Healing an Autoimmune Disease with Diet
What is an Autoimmune Disease?
Did you know that autoimmune disease affects 23.5 million Americans and 80% are women? So what is an autoimmune disease and why is it impacting the population on such a large scale?
Autoimmune diseases result when your immune system is overactive, causing it to attack and damage your own body. Your immune system creates proteins called antibodies to protect you against harmful foreign cells. In autoimmune disease your immune system attacks your own cells.
Physicians have identified over 100 different autoimmune diseases, and in some cases the antibodies attack one specific organ. For instance Type 1 Diabetes attacks the pancreas and Graves’ disease or Hashimoto's disease attacks the thyroid. Other types of autoimmune diseases attack the whole body such as Lupus.
The Most Common Autoimmune Diseases Are:
Multiple sclerosis
Myasthenia gravis
Pernicious anemia
Reactive arthritis
Rheumatoid arthritis
Sjogren syndrome
Lupus
Type 1 diabetes
What Causes Autoimmune Diseases?
There are many theories but ultimately, doctors are unsure why autoimmune diseases occur or why they affect more women than men.
Some potential theories for why autoimmune diseases occur relate to hormonal influences, viral or bacterial infections triggering immune responses, malfunction in the regulation of the immune system, such as failure to switch off after fighting cancer cells, and chronic stress or tissue damage leading to persistent inflammation.
Genetics play a role in autoimmune disease but researchers do not understand how. Having a family member with an autoimmune disease may increase your risk of having an autoimmune disease but genetics alone does not cause an autoimmune disease. The good news is that it’s possible to have a strong family history of autoimmune diseases and never get a disease, and it’s even possible to test positive for a disease and never get the disease.
Can “Leaky Gut” Cause Autoimmune Disease?
When the protective lining of the intestine, known as the epithelial barrier, is compromised, it leads to a condition called leaky gut syndrome. This increased permeability allows toxins to escape into the body, triggering an immune response. Research indicates that this immune reaction may play a role in the development of autoimmune diseases. Essentially, when your gut is leaking toxins, your body remains in a state of constant alertness.
Various factors contribute to the disruption of the intestinal barrier, including unhealthy dietary choices, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, stress, and exposure to environmental contaminants. These lifestyle and environmental factors can exacerbate the risk of developing leaky gut syndrome, thereby potentially increasing the likelihood of autoimmune disease.
How Autoimmune Diseases Impact Joint Health:
Rheumatoid arthritis is the most well known autoimmune disease that affects the joints. Many other autoimmune diseases cause joint inflammation with resulting pain, swelling, and damage. Examples include lupus, polymyalgia rheumatica, and psoriatic arthritis.
An orthopedist may be the first physician to treat the patient with an inflammatory arthritis caused by an autoimmune disease. There are several situations where the orthopedist may consider referral to a rheumatologist or consider preliminary blood work to test for inflammatory markers.
The inflammation is more than expected from normal degeneration seen with age of the joint or osteoarthritis (degenerative joint disease)
The inflammation is greater than expected for the degree of injury
The inflammation involves multiple joints
The inflammation does not respond as expected to treatment
Joint Pain Treatments
Your physician will aim to reduce inflammation, which will also decrease your pain using medication. Steroids will decrease inflammation by lessening your immune system's response. Unfortunately, these slow down your entire immune system and can have negative side effects.
Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medicines (NSAIDs) can be helpful to decrease inflammation and are generally tolerated by healthy patients. However, they should be avoided if you have a history of kidney issues, heart issues, stomach or intestinal ulcers, or you are on blood thinners.
Finally, if these treatments prove ineffective, a rheumatologist will explore a variety of medications.
Does Lifestyle Affect Autoimmune Diseases?
Embracing a healthy lifestyle isn't just beneficial for managing symptoms of autoimmune diseases – it can also hold the key to prevention or even elimination of these conditions altogether. Prioritizing stress reduction, regular exercise, and quality sleep can significantly alleviate autoimmune symptoms. To learn more about improving your sleep, fitness, and stress levels, explore the Lifestyle page on the The Real House MD website.
