Painopolis

By now, we’ve all heard that eating a plant-based diet protects against cardiovascular disease. But can you eat your way to better health if your medical problem is chronic pain? And if so, which diet could accomplish that, and how quickly? And could it do so even more effectively than prescription drugs?

In June 2016, 32-year-old dental hygienist Gabrielle Fennimore decided to find out. She’d suffered for years with ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disease that attacks the colon and triggers severe abdominal pain and bloody diarrhea. Despite taking powerful anti-inflammatory medications, her symptoms were getting worse rather than better.

So last summer, she took the gutsy step of flying from her home on the east coast to attend a 10-day dietary program in California run by internist John McDougall. Here’s what you need to know about McDougall: he’s all about eating exclusively starches, vegetables, and fruit. That means no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no cooking oil, and no junk food. In other words, goodbye, typical American diet! Unlike Fennimore’s physician back home who championed medications instead of diet to control her ulcerative colitis, McDougall argues just the opposite.

He claims that eating low on the food chain can fend off the plague of chronic ailments targeting countries that follow a Western-style diet. Those diet-related diseases, he says, include the obvious ones: clogged arteries and diabetes, for starters. But he also insists that our Western way of eating puts us at greater risk for certain cancers (including breast, colon and prostate cancer) as well as autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. What’s more, McDougall contends that a plant-based diet can promote healing in people who have already those diseases.

Other researchers have also linked the Western diet with an upswing in various chronic diseases. For Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, however, the scientific research to date has been inconsistent in nailing down that cause-and-effect relationship and pinpointing which specific elements withing the Western diet might be most to blame. So McDougall’s approach sounds promising in theory. But when you put a plant-based diet to the test in the real world, can it actually reduce chronic pain and other symptoms enough to make a difference?

Well, it’s now been the better part of a year since Fennimore took McDougall’s advice. And it hasn’t been easy. Her colon was already so fragile that for the first few weeks she subsisted only on pureed squash soup. And because of that hyper-spartan menu, her weight quickly dropped to an emaciated-looking 88 pounds.

Despite those challenges, she stuck with it. And today, eight months after she opted for a plant-based diet and stopped taking her medications, we find out if her symptoms have improved; how she weathered the trial-and-error ordeal of figuring out which foods to include on her grocery list; why that list is still limited to just 15 items; and lastly, how hard it’s been for this self-confessed foodie to give up fine dining in favor of a menu that’s heavy on squash, rice, and purple sweet potatoes.

Go to this episode’s show notes at https://painopolis.com/can-a-plant-based-diet-thwart-chronic-pain/ for more on the relationship between autoimmune disease and diet.