Knee pain. It’s not fun. But around half of us will suffer from it at some point in our lifetime. 

Question is, could sugar be making a common problem much worse?

What usually causes knee pain?

There are lots of different structures that can cause pain in the knee area; tendons, ligaments, cartilage and bone. Usually, you have to suffer a proper trauma to damage anything; it takes a fair bit of force to break bones or rupture ligaments.

Another way to get knee pain is a gradual build up over time. Reports show around 50 per cent of us will have knee arthritis that causes us pain or impaired function by the time we hit 85 – just another one of those great joys of getting older…

Could sugar cause knee pain?

But it turns out, it might be possible to cause degeneration and pain in your knee earlier on. Researchers in 2012 did a very interesting study to look at exactly what a high-sugar diet (measured by soft drink consumption) would do to the state of your knee joints.

The study design was incredibly simple, but also really clever. They assembled 2,149 people and took X-rays of their knees. Then they sent them away for 12 months and asked them to take note of how often they drank soft drinks.

They came back after one year and had the X-rays done again, and repeated this at two years, three years and four years as well. So every year they were able to compare the X-rays and see if there were any changes, then link that back to how often they had soft drinks.

The reason for this long term approach is that arthritis happens gradually. So it would have been unlikely that there would be any changes in a few weeks or months, but a gradual consumption over time, they theorised, might lead to a gradual deterioration in the joint.

Sugar dramatically increases knee deterioration.

They were right. A lot of different things can contribute to the development of arthritis, like serious injuries, or surgery, or being overweight. But they took all of this into account when interpreting the results.

The knee joints of people who drank more than five soft drinks a week narrowed by DOUBLE that of the people who drank no soft drinks.

The results of the study showed that the knee joints of people who drank more than five soft drinks a week narrowed by DOUBLE that of the people who drank no soft drinks. And knee deterioration is the primary cause of non-trauma-related knee pain.

Four years might feel like a decent amount of time, it’s still relatively small in the scheme of things. When you think about knee deterioration as a condition that really doesn’t affect large numbers of people until they are in their 70s and 80s, four years is immensely quick to notice that much of a change.