[Theodores]

If I was in your position, I would ease in to a whole food, plant based diet.

What this means is a lot of cooking from scratch, which means hands! So how about a whole food, plant based diet that requires very little preparation?

This is serious, so please do not waste time with 'cut out teh carbz' bro science. Do not take advice from anyone that talks of 'seed oils' and other keto talking points. Keto and carnivore diets are fad diets that are just another way to get to calorie restriction. They are popular amongst people with protein obsessions and social media influencers, because who does not want to eat steak and butter?

The whole food, plant based diet means no animal products, no refined sugars, no processed foods and lots of plants. Lots is important as vegetables, pulses, grains, beans and fruit are not as calorie dense as a lump of meat. You will need to be eating huge bowls of cooked food and not skipping meals just so you can get your calories in.

On a whole food, plant based diet, you can vary your diet by the season. This means buying from the vegetable and fruit aisles, going for whatever is on offer.

Due to the hands, you might want to buy lots of prepared frozen vegetables. Get the lot.

Oils are what you don't want in your system. Clearly we need some fats but there are plenty in nuts. Personally I only use a small amount of mild olive oil in the air fryer, I don't have butter or fake spreads.

Sugar is surprisingly easy to give up and comes with immediate health benefits as you have to home cook everything to avoid sugar. Sugar is in sauces and other savoury products that you would not expect.

Once you have knocked off sugar, you can knock off the animal products and expand your repertoire of goto plant based recipes.

What works for me is slow cooking. I usually start by putting a chopped onion and some garlic in the pot, to then add some starchy vegetables such as sweet potato, then some leafy greens, then a tonne of lentils and dried beans.

If there is room I put even more vegetables in and add some herbs and spices. Sometimes this could be a curry, or it could be a new herb I am experimenting with. Ginger goes in quite often, there is no fixed recipe as recipes are boring.

I usually add some chopped tomatoes, top up with water and set the thing to do its thing for about four hours.

This approach means I am spending twenty minutes in the kitchen every day, in total. I often add grains such as rice or barley, or I add pasta to the pot after taking my first portion, adding water as appropriate. Grains or pasta does not take four hours, an hour should be good. This means my second portion is a variation on the first.

To top out my slow cooked creation I put some tofu or even some vegetables such as broccoli in the air fryer, with some herbs. This gives different texture.

Just by varying the ingredients I can get variety even though I am doing a one pot meal.

Be an autodidact with this, implement your changes on a monthly basis and see how the inflammation in your hands changes. If you go WFPB then you should end up with excellent gut health, to be in the middle of the Bristol Poo Scale every time, with farts that don't smell.

This is an elimination diet, specifically sugar and animal products. Once you have done the 'factory reset' then you can add in the favourites again, super sensitive to how you feel afterwards. Or you might not want to. I could not care for sugar when it was gone, and the same with dairy, which I thought I was wedded to.

One pot meals, tray bakes and air fried things provide enough variety for me. I don't indulge in salads because of the lack of calories, and neither do I make smoothies because they are for babies, gym bros and people in care homes. Cooking is our original innovation and we need cooked food, mostly starches, to get the calories in.

[srid]

> Keto and carnivore diets are fad diets that are just another way to get to calorie restriction

I wouldn't be so confident in publicly discouraging my fellow human beings from trying these diets.

Speaking personally, I tried various diets -- raw milk diet (drinking 4L of raw milk a day), vegan diet, fruitarian diet, keto diet, caloric restriction, etc. -- before discovering that the carnivore diet helped my own condition (induced by antibiotic abuse), and I wrote about it here: https://srid.ca/carnivore-diet

Diets are personal; people should experiment and find out for themselves. In the long term, therapies like FMT should become widely available, enabling many of us to eat a wider range of food stuff.

[Theodores]

For some reason we have been dragging around this lower intestine that, if keto/carnivore fans would have you believe, we do not need. And that is true, there are people with colostomy bags that are high achievers, without having a functional lower intestine.

Yet others believe that you should be eating all of these fancy probiotic and prebiotic foods to maintain 'gut health' of this lower intestine, as if your life depended on it.

