Healthy Food Choices for Lupus

Video Transcript

MARY HONDROS: Okay. I am going to talk a little bit about lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune disorder which means that your own body is attacking your own tissues. There is no known cause for lupus. It causes like a general inflammation of all the tissues in your body which can cause problems with your kidneys, your liver, your lungs and other major organs because of this inflammation. Generally, people with lupus are required to take some sort of steroid or anti-malarial drug for most of their life. These drugs help to control the inflammation of those body tissues and to control symptoms that people with lupus have like fatigue and general swelling of the joints and things like that. If you do have lupus and you are trying to fight some of those symptoms of inflammation, you can try to do certain things like taking an omega-3 supplement or eating omega-3-rich fish in your diet. You can also try limiting the amount of saturated fat and cholesterol that you eat through animal meat and milk products, so that you can reduce some of that inflammation. Thirdly, you need to maintain a healthy body weight, because the more excess weight you put on, the harder on your joints it is, which are already sort of inflamed. And lastly, it is important to take a multivitamin with calcium and vitamin D, because generally doctors recommend if you have lupus that you need to avoid sun exposure completely. And sun is one of the number one sources of vitamin D. So it is important that you consume calcium and vitamin D in some sort of supplemental form. And those are some tips on the lupus condition.