Dr. Tomiko Katsumoto

In addition, exercise, stress reduction, social connections, sleep, and then finally avoidance of risky substances.

So those are the six pillars of lifestyle medicine.

And essentially what this randomized controlled trial did was put these patients through either the active arm, they called it the plants for joints arm, that underwent these six lifestyle interventions, versus the placebo, which was essentially standard of care.

They ran them through this program for 16 weeks, and what they found at the end of the study, and even at eight weeks at the midpoint, they saw dramatic improvements in the patient's joint disease.

So for the rheumatoid arthritis patient,

The endpoint they looked at is called DAS28.

This is disease activity score based on 28 different joints.

So you measure swollen and tender joints.

You measure the CRP inflammatory marker.

You measure how the patient's feeling.

And based on that endpoint, which is a very robust endpoint, there was a very statistically highly significant difference in terms of the RA patients that underwent this lifestyle program.

They looked more deeply to see what was the most likely thing driving this difference, and it was most likely diet.

Of course, you can't separate out, you know, it was a full holistic intervention of multiple different domains.

But anyway, bottom line, I think diet played a huge role.

And what they did was they educated these patients on whole food plant-based diets.

So minimizing processed foods, minimizing, you know, really, or mostly eliminating animal products.

increasing fiber intake, and really trying to encompass a very healthy whole food diet.

Same thing was done for osteoarthritis.

And the reason I got so excited to see the results for osteoarthritis is we don't have great treatments for OA.

It's one of the most common conditions, debilitating.