Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
The crippling pain of your stiff, achy arthritic joints has begun affecting your quality of life. You find it difficult to sleep, exercise, and participate in everyday activities. Lately, you’re seriously considering a different, more natural treatment for your arthritis, such as fasting. Can fasting help with arthritis pain?
Yes, fasting may be able to reduce arthritis pain. According to a UK news article in Express, fasting’s benefits for the immune system could extend to arthritis since it’s an autoimmune condition. Fasting can also lessen inflammation, help you avoid foods that can trigger worsening symptoms, and promote weight loss.
In this in-depth guide, we will discuss arthritis and what causes it so you can better understand how fasting can benefit most arthritis patients. We’ll even talk about which types of fasts, such as intermittent or longer-term fasting, are recommended to lessen arthritis pain. Keep reading!
What Is Arthritis?
Arthritis affects your joints, causing tenderness, swelling, stiffness, and pain. As you get older, the severity of symptoms can increase, but not only older people develop arthritis. According to Arthritis.org, 300,000 children have the condition, as do 50 million adults. Anyone can get arthritis regardless of race, gender, and age.
Those who do have arthritis for most of their lives may find their pain levels and symptoms change over the years. Symptom severity can increase one day and then stay that way. This can cause both chronic pain and permanent, significant changes to the joints. For example, some arthritis patients develop finger joints that look knobby.
Types
Arthritis.org mentions that over 100 different arthritis types exist. We can’t possibly talk about them all, but here are the most common ones.
- Inflammatory Arthritis
Inflammatory arthritis occurs when your immune system overreacts and causes excess inflammation. As we’ve discussed on this blog, inflammatory markers can indicate to your immune system that it’s potentially at risk of a foreign invader, but too much inflammation is unhealthy.
With inflammatory arthritis, you’re at higher risk of the condition causing symptoms in organs like the skin, eyes, heart, and lungs as well as connective tissue. You may find you cannot use the area most affected by inflammatory arthritis without pain. You could also have tenderness and swelling and feel heat around the joint.
- Rheumatoid Arthritis
Another type of arthritis that can spread to the blood vessels, heart, lungs, eyes, and skin is rheumatoid arthritis. Instead of the joints becoming inflamed, with rheumatoid arthritis, your immune system confuses your tissues for foreign invaders and attacks.
Most rheumatoid arthritis patients will have swelling as their joint lining is affected by the condition. This swelling, if long-term, could cause deformities in the joints and erosion of the bones.
- Metabolic Arthritis
Metabolic arthritis is also known as gout. We just wrote a post on fasting for gout. If you missed that, here’s a quick recap. Within your body are purines, a type of substance that increases from the dietary choices you make. Your body can also produce its own purines.
When purines get broken down, you end up with uric acid. In metabolic arthritis or gout patients, uric acid levels increase to the point where they cause the development of urate crystals. These very sharp crystals cause and contribute to your joint pain, especially during a gout attack.
- Infectious Arthritis
Infectious or septic arthritis causes joint infections. These infections are fungal, viral, or bacterial in nature and can affect other body parts as well.
Reactive arthritis is a type of infectious arthritis where a joint becomes painful due to an unrelated infection. For example, bladder infections could cause terrible joint pain.
- Osteoarthritis
Also known as degenerative arthritis, osteoarthritis occurs due to a lack of bone cartilage from natural wear and tear. Spinal, hip, knee, and hand osteoarthritis are the most common, but all other joints in your body could become symptomatic as well.
Symptoms
Where in your body you’ll feel pain will depend on which type of arthritis you have, but the symptoms tend to be similar from one type to another. These include:
- Lack of flexibility and range of motion in the joints
- Redness
- Swelling
- Stiffness
- Pain
Causes
As an autoimmune condition, some types of arthritis are triggered when your immune system mistakes foreign invaders. Others are caused by infection.
With osteoarthritis, the type of arthritis that affects the most people, it’s a cartilage breakdown that triggers the onset of the condition. Cartilage surrounds the joints as a hard bone coating. Several pieces of cartilage may form cartilage cushions to let your bones move fluidly and without pain.
When the cartilage breaks down, the bones have no protection, so they make contact with one another as you go about your day-to-day life. Infections, joint injuries, and age can all reduce cartilage levels as well.
Triggers
Arthritis has many triggers depending on the type. For some, infections can make arthritic symptoms flare up, or perhaps it’s doing the same type of movement over and over.
