I discovered I had psoriasis a few years ago.  The first sign was an arthritic pain in the foot.  It wasn’t diagnosed as psoriasis until I saw a dermotologist about some dry skin on my neck about a year later.

Both things seemed fairly constant.  No sudden appearance or dissapearance of sympoms, which meant identifying any triggers was really hard.

Later on, I started to get a related eye problem. Thats when I found out I have a gene thing called HLAB27 positive.  Turns out all my ailments could be connected to that one gene.  But it also helped with something else – I now had a very visible, relatively quick indicator of potential triggers.

I might start to think of the eye issue as a blessing.

At first, I thought the eye would flare up randomly.  But why would that make sense?  My body is a ‘closed system’ – one big bag of human chemicals that either:

• does what its supposed to do (and react to changes in the chemical composition to protect me).  In which case, something external (e.g. environment/food/etc) is triggering the psoriasis
• doesn’t do what its supposed to do.  In which case, my body is reacting in the wrong way to things that are not a threat to my health- i.e. my body is broken.

HLAB27 confirms that the second proposition is true (my body isn’t going to react the right way all the time), but both points are not mutually exclusive.  A trigger is still possible.

The hypothesis – reducing salt intake will stop my eye flaring up

I stumbled on the idea that salt intake could be a contributor because of some suspicions:

Suspicion #1:

I wondered whether the cause of the skin flareups was being delivered through the pours of my skin – the sweat in particular.  Turns out that sweat comes from your pee pee – so your Kidney’s are involved.  Kidney’s have something to do with food processing right? (did I mention at the beginning of this that I’m not a doctor?)

Suspicion #2:

I stumbled across an article on PH balance when browsing the net.    Sadly, I can’t find that article.  Anyway, the author spoke about the fact that our bodies are designed to maintain a particular PH balance.  You can eat too much acidic stuff, or alkaline stuff, forcing your body to restore its balance.  Turns out the Kidneys have a big role in maintaining PH balance by getting rid of the nasties. Eating stuff that pushes the body away from its PH balance might strain the body.

There is a twist in this story though that is more shocking than the ending of The Usual Suspects.  Almost everything I thought was acidic was in fact alkaline and vice versa.  Lemon?  Its alkaline.  Orange? Alkaline.  Bread?  Acidic!  Go figure?!  This list is helpful for figuring out what is what.

Suspicion #3:

When my skin was flaring up, I could often smell something very similar to Chlorine.  In fact, I could have been convinced it was Chlorine (even though didn’t swim).  Years later, I learned that Chlorine is made from …drum roll….salt.  This was like a light bulb moment.

Suspicion #4:

My son would get a flare up of something on his skin from tomatoes and kiwi fruit (two alkalines).

The test so far

Despite the gut feeling that a PH diet would be good, I’m not the dieting type (too hard basket).  So I figured that I would try to cut back on the salt intake, stop eating tomatoes like apples and stop the Indian takeaways.  Its been many months (probably coming up to a year) when I started the exercise.  The pain in my foot hasn’t been as bad (I’m careful with footwear which helps the most), no signs of a skin flareup (never used any topical drugs or steriods – ever), and no eye fare ups.  Fingers crossed this works.