Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know there is an alternative to painful suffering? Something besides taking a medicine (which may not always work). Ideally, it would be a natural solution. Perhaps there are foods for nerve pain?
I’m pleased to say that there are!
Several studies show a strong link between the food you eat and how much pain you will likely experience. With conventional medicine, nerve pain is often a difficult symptom to treat. Studies show that certain foods can relieve pain. In fact, plant-based foods can help a variety of painful conditions.
In this article, you will see which foods can help to relieve pain, including nerve pain.
How Nerve Pain is Linked with Diabetes
Nerve pain occurs when nerves get damaged. This is called “neuropathy.” Neuropathy feels like a sharp, burning pain, numbness, or abnormal sensations.
In diabetes, it’s called “diabetic neuropathy” and most commonly occurs in the feet. When you experience diabetic neuropathy, it can lead to difficulty walking, amputation, anxiety, depression, and reduced quality of life. Neuropathy occurs in more than half of people experiencing diabetes. It often goes hand-in-hand with obesity and high blood pressure and lipids.[Ref 1]
The link between diabetes and neuropathy is that nerve damage slowly occurs over the course of years of living with diabetes. How well your body manages blood sugar levels and how sensitive you are to insulin seems to play a key role in diabetic neuropathy.[Ref 1]
A 2015 study was done to find foods for nerve pain. The researchers specifically chose plant-based foods.[Ref 1]
Why Plant-based Foods?
Plant-based foods were chosen because a low-fat plant-based diet can help improve many conditions associated with type 2 diabetes. These include: obesity, high blood pressure, blood lipids, and blood sugar. Since many of these are also linked with nerve pain, researchers wanted to take this a step further. They wanted to see if this eating style would help both type 2 diabetes, plus reduce the pain of diabetic neuropathy.
The study split 35 participants experiencing diabetic neuropathy into two separate groups. Half of them started a plant-based diet with vitamin B12 supplements. The other half kept their regular diet, simply adding vitamin B12 supplements.
After 20 weeks, participants on the plant-based diet had significant improvements in pain compared to the people who did not change their diet.
Imagine having significant improvement in pain, just from moving to a plant-based diet.
These results don’t stand alone. They are similar to smaller studies that also showed that people who started a reduced-calorie, low-fat, plant-based diet (and included 30 minutes of daily walking) for 25 days experienced pain relief.[Ref 2] Participants also experienced weight loss, decreased blood lipid concentrations, and reduced need for blood pressure and blood sugar medications. In fact, their insulin requirements were cut in half.
Plant-based Foods for Nerve Pain
The benefit of plant-based nutrition for pain is clear, yet most patients are automatically treated with a prescription for conventional medicine, regardless of the science. Plus, medicines can have significant side effects, so changing your diet to one that improves your body’s ability to manage both nerve pain and type 2 diabetes is preferable.
I believe that you should be given all the information so you can choose what method works best for you. There will certainly be some who prefer conventional medicine over dietary changes. But in my experience, given the alternative of painful suffering, most people would love to know there is something they can do besides take a medicine that isn’t even working.
How will you start eating more plant-based foods for nerve pain?
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