,& you are somehow enlightening us.
Well said. There’s a Facebook group called helping RA naturally. All advocates of non drug use. Mostly American. I find it very sad that so many posts are by people that are in sheer agony and still people say, try vinegar or tart cherry juice etc....these are people with damage and there’s no going back from that. Can’t repair eroded bone without total replacement. And not always then.
I had to leave the group as I found it so confusing really. This desire to be pain free or at least a bit better was overtaken by peoples insistence that Paddison was going to work for them. At whatever cost.
You know what really gets my goat about these type of posts. The assumption that none of us research our own issues. I’m sure most people are the same, that for the first few months or longer, we’re in agony and quite frankly, would eat pooh if it said it would help. I bet we all have a cupboard full of celery juice, cherry juice, 101 vitamins and minerals. None of which did stuff all.
The poster here must realise that we all know and may have tried these programmes. We’re neither idiots or 6 years old. It’s smug and patronising. Grrrrrr.
He may or may not have an agenda. Not sure. Those videos may have a clickable referral link that he receives payment for every time someone clicks on it? Who knows. It would be more genuine if his wife had commented rather than someone with no bio either.
No, they don't have any payment link - they're just pasted straight from the address bar. I am in no way wishing to be patronising and if that's how it seems, then I apologise. I have simply seen first hand the effects of RA in someone I love, both physically and emotionally and in many ways, the latter was almost worse. I have seen the improvement through drugs and then through diet. My wife doesn't like being directly involved with threads and posts etc - it's just not her thing. She is happy for her story to be shared in the hope that it may help others. So, please don't shoot the messenger.
Well said, I tried every supplement, diet (paddison, gluten free, vegan, Margaret someone or other who advocated treacle and apple cider vinegar etc etc) Nothing helped except Methotrexate which I'm thankful for every day - but I took a lot of persuading to try it!!
Not a waste of time..as you say....a lesson learned indeed .....I just wish those newly diagnosed & fighting against RA drugs, would understand that we here have no secret agenda to stop them feeling better.....& that when we say listen to your rheumy, take the meds you are prescribed, have patience & persevere..... is well meant sensible advice.
But I guess there will always be those who think they know better?
I just hope those reluctant druggies(!) don’t leave it too late to get the best results possible from the meds they resist so energetically.
well I would like to be open minded, I am not coming off my mediaction and wont chuck it away , but I would like to hear about the diet and also recipes
I think life style has a big part to play too
I know if I eat some foods I am so worse
so for one would like to hear
I am having hug issues with my stomach at the moment
If you have gone gluten free but don't need to it can cause problems and so I always say get a test for Celiac before going gf as you might need to see a dietician and also there is the FODMAP diet for IBS. For me a diagnosis of Celiac stopped my tummy issues but it is hard to keep too.
I love that phrase’ under the Dr with my stomach’ it did make me giggle it drew such a picture in my imagination!. Seriously I have had gastric problems too,so imagination aside, I sympathise with you and hope you get better soon
I agree, it can make a big difference to you overall. It’s worth looking at what you eat (and drink🥂🥤) to try to help your body, and to learn what doesn’t suit you.
However, I think people like Mr Paddison are the worst kind of charlatans, as they present pseudo-science that has a kernel of fact somewhere that is twisted or exaggerated to mean something else. If I want to listen to anyone it would be a proper trained medical doctor (and NHS GP) like Dr Chatterjee. He has slightly disappointed me by selling books, but perhaps that does help get to more people
I'm sorry to hear that you have digestive issues too. As for a "properly trained medical doctor"... It would be great to think that they have a good handle on nutrition, but the clue is in the "General" of GP. They have a broad knowledge base, but when it comes to nutrition they receive but a few hours of tuition on the subject during a five year course. So, unless they choose to do further courses in the nutritional line, you'd be better off talking to a dietitian. There are indeed some Drs who take it upon themselves to dive into the subject, but that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort.
If your issues are along the IBS/Colitis/Crohns lines, then you might want to take a look at this talk by Dr Pam Popper:
Hello again - whilst I'm the first to promote benevolent skeptiism, I'm just curious to know why you have such a strongly held conviction about Clint Paddison?
