Recap: How to lower your risk of arthritis | Dr Tamiko Katsumoto

Hello, and welcome to Zoe recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're talking about arthritis. It It might not sound as serious as cancer or heart disease, but arthritis can have a huge impact on your quality of life, turning simple movements into painful tasks. But here's the good news. Emerging research suggests that diet can have a huge impact on the symptoms of arthritis, helping to lower inflammation and even reduce the risk of the disease developing. I'm joined by Doctor. Tomiko Katsumoto to explore how simple changes to what's on our plate can help protect our joints. You know, it's been eight years since I co founded ZOE. And I think every year I've just got more and more shocked at the way in which, you know, the food that we're eating, you know, across the Western world is making us so sick, but also just discovering each year about ways in which it affects us that I had no idea about. So today, we're talking to you as a professor of immunology and rheumatology at Stanford about arthritis and how it's linked to food. And I never would have guessed when I found it, Zoe, that it could have anything to do with food. In fact, I would have said that was, you know, like crazy, totally nonscientific. So it's amazing how much I think my understanding has changed. What is arthritis and how does that relate to this concept of inflammation, which I know is a lot about what you study? I'm a rheumatologist, so I take care of patients with arthritis, with a lot of other inflammation of other organs. So rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, vasculitis, you know, psoriatic arthritis, you name it. I think arthritis is complex. Basically, our joints are generally protected areas where you've got your bone, you've got a synovial lining, you know, you've got this nice joint capsule that is lubricated so that it allows us to move freely. The problem is, with inflammation, there can actually be a breach of those protective barriers, such that you can end up getting inflammation. There's actually connection with the gut and mucosal barriers that play into the inflammation, leading to arthritis. And, Tomiko, I know nothing about how my joints work, and I could see you're sort of painting a picture of I'm sort of imagining somehow something, I don't know, a bit quite mechanical with some oil running. Could is that the right analogy? Is that what you described? Could you just help me to understand a bit? Yeah. I think that, you know, it's actually I'm thinking about this. There's a lot of analogies. We talk a lot I know Zoey talks a lot about the gut and how there's this important lining of the gut. Similarly, I think you can think about the joint in that there's an important lining called the synovial lining …