John Arts Abundant Living www.johnarts.co.nz

I've been working with someone who has had problems with his knees. He had damaged one knee some time ago. In more recent times his ‘good' knee had started to deteriorate from osteoarthritis. Eventually his ‘good' knee became worse than the knee damaged in an accident.

I followed up with him after six weeks and in his own words he thought the results were ‘amazing'. He has much less pain and is more mobile. He has come from a position where working was becoming increasingly difficult to now being more confident about the future.

There are several lessons we can learn from this. The first is our bodies have an extraordinary ability to heal. However, healing is dependent on the smooth operation of our healing systems. In many cases, healing is restricted because the body system that is designed to heal the damage is faulty or has just stopped functioning. The outcome of this is always disease.

In this case we made a number of changes. The first is to try and identify foods that either cause inflammation or in some way restrict healing. Two of the most important groups of nutrients are fats, because they govern the inflammatory pathways and antioxidants because they protect our cells from damage. Please email me if you'd like a copy of my Anti-Inflammatory Nutrition Guide.

We can also cheat a bit. Actually, we can cheat a lot. I see effective joint health supplements as the ultimate cheat. We can target specific compounds that have a direct therapeutic function in the body. For example, we can add therapeutic levels of Chondroitin Sulphate to greatly impact the health and stability of cartilage. Adding significant amounts of curcumin, the active ingredient in turmeric, can reduce inflammation and swelling in the joint capsule.

For more information, give me a call or email: john@abundant.co.nz Read my newsletter at: www.abundant.co.nz John Arts is a qualified nutritional medicine practitioner and founder of Abundant Health. Contact John on 0800 423 559. To read more go to www.sunlive.co.nz