It's ture, we did wonder if it was going to be a total rip off, but it wasn't. He spent years trawling through medical and nutritional research and experimenting with what he discovered until he'd distilled the regimen down to what really worked. Now if he charges for all the work he did and continues to do, does that really make him a charlatan.
The science behind what he does (and what Dr. John McDougall has been doing for over 40yrs), is solid. Because of my wife's condition (ex-condition) I dived headlong into the murky waters of nutrition science and I still haven't come up for air!! I can assure you that everything that I have read and seen backs up the Paddison approach. I'm not advocating his Canonisation any time soon, but I think that he does deserve a lot of credit and he is even teaching rheumatologists the protocol now.
A really good (free) information source regarding diet and health is Nutritionfacts.org
The videos here are about 7 mins long, so easily digestible!
Sorry, but we will have to agree to disagree. I think Mr Paddison is a manipulative salesman, and the approach he uses of endless testimonials and exhortations that engender fear is an awful thing to do to vulnerable people.
I believe in the microbiome, and the importance of nutrition - but what he sells is not soundly based. He hasn’t, as far as I can tell, published anything in the peer-reviewed medical literature on his program. All he has are anecdotes. Who knows whether all these people even had an inflammatory arthritis in the first place as no medical proof.
To me it’s like toilet paper stampede at the beginning of this pandemic. People need to feel in control when faced with the unknown (be it coronavirus or RA) so doing something/anything helps to create that impression and makes you feel better. But buying a few extra rolls of toilet paper is more harmless than throwing money away on slick talking comedians.
Perhaps I was lucky, but my very first rheumatologist impressed upon me that I could do things to help myself alongside the treatment, and was keen on promoting a healthy lifestyle and controlling comorbidities. I, like many others, probably went a bit too far to start with in trying alternatives and then realised that a simple approach was all that was needed alongside conventional medicine. It works for me, and although I have never managed to taper off drugs I have been in remission for years now.
It is sad that increasing pressure on doctors mean that few have time to talk to their patients about lifestyle, as so much good could be done with non-medical interventions, not just for RA.
Here is another person’s story that is more realistic than Mr P’s anecdotes.
I completely understand your standpoint. I can only go by our experience and contact with Paddsion. He never fear mongered in my wife's case. She has been in touch with others on his program and nobody so far seems to have been anything other than pleased that they did it.
You were certainly lucky with your consultant, as was my wife.
Aside from that, we'll simply have to agree to disagree when it comes to Mr. P!
I think we should research the drugs we are on very carefully. Looking at side effects and also the drug trials themselves. If they have been around for quite some time the trials may not have been so exhaustive as they are now (or supposed to be). Obviously diet can play a large part. They say 'you are what you eat' and if you put over processed rubbish into your body ( as we all do occasionally) then it will affect us. I don't think our medication is reviewed as often as it should be. We often see on these posts that people have tried to have their meds altered and came against a brick wall. You know your own body .
RA drugs are continually reviewed......& much as we might know our own bodies & know how each drug we take makes us feel...the majority of us don’t understand why.....which is why rheumatologists continually report back on drug reactions.....& the researchers are kept up to date in the drugs in use.
I never research drugs as the technical stuff means nothing to me, but ask me to write a thesis on "the impact of 20th Century literature on the role of woman in society" then I'm your gal. I find it actually astonishing as probably more than diet its weight that that puts more pressure on joints but no where has that been addressed. So loose weight and less pressure = less pain. Personally I've never had a problem with discussing a medication but then i've not gone through them like smarties. But have persevered and achieved remission. My RA team and GP are great and I've never had any difficulty seeing one or talking to them. As for processed food as my mum would say" tell that to the starving millions across the world" and all food is processed be it by cutting up or cooking its a process. As I've said before records exist of RA in the fossil records and in the bones of people from hundreds of years ago when people didn't go to Iceland for ping meals. Although I have to say that if someone is in pain those ping meals are great.
I do wish everybody would acknowledge as you do....we can read RA research until our eyes bulge....but we have got to understand that Drug X given to 10 different people could have 100+ different outcomes.Personally life’s too short to bother.
So listening to those who have studied RA for many years kind of seems the sensible thing way to go.
Yes we might have times when we could murder our doctors as we feel so bad...but the day the light dawns we realise that Doc was right!
