Obesity: It’s a Dog’s Life and a Major Cause of Nobbly Knees

Household pets often have little choice but to follow the life style of their owners.
The couch potato owner of Cassie, a border collie, fed his treasured pet on the left over scraps of the fast foods he habitually ate himself habitually. By the age of seven the dog was three times his healthy weight, having been trapped indoors and reared on scraps of burgers, pizzas, chips and crisps. His knees were suffering from their gross overloading. He got breathless on the slightest exertion, could barely walk and had developed bed sores from lying down for large parts of the day. When his owner died, he was taken into a dog care centre where the staff reported that he was ‘being killed with kindness.’ They were confident that his health could be restored, by a regime of healthy eating and progressive daily exercise, but reckoned that it would be at least a year before he regained his full agility and zest for life. Today at least a third of pets are obese or overweight. As a result vets are having to treat an increasing number of dogs who as they age develop arthritis in their knee, or ‘stifle’ joints.

Humans are suffering the same fate. This is not surprising, for the knee is the largest joint in the body and one of the most complicated, since it has to be strong enough to bear our weight when we’re on the move and sufficient flexible to allow us to twist and turn when we’re playing games. Every step we take subjects the knee to a downward force of three to six times our body weight. This is particularly marked for overweight men, who have five times the risk of developing arthritis of the knee, compared with women whose risk is four times greater. To a slight extent arthritis is genetically determined. Its incidence increases as we age, when the joint has been damaged in an earlier accident, if we’re carrying excess weight and when we’re a man rather than a woman. Since we can’t change our parents, revert to childhood, change our sex or undo the injuries we’ve suffered in the past, the only practical self help treatment for arthritic knees is to lose weight. At present 70,000 knee replacement operations are carried out in England and Wales every year. That figure will mount unless we can overcome the obesity epidemic. Osteoarthritis is a degenerative process which starts in the smooth hyaline cartilage which lines the surface of our joints. In a state of health this slippery, glistening surface generates considerably less friction that a skate gliding over ice. With the onset of arthritic change the surface becomes dull and rough. Despite the scientific evidence to the contrary, many people still believe that this degeneration is the result of everyday wear and tear. In truth, a healthy joint shows an incredible ability to withstand prolonged and heavy use, as arises during the course of playing professional tennis, without showing any signs of wear.

This I explained in my first book Hands for Healing, written well over forty years ago, in which I described experiments in which the knee joints of dogs have been fixed in a stand, loaded with weights and then moved rapidly backwards and forwards to simulate the effects of weeks of normal use. Even after twenty four hours of this gruelling test the joints have showed no signs of wear. But when the same joints were put in a clamp, placed under compression and prevented from moving, the typical signs of arthritic degeneration quickly appeared. Swedish experiments also revealed that the hyaline cartilage acts like a sponge, which sucks up nourishment from the looped network of blood vessels in the underlying bone only when the joint surfaces are subjected to intermitted compression and release. This was confirmed by post-mortem studies of hip joints, carried out at Oxford University, which showed that the earliest signs of osteoarthritis are always found in the least used parts of the joint. This led me to recommend that anyone wishing to avoid developing arthritis of their hips and knees should ‘take plenty of regular exercise involving the fullest possible use of their joints’ and ‘avoid putting on even a pound of excess weight.’ That remains my advice today, and it’s simpler now than ever before to get down to your healthy weight if you follow the regular tips provided on the selfhelpalliance.co.uk website. Do that, and you’ll increase your chances of escaping the surgeon’s knife, for the famous Framingham study in America has shown that women who lose just 11 pounds of superfluous weight lower their risk of developing arthritis of the knee by a massive 50 per cent.

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