Award-winning New York chef Seamus Mullen was a finalist on the Food Network’s Next Iron Chef, but a rheumatoid arthritis flare-up made it difficult for him to finish the show. Rather than resort to a 100% medicine-based treatment plan, he started to look into the causes of the disease, and if he could reduce his symptoms with the right foods.
“Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease, and our immune system directly responds to the food that we eat," he writes in the bestseller Hero Foods: How Cooking With Delicious Things Can Make Us Feel Better. Mullen lists 18 foods he found have made a huge difference to his joints.
These are: olive oil, dried beans, almonds, ancient grains, anchovies, eggs, free range chicken, sweet peas, parsley, berries, carrots, corn, stone fruit, fish, squash, mushrooms, leafy greens and grass-fed red meat.
For example, when he has a bout of RA pain, he reaches for the parsley, that he believes clears out the buildup of uric acid in the joints (the cause of the pain). He mixes a handful parsley with lemon juice and an apple in a juicer and a couple of hours later he finds his pain is significantly less.
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