Does Diet Quality Impact Chronic Pain Outcomes?

The TLDR:

• Physical therapists help patients with chronic pain through multiple forms of interventions (e.g. therapeutic exercise, pacing, mental health strategies).

• Some prior studies have linked obesity with having greater odds of body pain, and possibly with chronic pain.

• A new study highlights how diet quality is directly related to pain. For women especially, a diet rich in unprocessed foods, like fresh fruits and vegetables, had less pain. Interestingly, those that were more overweight did not necessarily have greater pain.

Transcript:

Hello everyone, Dr. Wells here from Nutritional Physical Therapy. I've got a cool research update here. This one is by Ward et al.

in the Journal of Nutrition Research. The title of the article is Better Diet Quality Associated with Decreased Body Pain in Adults Regardless of Adiposity. This was a WIAL intergenerational study.

It's a group of individuals in the south central part of Australia. Effectively this is a retrospective analysis looking at their food frequency questionnaires, also looking at their short form 36, which is a quality of life index, to see kind of what associations are found between diet quality and bodily pain. And overall, interestingly, and we've talked about this in some of our courses and some of our lectures as well, we know that individuals that have greater adiposity have higher markers of inflammation.

And in some ways, that's how many of us have explained why some individuals develop chronic pain. You say, well, you know, there's no repetitive forces or, you know, your training's, you know, in line or, or what have you. And the issue is that you're just overly fat or you have too much adiposity and that those hormones being released are just bumping those cytokines up and causing chronic pain.

Well, more at all, their study seems to be kind of conflicting with that, with that sort of mantra. Effectively, what they found was diet quality had a direct effect on pain. They found that particularly in women, when they eat higher amounts of core foods, so that would be part of their dietary guideline index, if you will, like eating more fruits, vegetables, unprocessed foods, they typically had less pain in their bodies.

It didn't find that effect with men, but regardless, we know that a lot of chronic health, chronic pain conditions tend to skew more towards females. So maybe that partially explains it. But lastly, the big finding from Ward et al was that adiposity wasn't correlated with pain.

So in other words, if someone had a little more fat on them, that didn't necessarily mean that their pain levels were higher. It was really what fruits and vegetables they were eating or what unprocessed foods were they eating compared to the other people. So interesting findings.

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