Assuming that both a keto/carnivore diet and a WFPB diet eliminated the food that was causing inflammation, let's say it was sugar, to relieve the arthritis flare ups, then you would think that it would not matter which solution was chosen by the OP.

Well no. The WHO do not list carrots, potatoes and tomatoes as carcinogens. They are not so kind on meat products though. Or alcohol, for that matter. In my own situation, I have a heavy meat eating relative that is having another part of his digestive tract or waterworks operated on every year to remove cancer. He insists on all of the tests, PSA etc., however, I am not willing to just eat steak and get drunk every evening, dutifully getting my nether regions screened for cancer. He would have me believe that it is genetic and not to do with consuming carcinogens. I beg to differ. He has eliminated fibre from his diet, I have eliminated carcinogens.

Fundamentally, our digestive tract is not that of a true carnivore, and, even if it was, there is a price to be paid for consuming animal fats and proteins. This is in the arteries. They get clogged, leading to strokes, heart disease and much else, including cancer, according to some. True carnivores don't live that long, compare the lifespan of the lion to that of its prey. This does not matter to them as they only need to get to reproductive age and procreate.

After getting past the procreation age, priorities change at the individual level. I don't want to die of a heart attack in my fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties or nineties. There are two options for solving this problem, my relative with the cancer woes, steak in one hand, beer in the other, takes a smorgasbord of pills ranging from blood thinners, to statins to much else. He has had the heart bypass operations and more stents than I can count.

Me, I see prevention as better than cure, so that means maintaining a BMI between 19 and 20 with optimal blood pressure, with no cause for blocked arteries due to a diet free of animal products combined with active travel (cycling rather than car dependency).

My relative sees this as no fun at all. Yes, diets are personal. He sees a good weekend as down the pub eating steak and drinking beer, with good company. You can't argue with that, particularly if you are in your twenties. But, I don't want that to be the only option open to me. I like to be able to cycle near effortlessly, to go places and do things during the weekend, even if the only company I get on the way is at the acquaintance level.

Each to their own, I get it. But I am not advocating anything weird. Raw milk, keto, fruitarian, carnivore, junk food vegan and plenty of other diets are weird. You need to be secretly wanting to be in a cult to sign up to these things. No processed food, no refined sugar, no animal products and no alcohol is not how I lived in my younger years, but the fate of my relatives and ancestors has made me embrace the WFPB diet.

[pdfernhout]

Enjoyed reading your post about your success with a WFPB diet as well as the followup comment. Thanks for posting them! Liked your dynamic slow cooker approach to variations. I should try that.

Sad to see your informative and insightful comment modded down. Just goes to show how problematical discussion of all this can be. The issue is not so much ignorance as decades of (often profit-driven) misinformation. Peter C Gøtzsche wrote some books on problematical issues with a profit-driven medical industry.

Some more comments on related issues -- pardon if you have seen much of this before.

On your last paragraph, for salads, Dr. Joel Fuhrman suggests "Make the salad the main dish" including by adding a lot of things to it, like chickpeas and so on, and making dressing using nut butters. https://info.drfuhrman.com/make-salad-the-main-dish

He's also big on smoothies, especially in the morning, where people can drink them on the go.

I did not see you mention mushrooms. Something to consider: https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog/237/g-bombs-the-anti-cancer-f...

As a rule of thumb, Dr. Fuhrman basically suggests eating one pound raw foods and one pound cooked foods per day (ideally all WFPB). I can't say I manage that though. I keep trying to take short-cuts to all this, and probably none of them work that well. I've also tried meal delivery services (like Whole Harvest) but the cost, packaging, timing, and not having recipes tuned to my tastes is problematical -- even if the food is generally healthy otherwise. I am at least eating a lot more leafy greens, often in wraps -- although what I use for wraps can be problematical (any of processed wheat wraps, Ezekiel wraps, corn tortilla wraps, Nori wraps, large leaf lettuce, some worse than others).

