I make and eat a lot of dishes with bell peppers and tomatoes, and to a lesser extent, potatoes. I also like eggplant, though I don’t eat it nearly as much, and I use a lot of cayenne pepper and paprika, other members of the Nightshade family.
Part of the reason for this is because I love them, and I love the types of dishes that use those vegetables as main ingredients. Another reason is that one of my kids hates most vegetables, especially cruciferous, and will not eat them to save his life. But he will happily eat things with bell pepper and tomato, and he likes spicy food very much. So I try to help him ward off scurvy with peppery, tomato-ey curries, gumbos and soups.
I have osteoarthritis in pretty much every joint, partly due to genetics, partly just due to getting older. It’s not debilitatingly painful, but it is getting worse. I’ve heard theories that Nightshade vegetables may worsen inflammation and make arthritis more painful. According to the Arthritis Foundation, there’s no evidence of this, but there’s been no scientific studies on it. So the jury is out.
Anybody have any anectodal evidence (or otherwise), either for or against? My gut feeling (heh) is that I’m getting much more nutritional benefit from peppers & tomatoes than I’m getting any negative effects. But I wonder.
I’ve had arthritis since my teens (started very mild, but it was there) and I’m now pushing 60. I have not, myself, noticed any increase in arthritis pain or inflammation of any sort when consuming nightshades. I have not noticed any decrease when not eating them.
It might be that there are a certain sub-set of people who are susceptible to problems when eating vegetables from this group, just as there are some people for whom wheat/barley/rye/etc. are a problem (celiac), or consuming dairy products are a problem (lactose intolerance). If you aren’t in that group then you don’t have to worry. I am not, however, aware of any actual evidence supporting that, it’s just that people differ and some people should avoid certain foods that the rest of us can enjoy freely.
I’m less than impressed by that Medical News Today article.
While it highlights the position of organizations like the Arthritis Foundation that vegetable in the nightshade family have not been linked to arthritis, it also links to a 2020 study that supposedly supports such a link.
Except that study does no such thing. It merely proposes a 7-day diet plan that excludes vegetables in the Solanaceae, without even measuring if the diet has any benefits. And the sources that article references are not exactly convincing either, proposing that potatoes may have a detrimental effect on inflammatory bowel disease (not arthritis) or are preliminary studies in mice (one mainly deals with hypothermia in mice, which is relevant if you’re a rodent living in a place without good central heating). And if you’re going to get excited about “Vegetables with high content of phytochemicals were suggested to have anti-inflammatory properties”, well, tomatoes, eggplant etc. have lots of phytochemicals in them too (lycopene in tomatoes for instance) that might well have beneficial effects in arthritis patients that outweigh any detrimental effects of whatever low concentrations of solanine exist in those vegetables.
There’s no major harm in trying a special diet if it provides sufficient key nutrients. But there’s no way I’d give up my eggplant parmigiana or tomato pasta sauce based on vague mumblings about microbiota and intestinal permeability that haven’t been shown to be important clinically in human beings.
The underlying idea, if I understand correctly, is that some foods may increase inflammation in the body, and thus may make autoimmune issues worse. But this is based on the “leaky gut” theory that sometimes more gets through the intestinal walls than should, and that this revs up the immune system.
Personally I wouldn’t consider it unless I was having other problems with my digestive system, or had noticed a particularly bad spell after a particularly tomato-filled meal. And, even with the latter, I’d do experiments before I would consider going without, like maybe going a week without and then introducing it back.
If it was a strong effect in most people, I suspect it would have been noticed sooner.