J Ayurveda Integr Med. 2010 Oct-Dec; 1(4): 241–242.

doi: 10.4103/0975-9476.74421

PMCID: PMC3117313

PMID: 21731368

A traditional way of rice preparation with particular benefits for Arthritis and musculo-skeletal disorders

Muralidhar Kontum

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Sir,

The review paper by Chopra in J-AIM[1] concerning Ayurveda drugs for Arthritis is clearly of great value to those who have contracted the disease, but in order to be considered full Ayurveda treatments, such drugs need to be combined with diet and lifestyle recommendations appropriate to the patient. In this sense the studies concerned are not really about Ayurveda as practiced, but about a bowdlerized Ayurveda seen from the biomedical perspective, with its treatments implemented and evaluated strictly as a substitution for western medicine. This constitutes a sad failure to acknowledge Ayurveda’s unique features which promise to give it a highly valued place in medicine globally.

Diet and lifestyle components of Ayurveda are fundamental, and, as is well known, Ayurveda states that even the administration of the correct medicine to cure a complaint may not be of lasting value unless the lifestyle and diet of the patient are attended to. Most chronic illnesses or degenerative diseasees like arthritis result from persistent stresses placed on the system by personal habits which, in the long term, build into unacceptable strain on regulatory function. Over the years, such strain drives the system to breaking point, and pathology results.

Ayurveda is clear that diet and lifestyle have to be attended to. Without such action, say its texts, disease will inevitably return. To implement this, the vaidya plays the role of ‘doctor’ in the true sense of the word’s Latin root, ‘docere’, meaning ‘to teach’. Ayurveda traditional treatments incorporate components of instruction in remedial diet and so on, to help bring the patient’s regulatory system back to whatever state of relative equilibrium can still be regained after years of misuse. If the patient’s system is strong, however, such remedial instruction can often be of actual curative value.

Knowledge of good dietary practices was deeply embedded in India’s traditional culture. Earlier generations often observed age-old procedures for doing particular things for reasons they did not fully understand, but did out of habit from the example of their elders. Skeptical younger generations did not always continue to conform to tradition, and so the knowledge has slowly been lost.

In the case of arthritis, there is a method of cooking rice which appears to be very effective in helping musculoskeletal conditions. The method removes extra starch, increases vitamin content, and generally improves nutritional value, in such a way that arthritic conditions and several other classes of pathology seem to benefit considerably.

The method of preparation is simple and straightforward. First cook your rice with enough excess water, so that when water remaining after cooking is drained off, any excess starch is removed with it. Instead of throwing this valuable starch solution down the drain, it is used constructively: half is offered to animals and plants, while the other half is inoculated with buttermilk and a pinch of fenugreek seeds - apparently because the strain of yeast that grows on fenugreek seeds is of particular value - and fermented overnight. The following day it is added to the pot in which the day’s rice is being cooked.

The value of this procedure is easy to understand. Firstly, the most soluble carbohydrates are removed from the rice, so sugar loading is decreased. Early stages of digestion of ingested material may be expected to cause less impact on blood glucose levels. Secondly, decrease in the food’s Kapha content as a result of reduction of easily available carbohydrates decreases tendencies to constipation, and improves elimination. Finally, the food’s added microbial content from the lactobacillus and yeast considerably increases its nutritional value.

This single procedure therefore has health promoting and preventative value for many conditions. Decrease in sugar loading will reduce tendencies to obesity, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 Diabetes. The reduction in Kapha and constipation will tend to improve long term colon health, and all conditions involving ama, and amavata, such as the various forms of arthritis. Improved vitamin content from the lactobacillus and yeast (killed by the cooking) will help all conditions. I have extensive anecdotal evidence for all these kinds of benefit from adopting the procedure.

My grandmother never failed to use the above procedure when cooking the day’s rice, and our family enjoyed excellent health, but neither she nor the next generation understood the basis for its benefits. When she died, it ceased. Some years ago, seeking ways to improve health, I remembered her procedure, so I then adopted it, and have found it beneficial.

I recently recommended it to an elderly female friend, who had become bedridden from arthritis. Within two weeks of adopting it she was on her feet and able to do housework again. I then told two vaidyas about it, and after the wife had lost four pounds in ten days, they were sufficiently impressed to print a small pamphlet and distribute it among their patients. They received many reports of freedom from constipation, and feelings of lightness in the body that had developed over a similar time period.

The same vaidyas said that they did not know of reference for this procedure in Ayurveda’s literature, but this does not make it less Ayurvedic. Ayurveda’s knowledge of life and how to improve life-span has been recorded, and ‘codified’, by those who observed benefits received by their fellow human-beings from whatever cause. Today’s Charaka Samhita is a compilation of such observations over many millennia, now amplified by all later Nighantus.

This kind of procedure is a free way to improve health. It could be easily taught by doctor-vaidyas everywhere. Precise assessment of its benefits as a preventive measure would be of interest to evidence-based medicine; so would its therapeutic applications. In his summary of his work to the World Ayurveda Congress*, Dr Chopra mentioned that he would like to see Ayurveda’s holistic treatments assessed, not simply their phytomedicines used as substitutes for biomedical drugs. Might he and his colleagues not consider also evaluating the benefits which the above procedure may bring to his patients, and eventually those in some future arthritis study? Then he will be one step closer to evaluating Ayurveda as actually practiced.