Right now I am struggling with what to eat for breakfast. I have been trying some organic oat-based cereal with almond milk, fruit, and an organic plant-based protein powder -- but I know it could probably be much better if I was cooking more. Related to that I have been doing roughly 8:16 intermittent fasting by shifting my eating window into the mornings from roughly about 8am to 4pm (after a seven day water-only fast a couple months ago). So a good breakfast becomes more important. Surprised no comments by anyone here so far have mentioned fasting as another possible way to help with arthritis and other autoimmune issues.

The book "The Pleasure Trap" explains why so many people (whether me or your relative mentioned in your followup) are caught up in a "Pleasure Trap" of unhealthy eating related to how our natural inclinations rooted in food scarcity are maladapted for a world of food abundance (especially an abundance of salt, sugar and fat found in engineered ultraprocessed foods -- and also various non-food-related stress where the natural human response to stress is to fatten up for likely hard times):

https://www.healthpromoting.com/the-pleasure-trap

https://archive.org/details/the-pleasure-trap-mastering-the-...

Joe Cross' movie "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead 2" explores why it can be so hard to keep up with healthy eating in modern Western society: https://www.rebootwithjoe.com/watch-here/

From: https://www.rebootwithjoe.com/about-fat-sick-nearly-dead-2/ "But then a funny thing happened, even with all the knowledge I’d learned, the techniques and tips I’ve gotten from experts, the fact that I was still off all of my medication, I found it was an ongoing struggle to keep the weight off! I was like, “hey, this isn’t supposed to be happening!” I’d done all the hard work, I even got off my meds! But that’s not how it works. I learned that losing the weight was easy, that the hard work really starts when you’re trying to maintain the weight loss. I quickly realized that I wasn’t alone. Seems like everyone has trouble keeping the weight off. That’s where the idea for “Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead #2” came from. I figured that I might as well share all this stuff. I was learning? So while I traveled to 10 countries, learning about health and nutrition along the way, I brought along the camera crew and what I found out is what you’ll see in the film. I visited doctors like Dean Ornish who gave me insight into the keys to health besides food, and Sheila Kar who gave me a view of my own arteries. A real eye-opener, I’ll tell you! I also wanted to know the power of marketing and see if I could eat only what I wanted to, not what I was being told to eat. That was what led me to Professor Brian Wansink who took me on a very enlightening tour of his hometown and showed me how food is sold to us and what we can do about it."

One interesting thing I read on Dr. Fuhrman's site somewhere is that one patient concluded it was cheaper to spend a month at a retreat and learn to eat better to reverse his heart disease than it would be to pay the deductible and copays on a heart bypass operation. I can wish there were more such health retreats all over the USA and the world -- maybe a Y-Combinator success yet to happen about that someday? https://www.drfuhrman.com/etlretreat

Supper clubs are one alternative to "retreats": "Logical Miracles: 100 Stories of Hope and Healing" https://www.amazon.com/Logical-Miracles-Stories-Hope-Healing... "Why is it so hard to eat right? What does it take to turn around the habits that make us sick and fat? Logical Miracles is a collection of stories by people in The Suppers Programs who found their personal solutions by experimenting with whole food. In an environment of nonjudgment, we cook, taste, and feel our way to health, and we forge new friendships based on healthy living. For five years, pilot Suppers groups have been helping people with a range of food-related challenges find their path, especially people with depression, anxiety, learning issues, obesity, diabetes, and problems with alcohol. No special diets. No fees. No commercial messages. The only requirement for membership is the desire to lead a healthier life. Now we’d like to share our logical miracles, our road maps, our recipes, and especially our hard-earned wisdom related as stories of hope and healing. Welcome to Suppers."

A bigger societal-level approach to transformation towards health is pursued by the "Blue Zones" project. https://www.bluezones.com/

Congrats on finding things that work for you to stay healthy in our current short-term-profit-maximizing society -- one that often privatizes gains like from addictive ultra-processed foods while socializing costs like ill health (paid for by higher medical-related taxes/borrowing and higher "health"-insurance premiums, not to mention years of personal suffering or family/communal grief from early deaths).