Does what you eat make your knee pain worse?
The eFEct of an Anti-Inflammatory Diet for Knee oSTeoarthritis (FEAST) Trial: Baseline Characteristics and Relationships With Dietary Inflammatory Index.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Scientists looked at what 144 people with knee pain ate and checked if their diet made their pain worse or better.
No biological mechanisms were identified in this study. This may be an epidemiological, observational, or survey-based study that reports associations rather than proposing causal biological pathways.
Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analyses
Max 100Randomized Controlled Trials
Max 90Cohort Studies
Max 72Case-Control Studies
Max 58Cross-Sectional Studies
Max 44Case Reports & Case Series
Max 30Expert Opinion & Narrative Reviews
Max 544 / 90
Evidence Score
Participants are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups, minimizing bias. Considered the gold standard for testing whether an intervention causes an effect.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Scientists looked at what 144 people with knee pain ate and checked if their diet made their pain worse or better.
No biological mechanisms were identified in this study. This may be an epidemiological, observational, or survey-based study that reports associations rather than proposing causal biological pathways.
Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analyses
Max 100Randomized Controlled Trials
Max 90Cohort Studies
Max 72Case-Control Studies
Max 58Cross-Sectional Studies
Max 44Case Reports & Case Series
Max 30Expert Opinion & Narrative Reviews
Max 544 / 90
Evidence Score
Participants are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups, minimizing bias. Considered the gold standard for testing whether an intervention causes an effect.
Publication
Authors
Law L, Heerey JJ, Devlin BL, Brukner P, De Livera AM, Attanayake A, Cooper I, Donato A, Hebert JR, Price S, White NP, Culvenor AG
Related Content
Claims (6)
When your diet messes up your gut bacteria, it can cause your whole body to be inflamed, which might make your muscles and joints hurt—but eating anti-inflammatory foods like veggies, fish, and nuts can help calm that down and ease the pain.
For older adults with knee arthritis, eating more inflammatory foods doesn’t seem to make their knee pain or function worse, but it does tend to go hand-in-hand with being heavier, having more other health problems, and feeling pain in more joints.
Most people over 45 with knee arthritis are women, they’re around 65 years old on average, and most of them are overweight or obese.
Most people over 45 with knee arthritis also have other health problems—like high blood pressure—and almost 8 out of 10 say their back or other joints hurt too, not just their knee.
People with knee arthritis in their 40s to 80s tend to eat foods that slightly spark inflammation, like processed meats and sugary snacks—but when you adjust for how much they eat overall, their diet is a bit less inflammatory than it first looks.