Nightshade veggies can worsen arthritis

Joint pain? Try eliminating these foods from your diet

Q: I learned the hard way how nightshade vegetables like tomatoes and green peppers can flare up my arthritis, but I’m still confused as to why. And are there any other “nightshade” foods I need to avoid?

GR: In the 1950s, Norman Childers, Ph.D., found that eliminating so-called “nightshade” vegetables from the diet could completely eliminate arthritis symptoms in many cases.

According to Dr. Childers, nightshade sensitivity isn’t an allergy but actually a progressive loss of the ability to metabolize substances known as “solanine alkaloids,”
which are found in all nightshade vegetables.

Unfortunately, there’s no test that can tell you if your arthritis will respond to a nightshade-free diet. It’s strictly a “try it and see” situation.

Nightshade vegetables include tomatoes, potatoes, peppers (including paprika, but not black pepper), eggplants, and tobacco.

It’s harder than it might seem to completely eliminate nightshades. Tomato and potato, for instance, make their way into a wide variety of food products. Pepper gets around a lot, too.

But as difficult as it is to eradicate ALL of them, I tell my patients that even eliminating the most common nightshades is definitely worth trying.

It may take three to four months of eliminating them to make a difference in the symptoms. Many people have found that eliminating nightshade vegetables can dramatically improve pain and swelling around their joints.

After that, if the benefits still aren’t clear, the other option to try is exactly the opposite — a “nightshade challenge,” in which LOTS of tomato, potato, and peppers are eaten to see what kind of effects they may have.

If the pain comes back after the challenge, that’s a sure sign that those foods should be eliminated from the diet — and permanently.

Nightshade vegetables aren’t the only ones that can aggravate cases of arthritis, though. In fact, the ¬first thing I recommend to my patients with osteoarthritis is to change certain aspects of their diet, as many food allergies and sensitivities can make it worse.

To boot, attention to diet is very important to controlling rheumatoid arthritis in particular — even MORE so than in cases of osteoarthritis. I’ve observed improvement in every case of rheumatoid arthritis with elimination and desensitization of food allergy — and not just elimination of nightshade vegetables.

But, in those cases, an elimination diet may be too daunting in order to discover what it is that you’re actually sensitive or allergic to — and that’s where testing comes into play.

I find that most mainstream doctors look for only the most EXTREME cases of food allergies (as indicated by a marker known as immunoglobulin-E, or IgE for short), but we integrative doctors tend to take a deeper dive and look at other markers, including immunoglobulin-G (or IgG), which can indicate milder sensitivities.

Your best bet is to see a doctor well-versed in integrative medicine who can run the appropriate tests… AND know how to interpret the results.