Does Ultra-processed Food Cause Knee Arthritis?

• Recent data at a radiology conference sheds light on how diet can impact our muscles and joints.

• The new findings show that a diet high in ultra processed foods is correlated with more fatty infiltration in the quadriceps muscles.

• We know that with more fatty infiltration means weakness and a greater risk of developing knee arthritis (OA).

• Bottom line: While the study does not look at the cause and effect of Ultra-processed foods and OA, it does shed some light on possible mechanisms and how our diet can impact our muscle quality, and ultimately our joint health. 

Here is the press release summarizing the findings and our full video transcript below:

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Transcript:

Good morning, everybody. This is Dr. Wells from Nutritional Physical Therapy here with a research update. This one's actually from the Radiological Society of North America's recent meeting.

It was data presented by Dr. Akkaya, probably butchering her name, I apologize, but what was interesting is, it's not published yet, but this was released at the meeting, were findings related to radiology, ultra processed food, and their associations possibly with osteoarthritis. I think it's significant because we as physical therapists, we talk a lot about exercise, stretching, physical activity, but we focus very little on the dietary components for osteoarthritis, particularly of the knee. What the researchers found was they actually had this initiative of preventing osteoarthritis within older adults, and they had a cohort of these individuals.

They were about 60 years of age, rough BMI around 27. All of them did not have officially diagnosed osteoarthritis, and I think the total N was around 660 individuals in the study. Interestingly, what they found is they dove into the data that within those people, about 40% of their diet was from ultra processed food.

And then when they dove further down into the actual analysis of the upper thigh muscles, that would be the quadriceps, and they found that the strong association between those that ate higher amounts of ultra processed food with higher amounts of fatty infiltration in the quad. Now, this is where the association kind of goes further. The author stopped there just with those associations because that was the focus of the study, but they dove deeper in their discussion in at the meeting to talk about knee prevention, excuse me, knee osteoarthritis prevention, and how having those higher rates of fatty infiltration correlates with weaker muscles and could also be associated with more knee pain and more knee osteoarthritis-like symptoms.

So this is the first big study I'm excited to see what this researcher and researchers have coming forward because this is the first big study we've seen with ultra processed food or food in general being connected with possibly knee osteoarthritis outcomes to my knowledge. So hopefully there's more to come and if you want to learn more, we have tons of other stuff on osteoarthritis and other conditions that affect us as physical therapists and our patients, so check it out on our website nutritionalphysicaltherapy.com. Sign up today, and hope you have a great day. Bye-bye.

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