A healthy diet can tip the scales against chronic pain

One in five — or 1.6 million — Australians struggle with chronic pain, an acute and debilitating condition. Globally, the figure is higher, at around 30% of the population, with higher rates among women and people who are overweight or obese. But there’s an easy and accessible way for sufferers of chronic pain to reduce its severity, a study from the University of South Australia has shown.

By exploring associations between body fat, diet and pain, researchers found that a greater consumption of foods within the Australian Dietary Guidelines was directly associated with lower levels of body pain, particularly among women. Notably, these findings were independent of a person’s weight. This means that a healthy diet can help reduce chronic pain, regardless of body composition.

“It’s common knowledge that eating well is good for your health and wellbeing. But knowing that simple changes to your diet could offset chronic pain, could be lifechanging,” one of the researchers, Sue Ward, said. “In our study, higher consumption of core foods — which are your vegetables, fruits, grains, lean meats, dairy and alternatives — was related to less pain, and this was regardless of body weight.”

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‘Better diet quality is associated with reduced body pain in adults regardless of adiposity: findings from the Whyalla Intergenerational Study of Health’, a 2024 paper on this study, has been published open access in Nutrition Research and you can read it at doi.org/10.1016/j.nutres.2024.08.002.

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Image credit: iStock.com/Jacob Wackerhausen