I am an advocate of healthy eating, I strongly believe it helps our bodies deal with the disease and medication. I don't preach about it and I do understand that every single one of us is different and coping with a very tricky and progressive disease in the best way we can.
I would never pay for a diet plan. I would never again give up my meds, I tried that for a prolonged period, lost weight, became very healthy and RA flared again and worse. It is the nature of the beast, for me at least, it is a balance of the right meds and healthy lifestyle.
Please give the people on this site the respect they deserve, they/we are not uneducated idiots who always blindly follow only the advice given by Rheumatologists, quite the opposite in fact.
One last thing... Why on earth would the NHS recommend very expensive medication if a simple change to diet would cure us? It would make more sense economically, to employ dieticians and put us all on specific diets. Unless of course, you believe the NHS in heavily invested in pharmaceuticals....
We had wondered the same thing - if it's that simple and that obvious and that cheap, why hasn't anyone mentioned it?!!
The problem the NHS has, as was explained to us by the Rheumatologist, is testing.... Anything he wanted to talk about in terms of RA treatment would have to have the NICE stamp of approval. Now that's just fine for drugs - the pharmaceutical companies pay for the drug tests and trials (many many £millions per drug) and they use a blinded testing system. The "gold standard" is a double blind randomised placebo controlled crossover trial. I hope I'm not insulting anyone by explaining this... drugs are given to some patients and sugar pills to others. Nobody involved in the trial knows which pills are which, they just have a coded label. The patients are randomly assigned drug or placebo. After a "washout" period to allow any drugs to clear from the body, the pill allocations are reversed. Only after the trial are the pill codes released by the third party so that the results can be analysed.
Now when it comes to dietary supplements or even single food items, this process can usually be replicated. However, when it comes to total dietary change or intervention, this is impossible - bacon is bacon and porridge is porridge and there's no way to disguise it! Thus, even when people are locked in wards and eat only what they're given, that still doesn't meet the NICE standard. The shame of it is, that there is decades of work to show the effectiveness of diet on autoimmune diseases, MS being one example.
Also bear in mind that Big Pharma support the NHS and the medical schools to the tune of many millions. Traditional medical training focusses on classification of disease and then using that label to assign a treatment plan - mostly based upon surgical or pharmacological intervention. Nutrition only features for a few hours of lectures during the whole five year basic Drs course, so it just isn't on the radar. To put things in perspective try watching the film "What the Health" - the UK economics are slightly different, since we pay through taxes rather than up front, but the result is still pretty much the same...
Really interesting stuff. Thank you for the response, you are obviously very knowledgeable in this field.
I have had RA for 23 years., have been vegetarian for much longer than that. I added Sjogrens to the mix about 8 years ago. During most of this time I was medication free - dipping in and out when RA flared and it worked, but things progressed, my diet has always remained veggie but has at times included empty calories. I have noticed that when I eat dairy in quantity and over a period of time, my gut and my joints hurt more and they improve a bit when I cut it out, and sugar really affects my Sjogrens.
I really don't like taking drugs, so have tried so many different eating plans devised by my own research. I guess I might just try another and try to stick with it - it is so easy to fall off the wagon when you are feeling well!
If it's of any consolation, my wife falls off the wagon every now and then too. The worst times are Christmas and birthdays - too much tempting but crappy food around... She soon gets the twinges and then get's straight back on the waggon again. It's just human nature!
I wouldn’t dream of stopping metoject or hydroxy plus the iron supplements etc. but I do limit red meat and dairy as my inflammation levels go up so it’s a combination of diet and meds and I think that’s a reasonable balance for me. ((hugs)) M x
Nor me but I have to limit my sugar and dairy intake as they affect my inflammation levels. In any case cutting back sugar is good - even though I do love my cakes biscuits and sweets.
Sorry, Paul, but without getting into whether diet helps or not, I will say that neither of those are compelling: at best they showed further studies may be of use. The conclusions are far from definitive in any way, shape or form. Compelling arguments for dietary alterations and/or supplementation are randomised, controlled, double-blind studies that result in absolute outcomes. The retrospective literature review you linked to is almost 20 years old and from the abstract had no definite outcome beyond a supposition that the supplementation *may* have some benefit, but that any benefit there might be appeared to be mild at best. The second study is now 30 years old, and whilst it’s moderately more convincing than the first on first glance, the only thing you can access on either paper is the abstract as the full texts are hidden behind a pay wall. You can’t draw firm conclusions from an abstract, because to do so means taking the study design and data analyses entirely on trust. For something to be even vaguely convincing, the full data has to be available for scrutiny to the person you’re trying to convince.
