About this episode

Dr. Micah Yu shares his personal journey with joint pain and how a whole food, plant-based diet transformed his health.

At 17, after adopting a high-protein diet filled with meat, milk, protein powder, and processed meats, Dr. Yu experienced his first gout attack. The pain was so intense that he still remembers waking up at 4:00 a.m. feeling as if someone had slammed a wooden board into his toe. But gout was only the beginning. Over the years, Dr. Yu developed recurring, mysterious inflammation throughout his body — jaw, shoulders, wrists, fingers, knees, toes, hips, ankles — along with fatigue and irritability. Even while in medical school, he struggled to find answers. Eventually, he was diagnosed with gout, pseudogout, and spondyloarthritis, an autoimmune arthritis often treated with immunosuppressive medications. But Dr. Yu had a feeling that diet was part of the story. Inspired by his wife, Dr. Melissa Mondala, as well as Forks Over Knives and Dr. Michael Greger’s How Not to Die , he decided to try a whole food, plant-based diet. Within two to three months, he noticed his joint pain beginning to disappear. At his follow-up appointment, his C-reactive protein — a key inflammation marker that had been elevated for years — had normalized. Today, Dr. Yu is a board-certified rheumatologist and…

Topics covered

• joint pain
• chronic inflammation
• whole food plant-based diet
• autoimmune disease
• supplements

Keywords

• gout
• spondyloarthritis
• C-reactive protein
• autoimmune arthritis
• integrative medicine

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