Temperature and barometric pressure changes can cause the onset of arthritis symptoms in some cases, as can stress. The foods you eat are important too. You should always avoid the following food and drink triggers:
- Aspartame, a sweetener found in many soft drinks
- Omega-6 fatty acids, which could worsen inflammation if consumed in very large quantities
- Monosodium glutamate or MSG, especially very processed foods
- Pizza, as it has enough saturated fat that it could worsen inflammation
- Refined carbs such as white bread, crackers, and white rice, as these too boost inflammation
- Vegetable, soy, sunflower, and corn oils, since they’re high in saturated fat
- Salt, since it makes blood vessels expand for more inflammation
- Alcohol, as most alcoholic beverages have lots of purines that could agitate metabolic arthritis or gout
- Dairy products like cheese, butter, milk, and ice cream, as the dairy proteins could inflame your joints
- Processed sugars, since they cause insulin spikes that could in turn lead to swelling
- Fried foods, as they increase your propensity for weight gain
You should also be aware of the risk factors for arthritis, such as:
- Obesity: Being overweight or obese puts strain on the joints, especially the spine, hips, and knees. If you don’t already have arthritis but you’re obese, you’re at a higher risk of developing it.
- Joint injuries: Sports injuries especially that affect the joint could later turn into a case of arthritis in that joint.
- Gender: Women are at a higher risk of having rheumatoid arthritis than men, although men tend to get gout more often than women, as estrogen can control uric acid levels. During and after menopause, when estrogen levels decrease, women become more susceptible to developing gout.
- Family history: Although it’s not the case for all arthritis types, some are hereditary. If your mother or father has arthritis, then you may get it as well at some point.
Treatments
Arthritis treatments can be holistic, medication-based, physical therapy-based, or even surgical. Corticosteroids such as Cortef (cortisone) as well as Intensol and Prednisone (prednisone) can cause immune suppression to control inflammation. Biologic response modifiers prevent immune responses by altering protein molecules. These medications include Remicade (infliximab), Eticovo (etanercept), and even tumor necrosis factor.
Disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs or DMARDS for rheumatoid arthritis can prevent tissue and joint attacks from the immune system. Your options are Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine), Trexall, and Rasuvo (methotrexate). NSAIDs and prescription painkillers may also be recommended by your doctor.
How Does Fasting Help with Arthritis?
Whether your joint pain is from gout, rheumatoid arthritis, or osteoarthritis, if you’re looking for a more natural form of relief without medication, we advise you to try fasting. Here are three ways fasting can treat the various types of arthritis for less joint pain and a better quality of life.
Healthier Immune System
Your immune system is one of the most important networks in your body. Without it, you’d be susceptible to developing illnesses from every germ you encounter. Although your immune system can’t always prevent illness, when it’s healthy, it can often lodge an attack against a foreign invader quickly enough that you don’t come down with a cold or flu.
The cells within your immune system, like the rest of the cells in your body, get older with time, and thus less efficient. This can put you at a higher risk of illness.
A 2014 study in Cell Stem Cell that we’ve discussed on this blog before uncovered an interesting link between fasting and the immune system. By fasting, the study respondents’ white blood cell count decreased. White blood cells have an average lifespan of two weeks, so they need to be regenerated often.
By reducing white blood cells through fasting, new ones soon appear in their place. This fortifies the immune system so it can keep you safe and healthy.
Since arthritis is an autoimmune condition, your pain may lessen to some degree with this immune system reset through fasting, especially if you have rheumatoid arthritis or inflammatory arthritis.
The Right Amount of Inflammation
In 2019, a report in the journal Cell stated that fasting can treat inflammatory diseases without changing your antimicrobial immunity. The reason this happens is twofold. For one, when you fast, your monocytes, a white blood cell type, have lower inflammatory and metabolic activity. Secondly, monocyte counts went down in both animal and human studies.
Monocytes play an important role in inflammation. As your body becomes inflamed, the monocytes travel to the tissues from the bloodstream. Microbial products like cytokines, which can increase inflammation, are conditioned by the monocytes, says Nature Reviews Immunology in a 2014 report.
Thus, with fewer monocytes, you’ll experience less inflammation and arthritis pain.
Weight Loss
Being overweight or obese can contribute to arthritis and even put you at a higher risk of developing the condition, as mentioned. Thus, it’s within your best interest to maintain or lose weight if you have arthritis. Fasting can help.
When you fast, your goal is to get your body’s supply of glycogen down to nothing. Glycogen is your body’s energy currency that’s stored in the liver. It comes from glucose, a sugar you get from food, especially high-sugar and carb-heavy foods.