Lastly, enhancing your diet could have the greatest impact in treating an autoimmune disease. Many medical experts advise reducing intake of junk food, sugar, and processed foods as a pivotal step toward better health.
Lifestyle and the Patient/Physician Relationship
Most physicians will try to use medicines to improve your symptoms because this has the most immediate effect and the most consistent compliance. They may discuss lifestyle changes but if a patient is not interested then they likely will not emphasize this.
That said, most physicians would love for you to be an active participant in your health journey and address a disease from all angles. I personally prefer to inform patients of their options.
Every food item has the potential to contain toxins that may trigger sensitivities in the patient. These toxins could be the culprits behind their leaky gut or the substances leaking through and exacerbating their autoimmune disease. Remarkably, even a minuscule amount of these toxins could ignite inflammation in the body for months. Armed with this knowledge, there are three paths you can consider moving forward.
Path #1: Take the medicine your physician prescribed to treat the symptoms
Path #2: Take the medicine, and shift your lifestyle and diet in moderation to (hopefully) decrease the symptoms
Path #3: Commit to identifying and removing all dietary toxins in the pursuit of reducing symptoms, minimizing the necessity for medication, and potentially eradicating the disease altogether.
There are no guarantees, and it’s important to note that there are more than just dietary toxins in our environment, which can contribute to an autoimmune disease.
If You Choose Path #3…
Many of my patients have told me over the years that they would do anything to get better. Well, this is where the rubber meets the road.
Elimination diets are restrictive by nature and require willpower to build new habits (If you need some extra willpower consider reading my blog “Willpower and Habits”)
When considering autoimmune diets, there are two primary options: Option 1 involves eliminating select items and carefully monitoring your body's response. Should you experience improvement, you can either maintain this regimen or gradually reintroduce one food at a time to gauge tolerance levels. Conversely, Option 2 entails a more radical approach, eliminating nearly all foods to observe symptom improvement before slowly reintroducing items one by one.
Option 1:
Option 1 typically involves adopting an Autoimmune Paleo diet, which focuses on foods reminiscent of those consumed by early humans: fruits, vegetables, lean meats, eggs, nuts, and seeds, while entirely avoiding sugar and processed foods. This approach may seem restrictive, but it offers a variety of options. One structured example is the Wahl Protocol, progressing through three levels of dietary adjustments to optimize health outcomes. However, transitioning from a Standard American Diet can pose challenges, particularly during the initial sugar withdrawal phase. While Option 1 proves effective for many, some individuals may encounter unexpected sensitivities, necessitating further dietary modifications.
^A Better Diet for Autoimmunity is mistitled. He is arguing many patients respond to the less restrictive variant.
Option 2
Option 2 involves a significantly more restrictive carnivore diet, where only meat, eggs, and butter are consumed. While this approach is criticized for its extremity, proponents argue its effectiveness as an elimination diet. Despite concerns about cholesterol and lipid levels, advocates contend that these effects are limited to specific subsets of individuals and may not be detrimental given the absence of inflammatory foods.
The video above describes how Mikhaila Peterson suffered from severe autoimmune arthritis. She got relief from eating only red meat and water. When she attempted to add food back her symptoms returned. As a result she can only eat the most restrictive diet that is compatible with survival. Obviously this is difficult but she prefers this restriction to avoid a life of disability and pain.
Conclusion
I recently completed a 30 day carnivore challenge with 13 of my friends, and I will be writing about the results in a future blog. As a preview I can say the restrictions were somewhat challenging but the results were surprisingly good!
In conclusion I would like to leave you with some motivation. For those who know me I have always loved the movie character Rocky Balboa. In this scene see yourself as Rocky, Mickey is the physician, and Apollo Creed is the challenging disease. Your physician will likely only say it once. They will want you to fight hard- take your medicines and overhaul your lifestyle, but if you only want to take your medicine they will only prescribe medicine.
“I’m gonna say this once and then I’m not going to say it again…..
But I say, for God’s sake, why don’t you stand up and fight this guy hard….
But don’t lay down in front of him like this…
But if you're gonna blow this thing I'm gonna blow it with you.”
- Mickey to Rocky in the chapel Rocky