Medications and Diet

• Some prescription medications for arthritis pain can affect how you should be eating, because they cause your body to lose potassium, retain sodium, reduce vitamin B-12 absorption, and lower your copper levels. Because of these effects, you may need to change your diet to include more potassium, less sodium, and more foods with vitamin B-12 with foods such as avocados, bananas, tomatoes, fish and dairy products. You may need a supplement in addition to diet change to bring these levels to normal. You should always check with your doctor before taking a supplement, especially if you're on blood thinning medications, because certain supplements may interact negatively with your medications.
  
  

Healthy Living

• Living a healthy lifestyle is one of the best things you can do to ease your arthritis pain. Diet is especially important because being overweight is one of the most common causes of excess arthritis pain. Being overweight puts too much stress on your joints. One of the first steps in losing weight is to follow the United States Agricultural Department's seven guidelines for a healthy diet. The seven guidelines include eating a variety of foods, maintaining a healthy weight (determined by your doctor), avoiding too much fat and cholesterol in your diet, avoiding too much sugar in your diet, getting enough starch and fiber, avoiding too much sodium and drinking alcohol in moderation. Eating according to these guidelines may help you lose weight if you're overweight or maintain a healthy weight if you are not.
  
  

Special Diets

• There are no studies that conclude that certain foods make arthritis worse. However, many people feel that eliminating plants from the nightshade family, such as potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, from their diets helps reduce arthritis pain significantly. Since foregoing these foods is probably not harmful as long as you get similar nutrients from other vegetables in your diet, you may try eliminating them from your diet for a few weeks to see if the approach works for you.
  
  Several studies in both the United States and Canada have concluded that patients who ate meat when they were diagnosed with arthritis showed significant improvement in symptoms and even joint function when they switched to a vegetarian diet compared with those patients who continued to eat meat, according to the Toronto Vegetarian Association. This may have more to do with maintaining a healthy weight than the specific foods that vegetarians eat, because vegetarians are more likely to maintain a healthy weight than people who eat meat. However, if you are having trouble controlling your arthritis symptoms, adopting a vegetarian diet may help.