Cherries for Arthritis

Cherries have been used by arthritis sufferers for many years to alleviate pain, and many studies have been done to support their claims. Cherries must do something for arthritis, for in 2005 the FDA moved to make companies take down their health claims about cherries. Obviously they were more keen for arthritis sufferers to be taking anti-TNFs, NSAIDs or the famous Methotrexate, all of these in some form or other will destroy your immune system, which is already compromised if you have rheumatoid arthrits, or send you to hospital with internal bleeding .Far better to eat a bowl of tart cherries to relieve arthritis symptoms.

“In a study involving rats, the researchers report that animals that received powdered tart cherries in their diet had lower total cholesterol, lower blood sugar, less fat storage in the liver, lower oxidative stress and increased production of a molecule that helps the body handle fat and sugar, compared with rats that didn’t receive cherries as part of an otherwise similar diet. All of the rats had a predisposition toward high cholesterol and pre-diabetes, but not obesity”.

“The chemicals that give tart cherries their red color may relieve pain better than aspirin and may provide antioxidant protection comparable to commercially available supplements like vitamin E, according to Michigan State University researchers. The new findings “suggest that the consumption of cherries may have the potential to reduce cardiovascular or chronic diseases in humans (such as arthritis and gout),” write the scientists”.

“Results of a preliminary study by ARS scientists and their university colleagues suggest that some natural compounds in plump, juicy Bing cherries may reduce painful arthritic inflammation. Eating cherries may also help lessen the severity of other inflammatory conditions, such as cardiovascular disease or cancer”.

In the above study ten healthy women volunteered to eat a bowl of 45 freshly pitted cherries for breakfast, they were not allowed to eat any other type of red berry for 2 days before the study began.It was found that the volunteers’ plasma urate levels decreased significantly over the 5 hours after their meal of cherries. Levels of urate removed from the body in urine increased over those 5 hours. The results indicate that cherries may be very benifical for the urate deposits which cause gout attacks.

Cherries are a rich source of antioxidants, anthocyanins, biflavanoids, perillyl alcohol and melatonin, all of which offer positive benefits to sufferers of arthritis, for these compounds in cherries scavange free radicals, prevent cancer and diabetes, and the melatonin assists sleep. Cherries are very beneficial not only for arthritis, but for all diseases, a more delicious solution to health problems would be hard to find.