Diet To Cure Arthritis

Samantha Cowan
Accredited Practising Dietitian and Sports Dietitian

Everybody asks me if there’s a diet to cure arthritis. The answer is no.

There is no diet to cure arthritis. The diet or way of eating that is best is general healthy eating. That’s the same for everybody. The same as what you would have learned at school. The same as what your mum and dad would have taught you. Eat a variety of different foods. The five key food groups that you should be including in your diet every day are vegetables, fruits, lean proteins such as chicken breast, lean beef, eggs and fish, dairy foods so milk, yoghurt, cheese, and then also health fats such as Omega-3s.

Omega-3s are a type of healthy fat that is found mostly in oily fish such as salmon, sardines, trout, and mackerel. It’s also found to some extent in plant foods as well so flaxseeds and linseeds and walnuts and chia seeds are good examples of plant-based Omega-3. So if you’re using Omega-3s to help relieve stress around the joints, the recommendation is 2-3 grams equivalent of Omega-3 per day. So you can get that by having one decent serve of oily fish such as salmon, sardines or ocean trout or you can have 5-7 capsules of concentrated fish oil or 5-7 mL of concentrated fish oil per day.

I’d like to mention dairy foods specifically. Dairy foods are really important to protect your bone health. Some medications that you might be on might affect your bones and in that way making sure you get enough calcium from three serves of dairy food; so a cup of milk, a tub of yoghurt or two slices of cheese per day is going to help to protect your bones.

Other than that there is no food that you should really be eating more of. Just a variety of different healthy foods.