A new study from the University of Central Florida published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology reveals amazing news for arthritis patients.
It can lead to a complete cure for your disease by cutting out just a couple of food items—maybe even just temporarily.
Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis, or simply MAP, is a common bacterium that appears in about half of the cows that provide our milk and beef.
One of the scientists in this team had previously found that people with Crohn’s disease were infected with MAP. And since rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease stem from the same genetic variants, and are often treated with the same immunosuppressive drugs, they wondered whether MAP was involved in rheumatoid arthritis too.
They examined 100 arthritic patients and discovered that 78 percent of them have the same genetic mutation as people with Crohn’s disease. This is in a gene called PTPN2/22.
Of these, 40 percent were infected with MAP.
From these findings, they concluded that people with a PTPN2/22 mutation who are then exposed to MAP have a higher risk than the general population of developing rheumatoid arthritis.
Being medical scientists, they are obviously thinking in the direction of treating people with rheumatoid arthritis with antibiotics, as doctors have already started doing with Crohn’s disease patients.
But since there are already so many antibiotics around in the world that bacteria are increasingly becoming resistant to them, it is hardly a good idea to stuff more of them into our bodies.
Moreover, as with Crohn’s disease, antibiotics against MAP may not stop the arthritis, but simply control the symptoms.
In fact, Crohn’s disease patients must remain on the antibiotics permanently, putting them at risk of colitis, which must then be treated with another antibiotic.
For these reasons, the best approach may be to find out whether you have the PTPN2/22 gene mutation, and to then steer clear of milk and beef.
The problem with MAP is that, unlike other bacteria, it is heat resistant and is not killed by cooking, pasteurization, and other common food-processing methods.