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Foods & Nutrition
30 entriesWhat you can eat, cook or drink that has a plausible route to cartilage — what's actually in it, what survives digestion, and what the trials fed people.
Collagen from food
- Bone stockStock, not broth — and the distinction carries most of the findingPreclinical
- Chicken feetThe collagen food whose absorption has been measured in peoplePreclinical
- Gelatin + vitamin C before exerciseThe Shaw and Baar timing protocol: gelatin with vitamin C before loadingPromising
- Dietary collagen & glycineThe glycine-shortfall hypothesis, and what has been measured of itPreclinical
Collagen, ingredient by ingredient
- What cooking does to collagenTime, heat and acid, and what each one does to the collagen in a potPreclinical
- GlycineThe amino acid a third of collagen is made of, and the shortfall argument built on itPreclinical
- Glycosaminoglycans from foodThe glycosaminoglycans in a stock — which survive the pot, and in what quantityPreclinical
- Sulfur & sulfateSulfate supply to the cartilage matrix, and where a diet's sulfur comes fromPreclinical
- Collagen types I, II & IIICartilage is type II. Almost everything you can eat or buy is type I.Preclinical
Foods with joint trials
- Tart cherry juiceA cyanidin-rich fruit, tested once against a knee and repeatedly against goutPreclinical
- PomegranateFour small randomized trials, a mapped chondrocyte pathway, and a metabolite your gut may or may not makePromising
- Cruciferous vegetables & sulforaphaneThe one food whose active compound has been measured inside a human kneePreclinical
- Olive oilThe peppery sting is a cyclooxygenase inhibitor, and the trials so far have rubbed it on or injected itPreclinical
- Oily fishThe capsule trials and the fish-eating cohorts disagree, and the reason may be who was short to begin withPreclinical
- Milk & dairyA dose-response in 3,064 knees that appears in women, disappears in men, and has never been replicatedPreclinical
- Green teaEvery animal result that worked was injected, and the genetic evidence points the other way from the cohortsPreclinical
- Berries & anthocyaninsWhole strawberries and blueberries, fed as food against a calorie-matched controlPromising
Dietary patterns
- The anti-inflammatory dietA dietary pattern scored by its inflammatory potential, against knee symptoms and biomarkersPromising
- Low-carbohydrate dietsA three-arm pilot where the low-fat diet did nothing and the low-carbohydrate one moved pain and oxidative stress togetherPromising
- Ultra-processed foodThe dietary exposure with a measured cartilage endpoint — and a route through muscle rather than through the jointPromising
- Fibre & the gutTwo cohorts find less knee pain with more fibre, and no change in the radiographPromising
Nutrients & minerals from food
- Omega-3s & fish oilTwo krill oil trials, two years apart, reaching opposite conclusions — and one enrolled people who were short of omega-3Preclinical
- Vitamin K from greensVitamin K1 from leafy greens, traced from the plate into the bloodPromising
- Selenium & Kashin-Beck diseaseA cartilage disease that a country reduced by changing what people atePromising
- Magnesium & boronMagnesium intake against the knee in three cross-sectional populations, and boron beside itPromising
What the data say to limit
- Sugar & sweetened drinksOne cohort found a dose-response in men, another survey found nothing, and the same dataset put milk's effect in womenPreclinical
- Dietary AGEs & cooking methodGlycation stiffens cartilage collagen for life, and dry heat multiplies AGEs in food 10- to 100-foldPreclinical
- AlcoholAlcohol intake against osteoarthritis, in pooled cohorts and in genetic instrumentsNot supported
- Coffee & caffeineFour genetic analyses agree that coffee raises osteoarthritis risk, and the largest effect in them belongs to decaffeinatedPreclinical