Chinese diet may help arthritics

Press, 12 November 1977, Page 17

Chinese diet may help arthritics

New Hope for the Arthritic. By Dr Collin H. Dong and Jane Banks. Hart-Davis, Mac Gibbon. 220 pp. Bibliography and index. $5.85. (Reviewed by Mrs J. Perret)

This book comes from Dr Dong’s own experience of having a severe form of arthritis. He recovered from it and he attributes his cure to the strict diet he followed. The book gives information on rheumatic diseases, explains the author’s dietary regimen, and suggests more elaborate menus than were included in “The Arthritic’s Cookbook,” an earlier work by the same authors. The human digestive system is explained in detail, to prove that the quality and quantity of food alters the whole chemistry of the body. Scientific studies during the last three decades have shown that what people eat can cause such degenerative diseases as heart diseases, strokes, diabetes and hypertension. Dr Dong quotes from the American Arthritis Foundation’s booklet “Diet and Arthritis” which encourages any arthritic (or non-arthritic) person to have a well-balanced diet, including dairy products, meat, vegetables, fruits and cereals. But if this advice is beneficial, he writes, then almost every person should have relatively good health. Whv, then, the increase in many chronic and degenerative diseases that are not caused by germs and viruses? Dr Dong suggests that the “well-balanced diet” may be the main factor leading to heart diseases, diabetes, and even cancer. To him, it seems logical to suppose that it may also lead to another degenerative disease: arthritis.

Dr Dong describes his own experience. He had no training in the science of nutrition at medical school and had never given much thought to the problem of food and its effect on the body. During the first two decades of his life he had subsisted on a fairly simple Chinese diet — mainly beef, pork, chicken, fish, vegetables and

rice, and never any desserts. When he started to practice medicine at the age of 28, he changed his diet to a typical American one: orange juice, bacon and eggs, tinned soups, roast beef, soft drinks. After seven years he gained 40 pounds, and had developed arthritis. He was treated with the usual high dose of aspirin, and other medications, and developed an allergy to them. His condition became worse until he remembered his father saying: “Sickness enters through the mouth, and catastrophe comes out of the mouth.”

As an experiment he went back to the Chinese “poor-man’s diet” he had been brought up on and finally settled on seafood, vegetables and rice. In a few weeks his skin improved, he was agile again, had lost three stone, and stiffness and pain disappeared from his joints. He then combined his newlyacquired knowledge of nutrition with a moderate amount of chemical therapy as a working hypothesis, to treat patients with rheumatic diseases and has treated thousands of patients who have experienced remission from pain and misery. Some of the more common types of arthritis are explained, and he cites the modern theories as to the causes of arthritis: bacteria or viruses, auto-immune theory, emotional factors, or metabolic and biochemical factors. It is time, he writes, to stop looking along those lines. His hypothesis as to the cause of arthritis is that the critical factors are food allergens. Millions of people suffer from allergic disease; the medical profession can no longer afford to neglect the study of allergy and nutrition, he maintains. Dr Dong believes it is important for patients who follow his diet to exercise as soon as the pain decreases in order to prevent atrophy

of the muscles and stiffness of the joints, but recommends to stop if there is pain. The best exercises are swimming and walking in fresh air. He also believes his diet could help people to live longer. He often gives acupuncture in addition to the diet. But he warns people that his dietary regimen is an auxiliary treatment for arthritis. Arthritic sufferers may have other physical conditions that require medical supervision, and he recommends that they seek advice from their own doctor first.

Dr Dong’s diet principle is: It is what you eat that counts. Do eat seafood, vegetables, honey, rice. Do not eat meat, fruit, dairy products, spices, alcohol, chocolate, soft drinks. Once on the diet, never leave it, even for one meal.

His theory is well explained, with many patients’ testimonies to prove its efficacy. It seems surprising, however, that people who had suffered arthritis for 20 or 40 years with, no dobut, many joints damaged, could get rid of all stiffness and pain in a few weeks, just by dieting. Also, if this Chinese “poor-man’s diet” is so fool-proot, how is it that poor people living in China or Japan, eating mainly fish, rice and vegetables, still get arthritis? It would certainly harm no one to try the diet, even without having arthritis, (the promise to live to 100 years old, in health, is very tempting) as long as patients do not. stop taking the drugs their own doctors have prescribed for them. But it would be very hard to stick to such a strict diet, especially in a country where quality meat and dairy products are plentiful, and where juicy fruits grow in many gardens.

[Mrs Perret is senior physiotherapist, rheumatology, at Christchurch Hospital.]