How I fixed my Joint Pain

I started having joint pain a few years ago. mainly in my fingers and toes. I'd wake up with stiff fingers which were painful to move. In the early days this discomfort would subside quickly, however, it slowly got worse to the point where using a keyboard - an essential part of being a Architect/Software Engineer got so uncomfortable I thought I'd need a career change! Something that's not an easy feat, especially when forced into it. I was also reasonably young for this kind of pain, 38, and even with a career change I didn't want to go through the rest of my life with this pain getting worse, so I decided to do some debugging!

Initially, I tried ergonomic changes like the Kinesis Freestyle2 split keyboard (Overpriced but probably worth it if you're on a keyboard most of the day) which did improve things over my original Apple Keyboard but it wasn't enough. I also tried trackpads over a mouse, etc etc, all with minor improvements but not long-term fixes.

Diet seemed the next logical step. I started tracking what I ate in medium-level detail (Main ingredients and brands) in My Fitness Pal App, and when my joint pain got worse I would take a deeper dive into the ingredients which made up what I ate, and if the trend continued then I would cut the particular ingredient and general food type out of my diet. Below is a list of what I ended up removing and why. This whole iterative process took about a year.

Sucralose

I noticed a correlation between my intake of Diet Coke and my joint pain. Based on research, the most likely ingredient causing my pain was sucralose, so I cut it out of my diet. This included everything that contained sucralose in the ingredients list, not just Diet Coke. My joint pain reduced.

Potassium Sorbate

A common preservative. I noticed a correlation between some sauces I was eating and my joint pain. Again based on research, the most likely ingredient causing my pain was Potassium Sorbate. And I removed all foods containing Potassium Sorbate from my diet. My joint pain reduced.

Gluten

This made the biggest impact, and probably also to do with the foods containing gluten are generally breads, beers etc which have a negative impact on metabolism and other metabolites like Uric Acid (Gout). I reduced by bread consumption from about 2 slices per day to 2 slices of Gluten free bread every couple of weeks. I switched from Beer to Cider or had Gluten free beer from time to time. This had the biggest impact on my joint pain. At this point I'd reduced my joint pain in the region of 75% - I was mainly pain free, except at certain times.

Quinoa and Peanut Butter

The changes above made huge improvements, but I still occasionally had bouts of pain and it took a while to figure out why - probably due to the two being seen by me as reasonably healthy and also being part of my diet before I had joint pain - a kind of confirmation bias. But I eventually opened my eyes, saw the correlation and cut them both out and this was the final piece of the puzzle. Quinoa doesn't have any real literature that I've found for being a trigger of inflammation which is interesting and with Peanut butter I imagine it's the Omega 6s in the oils.

After all this, i'm joint pain free and have been now for over a year.

If I'm out socialising and am limited by the options, then sometimes I'll have something which contains ingredients on this list. At restaurants, it's sometimes hard to tell what's in a sauce etc so I try not to worry about them. Generally I try and stay away from drinks I know contains sweeteners, and foods with gluten in it. Other than that, I try to enjoy myself.