Healthy food

Yesterday I saw PJ. (Hey, those are funny initials). Her husband has a bad family history and was overweight and had high cholesterol. He decided to start exercise and to eat healthy. He also lost sixty pounds and dropped his cholesterol by 40 points. His behavior caused her to also change her habits - especially her eating habits. In fact, the other day she had a cheesburger at McDonalds and got sick from it! (That's what happens to healthy people who are not used to eating such toxic food).
She has found that her chronic pain syndrome has improved significantly. She just has less pain. This is very interesting to me. I don't understand this, but I believe her. I do know that with inflammatory situations food is important. There is a dietary need for a product called arachadonic acid. This cannot be produced by our bodies. It is an essential component of inflammation processes because it is used to make the chemicals that produce the signals for inflammation. Duke University has taken advantage of this issue. They have a program for Rheumatoid Arthritis where they put people on a fast for ten days to improve their arthritis. It is very effective. Arachadonic Acid is found in polyunsaturated fats, particularly animal fats. So diets that are very low in arachadonic acid (vegetarian + fish + olive oil) produce less inflammation. So I would expect a "healthy diet" to produce less inflammation. In fact, I often recommend it - for those situations.
PJ doesn't have (I don't think, anyway - maybe I'm wrong about this) inflammation. According to everything that is written and thought about most of these chronic pain syndromes, there isn't any local inflammation. The pain is mediated through different pathways in the nervous system. That means that the arachadonic acid process is not involved in her pain mechanism. There is no reason that I understand why her pain should have improved. It's a mystery to me.
I'm glad her pain decreased. This is one case, though. I can't go around telling all of my chronic pain patients to go on a healthy diet to decrease their pain. I just don't know anything about this situation (I do tell the arthritis people to change their diets). Perhaps one day I will find the connection. I should probably put this question on my "look up" list, although I doubt I'll find something written about it. Sometimes it's frustrating to know that there is something there that we definitely don't know but we should know, and to also know that I'm most likely to not find out.