Recap: How to lower your risk of arthritis | Dr Tamiko Katsumoto
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What is arthritis and why is it important to discuss?
Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're talking about arthritis. It might not sound as serious as cancer or heart disease, but arthritis can have a huge impact on your quality of life, turning simple movements into painful tasks. But here's the good news. Emerging research suggests that diet can have a huge impact on the symptoms of arthritis, helping to lower inflammation and even reduce the risk of the disease developing. I'm joined by Dr. Tomiko Katsumoto to explore how simple changes to what's on our plate can help protect our joints.
How can diet impact the symptoms of arthritis?
It's been eight years since I co-founded Zoe, and I think every year I've just got more and more shocked at the way in which the food that we're eating across the Western world is making us so sick, but also just discovering each year about ways in which it affects us that I had no idea about. So today we're talking to you as a professor of immunology and rheumatology at Stanford about arthritis and how it's linked to food. And I never would have guessed when I found it, Zoe, that it could have anything to do with food. In fact, I would have said that was like crazy, totally non-scientific. So it's amazing how much I think my understanding has changed. What is arthritis and how does that relate to this concept of inflammation, which I know is a lot about what you study?
What is the connection between inflammation and arthritis?
I'm a rheumatologist, so I take care of patients with arthritis, with a lot of other inflammation of other organs. So rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, vasculitis, psoriatic arthritis, you name it. I think arthritis is complex. Basically, our joints are generally protected areas where you've got your bone, you've got a synovial lining, you know, you've got this nice joint capsule that is lubricated so that it allows us to move freely. The problem is with inflammation, there can actually be a breach of those protective barriers such that you can end up getting inflammation. There's actually a connection with the gut and mucosal barriers that play into the inflammation leading to arthritis.
And Tomiko, I know nothing about how my joints work, and I could see you're sort of painting a picture of, I'm sort of imagining somehow something, I don't know, a bit quite mechanical with some oil running. Is that the right analogy? Is that what you're describing? Could you just help me to understand a bit?
How does gut health influence joint inflammation?
Yeah, I think that, you know, it's actually I'm thinking about this. There's a lot of analogies. We talk a lot. I know Zoe talks a lot about the gut and how there's this important lining of the gut. Similarly, I think you can think about the joint in that there's an important lining called the synovial lining of the joint that can get breached when you end up having, let's say, T cells that are recognizing T. some of the synovial proteins, so the joint proteins. There can actually be what's called an autoimmune attack, where your own T cells can end up invading the joint, causing inflammation. It causes a leaky joint, if you will.
What dietary changes can help reduce arthritis pain?
We've heard about leaky gut. And I think what we've started to learn over the course of many years of research is that these mucosal breaches, for example, in our gut, even in our mouth, our oral microbiome, can stimulate certain bacteria that may actually cause our immune system to wake up. T-cells that are attacking these specific bugs in our gut, in our mouth, can end up actually getting confused and attacking our joints. So this is a whole hypothesis that's coming to fruition with some very exciting science recently in terms of how our immune system can be connected to joint inflammation.
So Tomiko, if I understand rightly, what you're saying is like, I'm not experiencing any arthritis today, so I can sort of move all my joints around and they're able to sort of slide around somehow really smoothly. I'm thinking a bit like a sort of Teflon pan or something like that, but you're saying that What can happen is my own immune system ends up attacking parts of these joints and breaking that Teflon.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is arthritis and why is it important to discuss?
0:01–0:45
2
How can diet impact the symptoms of arthritis?
0:45–1:35
3
What is the connection between inflammation and arthritis?
1:35–2:37
4
How does gut health influence joint inflammation?
2:37–3:13
5
What dietary changes can help reduce arthritis pain?
3:13–4:44
6
What does a healthy plate look like for arthritis management?
4:44–5:42
7
How do omega-3 fatty acids from fish affect arthritis?
5:42–11:30
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from ZOE Science & Nutrition
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