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REFERENCES

1. Chopra A, Saluja M, Tillu G. Ayurveda - Modern medicine interface: A critical appraisal of studies of Ayurvedic medicines to treat osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. J Ayur Integr Med. 2010;1:190–8.[PMC free article] [PubMed]

Meat only diet helps with depression and arthritis

Jordan Peterson and daughter swear by carnivore diet

By HELEN RUMBELOW

THE TIMES

12:00AM AUGUST 10, 2018

184 COMMENTS

For those familiar with the world of Jordan Peterson, it may come as no surprise that he is a red-blooded carnivore.

I do not mean that as some kind of intellectual metaphor. Yes, the Canadian psychology professor turned lifestyle guru to millions of young men worldwide has always regarded intellectual pursuits as something of a blood sport, but now he has become evangelical about his diet.

“I eat beef, salt and water. That’s it,” he says. Or, rather, meat seasoned with the controversy he finds so appetising.

Peterson has joined the new fashion for a “carnivore” diet, claiming it saved him from his lifelong depression.

“I need less sleep. I’m not anxious, not depressed,” Peterson said last month with the air of someone reeling from a miracle, and in fact the beef and water diet is so ascetic as to feel semi-religious. “I am intellectually at my very best at the moment. The depression is gone.”



Mikhaila Peterson is Jordan Peterson’s 26-year-old daughter and the inspiration for his radical diet. She has an Instagram account subtitled “Beef, salt, water and bourbon = cured” and a food blog called Don’t Eat That, subtitled “Many (if not most) health problems are treatable with diet alone”, in which she chronicles her and her father’s remarkable recovery from depression and anxiety. He now wakes without a feeling of doom, she reports jubilantly, and adds, in Peterson defiance mode, “F..k you, world — we won.”

This all makes Mikhaila Peterson the poster girl for the carnivore-diet movement, gaining traction among a similar crowd who already idolise Jordan, the highly influential bestselling author of 12 Rules for Life, whose YouTube videos have been viewed more than 50 million times.

Mik­haila Peterson also has done a lot of YouTube interviews. Yet what I find so appealing when I talk to her is that she knows that what she is doing sounds weird and can laugh about it.

“Sounds absolutely insane,” she says, and she knows there is no medical evidence to back it up. She laughs when I say her family has become “reluctantly kooky”.

“Yes. Totally. I was always really sceptical about diet. I thought it was for silly Californian girls. My father certainly did not want to get into this. He was always against diet as a solution because there was no hard scientific evidence linking to diet. At the beginning he was, like, ‘I’m not even going to mention this — it’s too weird.’ Now I’m literally eating the most extreme diet I’ve ever heard of. It’s absurd.” She laughs again.

She looks gorgeously healthy and has a daughter who is nearly one year old (and, by the way, survives only on meat and breast milk), but from infancy Mikhaila Peterson was very ill. She had severe juvenile rheumatoid arthritis that degenerated to the point that she had to have a hip and ankle replacement at the age of 17 and suffered chronic, severe pain.

Given new research into the link between depression and inflammation, it’s no surprise that, as a sufferer of an inflammatory illness, she developed depression in her late teens. It became so crippling that she could not finish university. She became “desperate to try anything” and began eliminating food groups. She remembers typing “allergic to everything” into Google. Then “allergic to everything except meat”. She discovered “beef is what makes me feel the best”. She fries strips of it with “just salt. Pepper doesn’t work.” Not even a few grains of pepper? Some tea? “No,” she says. “Nothing else. Just sparkling water.”

She reports that since January her depression and arthritis have resolved. Her doctors, she says, believe the results are a “placebo effect”. But she says her microbiome is unsuited to anything other than meat. She knows this goes against every “eat your greens” dietary guideline — “Completely, yes.”

Emma Morano was one of the longest living women in history; she died at 117, cheerful to the last. Her diet was surprising. She subsisted on biscuits and three eggs a day and, when she turned 100, added raw mince with a little pasta. She was famed for her good cheer, so is not a great example for the “anti-inflammatory” diet proponents, but Valter Longo likes to tell her story anyway.

Longo is the director of the University of Southern California Longevity Institute and the author of The Longevity Diet. He is famous for his research into fasting, diet and longevity. “Meat is nearly absent from the diet of the longest lived people in the world,” he says. Sardinians traditionally eat meat less than once a week, “and lead long, very happy lives”.

From what we know, Longo says, “a diet with a lot of meat is the worst” and as a result he gave it up decades ago. However, he acknowledges that individuals such as Jordan and Mikhaila Peterson, “with a particular genetic condition”, can buck the trend.

Longo says there’s a twist, though. Research shows that a low-protein diet is good for you up until the age of 65, he says. Then your inflammatory response to meat seems to drop, and the protein and iron may be useful. As an Italian, Longo is a friend of Morano’s doctor, Carlo Bava. It was Bava who suggested to Morano that she up her meat intake in her second century. “When you get to 100, meat may start to be a really good idea.”


Geoff 1 HOUR AGO
I actually put that diet down to ONE of the factors that helped me conquer cancer in my early 30’s - I am 65 now, healthy and cancer free - but I do also eat meat... yummy yummy meat!

Andrea 3 HOURS AGO
It has to do with methylation at the cellular level. Under-methylators need more meat and less greens; over-methylators need no meat and mainly plants. 70% of us are normal methylators, remaining 30% are either under or over.

Steve 2 HOURS AGO
My Grandfather, a doctor himself, would often say at the start of a meal, after grace.

'Meat maketh Man'.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/clever-guts-carnivore/news-story/92a72cb3e525b78fa8256083bbf39202