Patients are sometimes surprised when an orthopedic surgeon asks about their diet. But consider what healing actually requires: your body has to manufacture new tissue — collagen, bone, muscle — from raw materials, while keeping inflammation in check. Both jobs run directly on what you eat.
Three goals guide how I think about nutrition for musculoskeletal health: supporting healing, controlling inflammation, and protecting long-term function.
For healing, protein matters most. Repairing tissue is protein-intensive work, and most adults — especially those over 50 — eat less than optimal. Spread across the day, adequate protein gives repair its building blocks. Vitamin D, adequate calories, and basic micronutrients matter too; healing in a deficit is slow healing.
For inflammation, the pattern matters more than any single food. Diets built on whole foods — fish, olive oil, vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes — consistently show lower inflammatory markers than diets heavy in ultra-processed food, refined sugar, and industrial seed oils. You will recognize this as essentially a Mediterranean-style pattern. It is not a fad; it is one of the most studied dietary patterns in medicine.
For the long game, muscle and bone are the targets. Adequate protein plus resistance training is the combination that preserves them decade after decade.
None of this requires perfection. It requires a consistent pattern, most of the time, in the right direction. When we treat a joint problem, these levers are part of the plan — because the same meal can work for your recovery or against it.