Why Diet and Exercise Are Important for Your Knee
When we talk about knee pain we typically start with a diagnosis. This is what is wrong with your knee, a medical description term. Sometimes this makes complete sense to the patient, while at other times it is meaningless.
There exists a separate medical term doctors put on or x-rays or MRI reports, operative reports, and medical consultations. Patients are given lay terms like torn cartilage, clean out my knee, or bone on bone. This becomes important when we discuss diet and exercise.
What is wrong with the knee? What are we concerned with in rehabilitation or regeneration? How do we get from Point A to point B? A plan is needed. Truly understanding your knee, what is wrong with it, what makes it worse, and can help improve it are very important. Diet and exercise are two important knee health concerns.
Diet and your Knee
Diet is a multifaceted topic, especially when discussing knee health. are we talking about what you eat, or what you weigh? Both are often discussed.
Some people have no concerns with either issue and others who should be concerned, are not. What you eat can influence why you weigh too much, and also why you hurt so much. Let’s break that down.
Eating the wrong types of food and when you consume them, often is the culprit in not losing weight. Americans notoriously consume too many processed carbohydrates. Pure and simple sugars. Carbohydrates that are simple chains of sugar, cause a rapid rise in blood insulin levels. This in terms results in the intracellular storage of food as fat. Slow release complex carbohydrates, resulting in a decreased insulin spike.
The addition of healthy fats and protein to a meal with complex carbohydrates release glucagon to buffer the insulin further. This makes food a more metabolically controlled tool to use food for use as fuel, build muscle, and burn fat even. Understanding food intake better leads to the ability to diet more effectively and shape your destiny rather than be a slave to it. Also, unhealthy diets can lead to overall inflammation of the body. This can lead to more knee pain, and trigger more progression of knee arthritis. Much as inflammation from unhealthy diets can be bad for your heart, they are also bad for your joints and knees.Lastly, the overall effect of weight on your knee is important too. Height and weight ratios are very important assessment tools for the Sports and Regenerative physician. For every 10 pounds of extra weight, there are 50 pounds of extra force transmitted to your knee. For that matter, it is also transmitted to your hip, knee, ankle, and foot. The weight goes downward as force load, just like carrying a heavy backpack all day. All important to consider when understanding why knees hurt, and how to help them feel better.
Exercise and your Knee
The type of exercise patients do, want to do in the future, and what is actually good for their knee depends on a lot of factors, most importantly the diagnosis of what is wrong with your knee. Walking is not the same type of knee exercise for someone with little knee joint cartilage left. If the same individual is 100 pounds overweight, it is even more different. The same for running, tennis, treadmills, and lifting weights such as squats. Thorough knowledge of all factors impacting the knee is required to do the best job in exercise prescription. There is no uniform exercise for everyone. Nor is there a one size fits all Regenerative Medicine Stem cell procedure for everyone. It is impossible to treat all humans with the same program and do a proper Medical, Regenerative, and Rehabilitation program for everyone. Each patient deserves an individualized program based upon what is best for them.
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