Please note that today's posts by , JC, Rachel, and Janice all highlight issues of nutrition. They comment on what people with lupus should and should not eat. People with lupus need nutritional education and guidance along with their diagnosis and toxic medications. People with lupus should not learn that milk will give them trouble one at a time. Only five percent of adults produce the enzyme needed to digest milk. In other words most people cannot digest and should avoid milk. People with lupus should be given this information as soon as they are diagnosed. People with lupus are also so likely to be sensitive to gluten that the advice to try a gluten elimination diet should be handed out with each diagnosis of lupus.
There are many other foods that people with lupus should and should not eat. Some of the sensitivities and allergies will be individual but some will apply to almost everyone with the diagnosis. There are books and articles to guide us. We do not need to suffer while figuring each of these out on our own.
Furthermore, since lupus is a condition of the immune system someone should tell each lupus patient that as much as 80% of our immune system is located in our digestive tract. Eating the wrong foods will produce more flares and more severe flares. We should all be told early in our fight with the disease that there is a direct connection between our gut and our brain. Eat the wrong thing and the brain fog will surely follow.
The older discussion on this forum are full of discussions of nutrition issues. The the fact people with lupus are likely to vitamin D deficient and that it is this deficiency which is responsible for much muscle and bone pain is repeated on this discussion boards over and over again. It is also repeated that if you are vegetarian you will need to supplement with vitamin B12.
Good nutrition is important to the health of everyone. People with lupus need to take special care. We need to find away to make sure that those who have been newly diagnosed are given the information on the importance of good nutrition and on food sensitivities and allergies. They don't need to suffer from these problems until they can make independent discoveries when the existence of the issues is appreciated by almost everyone except conventional physicians.
How can we keep the importance of nutritional issues on top and up front so that they are impossible to miss? And yes you hear anxiety in my voice. The idea that people are suffering needlessly because they are eating things to which most people with lupus are sensitive does that to me. The fact that people with lupus are suffering because they don't know what they should eat also makes me anxious. My therapist calls it empathy.