The other point I consider when I look at any paper is the age and how any conclusions have been adopted: unless you believe in big pharma conspiracies, it’s reasonable to conclude that 15+ year old papers where the underlying science hasn’t subsequently made it in to routine medical consideration are unlikely to have ultimately been upheld as valid or sufficiently proven.
Yes, Charlie_G, I didn't perhaps present the best examples. If you were to conduct your own literature search you'll find that there is a lot more 'compelling' evidence out there. Not only for RA but for other inflammatory conditions along with diseases like coronary artery disease and diabetes (which it can be argued have an imflammatory pathogenesis). There is no doubt that a plant based diet has major benefit for many conditions with scientific consensus 'just around the corner'.
The only thing I don't understand is how much Paddison charges , its a lot of money to join.
I am sure I have a leaky gut or ulcer, I did heal it from staying away from things that cause me stomach issues, but for a long time felt better and got away with stuff I couldn't normally eat but I binged on some things and my stomach warned me, I ignored it, then the third time my stomach went bang, now I am back where I started over a year ago with stomach issues again.
so I went on that Paddison web site and was upset and sad to see how much it costed to join.
if anyone is so needing to help people and their stomaches why charge soooooo much money
its praying on vulnerableility of being sick and thats what is sad
I don't understand it all but I understand a bit and ph and floating round your body leaking from your gut and how it causes all sorts of issues even in your ears sinus issues all from the ph
but as I said I know but don't know enough to explain it right ,so yes I do understand that what you eat can damage your gut leaking ph round your body and effect your health.
ps the reason I went on that Paddison site was not because I didn't know what not to eat in my own body but its so blend what I do eat when I am being good, and I am not a very good cook, so went on there to see what recipes and foods that would be safe but yummy but as I said wont join because of how much he charges and its sad he does that
Paddison charges, yes. Charlatan, no. But then he spent years and years doing all the digging through the scientific literature, with himself as a guinea pig to try to beat the odds. Yes this is no doubt part of his living, but he now has the expertise both from personal experience and from health professionals within the nutrition and autoimmune disease fields. Leaky gut and molecular mimicry is not pseudoscience, it's well proven.
If you doubt the value, then look at all the free podcasts he puts out - many with advice and many many more involving people like you who have improved their lives immeasurably.
Alternatively, take a look at Dr. John McDougall - tons of free stuff on his website.
Bear in mind one thing - the Paddison program is hard work for the first month or so and requires dedication and perseverance, but as my wife discovered, sticking with it paid dividends. So, perhaps part of the reason why it's worth paying is that one may be more likely to do it properly having shelled out for it. Just a thought....
By the way, here's a review of Paddsion that I stumbled upon a day or so ago:
By the way, the general advice is DO NOT use oil in you cooking or your food - it inflames the gut makes it permeable.... No, not even virgin olive oil!
We're cooked this way for five years now, so feel free to get in touch if it sounds daunting.
I am allergic to hair dye, I spent a lot of time ,my time, searching and testing hair dye I could use, I found one, its safe, did I set something up to charge people money to get my advice on hair dye ?no
I am trying to help myself too to heal my stomach, so today had oat porridge as I always do, but had half of papaya first, lunch had chicken bone broth again a bit papaya before having that.
and tonight will have salmon cooked in oven no oils, sweet potatoes and carrots and peas .cut off any foods by 6pm
Unfortunately it seems paulipauli didn't use the Search box for previous Paddison posts, plus posted on a Sunday, known for similar help/advice being put forward here.
This might prove helpful reading to anyone who's interested The Paddison Program for rheumatoid arthritis: An unproven treatment that provides only the illusion of controlsciencebasedmedicine.org/th... . If you've a spare hour or so to have a read of the Comments (now turned off to replies) you may notice a familiar name appear time & again (names actually but one in particular). Comforting to read that replies to him were not dissimilar to those he received when he was still a member here.
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