When you don’t give your body more glucose through food, then it has no choice but to burn through the glycogen to keep your energy levels up. What happens when the glycogen runs out? Your body still needs an energy source, so it starts using fat. When you combine fat burning with calorie restriction, you can see good weight loss results from your fast.
Through fasting, you’re also at a lower risk of eating trigger foods and beverages that worsen your arthritis symptoms.
A classic study in The Lancet reports that “fasting is an effective treatment for rheumatoid arthritis,” although the researchers do say food relapsing post-fast is a possibility.
To come to their conclusion, the researchers worked with nearly 30 participants, following them for more than a year. First, the participants fasted for up to 10 days, then the first group switched to eating vegetarian foods over three to five months.
For the second half of the year, those participants went on a lactovegetarian diet, which introduces dairy but still no eggs, meat, or poultry. The other group didn’t eat a vegetarian or lactovegetarian diet at any point.
The first group experienced less joint tenderness after the study concluded, and they also had better grip strength, less stiffness in the morning, reduced swelling, and less pain. Even better is most of these results persisted for upwards of a year, although it’s not clear if that’s because the participants stayed on the diet.
How Long Does It Take to Experience Arthritis Relief on a Fast?
If you begin fasting for arthritis, when will you start having less pain? Well, it depends, but most experts agree that a longer, multi-day fast produces the best results for arthritis pain.
If you’re fasting for rheumatoid arthritis, then the Express article we linked you to at the beginning of this post recommends a fast of at least 48 hours. An arthritis expert quoted in the article named Lynne McTaggart personally recommended the timeframe. She said this to Express: “Fasting for just two days can kick-start the immune system – and might reverse auto immune conditions such as arthritis.”
The 2014 study in Cell Stem Cell that gave us a much better understanding into how fasting positively affects the immune system also recommends a longer fast.
This 2016 Forbes article, which features a write-up of the study, agrees that fasts of 24 to 48 hours are recommended for arthritis relief. This is about how long it takes for your body to begin burning fat instead of glucose, which can renew the immune system and other cells in your body.
The reason this happens is because of autophagy. We have discussed autophagy countless times on this blog, but if you’re a first-time reader, here’s what you need to know. Autophagy is a means of cell recycling that happens almost everywhere in the body. It’s a natural process that can be accelerated when in a fasted state.
Your healthy cells go after the old and damaged ones, eating them so only healthy parts are left. That’s why your white blood cell count temporarily goes down when fasting, as autophagy recycles those old cells so new ones can propagate and keep your immune system healthy.
What Are the Best Fasts for Arthritis?
Okay, so you know you need to fast for at least 24 hours for less arthritis pain, so what are your options? Intermittent fasting, which is a type of start-stop fasting, is highly recommended, but longer-term fasts may also be appropriate.
Here’s what we suggest.
Alternate-Day Fast
When you go an alternate-day fast, you plan your week so every other day, you’re in a fasted state. These fasts must be 24 hours, and they can start from midnight to midnight or 7 a.m. to 7 a.m. the next day, whatever works for you. In the next 24-hour period, you’re free to eat what you want. Then, the next day, you’d fast, and keep repeating that schedule as much as you feel comfortable throughout the week.
Water Fast
If you’re looking for another longer fast, water fasting is a good one. As the name suggests, you drink mostly water on a water fast. This fast can go on for periods of 24 to 48 hours or even for weeks, months, or longer with breaks in between.
Besides water, you can also consume black coffee and green tea, two low-calorie beverages that won’t interrupt fat burning or autophagy.
16:8 Fast
The Forbes article also says that some shorter-term intermittent fasts may be able to reduce arthritis pain. One of these is the 16:8 fast, a form of time-restricted eating in which you eat for eight hours a day and then fast for the next 16 hours. You’d probably have to follow this fast every day for the best results.
5:2 Fast
The 5:2 fast may also work for arthritis sufferers. With this intermittent fasting schedule, you spend five days a week following an arthritis diet. For two days of the week, you must abide by a limited consumption of 500 to 600 calories.
Conclusion
Arthritis is an autoimmune condition that includes rheumatoid arthritis, gout, inflammatory arthritis, and more. Sometimes arthritis is caused by your immune system attacking healthy tissues. Other causes include infection, inflammation, and a buildup of uric acid.
Fasting has been proven as a natural way to alleviate arthritis pain as you lose weight, strengthen your immune system, and reduce inflammation. For best results, plan for a longer fast of up to 48 hours. Good luck!