Recently I've been getting arthritis (I'm only 29, remember); I told my mother about it and she suggested a superstition that the nightshade family is what causes it. The nightshade family is composed of tomatoes, peppers (hot and normal), potatoes (but not sweet potatoes), and eggplant.

I doubted it, because she has a lot of crazy ideas, but decided to test it out, and found out she was right. For two weeks I had no arthritis pains while avoiding those foods; one day I ate a bag of potato chips and had pretty strong arthritis pains the next day. Again I avoided those foods and it went away, and then I tried another bag and the same thing happened.

Now you might thing it could have been a reverse placebo effect, where you expect something and it happens. So this next thing convinced me even more: today I had arthritis pains and hadn't (I thought) eaten any nightshade family foods. But I didn't realize that yellow and red bell peppers were in that family, which I just learned today, and I had eaten a bunch of them the day before in a salad.

I haven't yet tested tomatoes or eggplant, supposedly it happens with tomato sauce as well, so I'll try that out in a bit.

The only study that's ever been done on this was done in the 1950s at Rutgers (where I went to college): http://www.ultimatewatermassage.com/research-health/arthritis-nutritional-diet-nightshade.htm -- unfortunately it wasn't a rigorous study and no studies on it have been done since then, so it's still treated as a superstition even though potentially it could greatly reduce arthritis. That study found a 70% benefit rate, which is pretty good if accurate (and my experience at least indicates that that's accurate).

Anyway, it's pretty disappointing that millions of people could live better lives, with less pain, if only studies were directed toward things which actually looked promising, rather than things which can be patented.

This is pretty great. I like how they don't seem to have any reason at all for it.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3941545.ece

they're a little bit smaller than us