How can I lubricate my joints naturally?

The joint makes its own oil: what synovial fluid is, who makes it, what thickens it, what thins it, and why the pump is movement

How can I lubricate my joints naturally is a question that the shelf answers with hyaluronic acid capsules, fish oil and collagen, as if a joint were a hinge that a reader oils from outside, and the honest page answers with the fact the shelf omits, which is that the joint makes its own oil, that it makes more of it when it is used, and that the pump which makes it is movement. The oil is synovial fluid, and a reader who knows what it is knows how to make more of it. A joint is enclosed by a capsule lined with a thin tissue, the synovium, and the space inside is filled with a small volume of fluid, a teaspoon or two in a knee, that is a filtrate of blood plasma, the watery part of blood leaking through the lining's small vessels, enriched by the lining cells with two molecules that plasma does not contain in quantity. The first is hyaluronan, hyaluronic acid, a very long unbranched chain of sugars that tangles with itself to give the fluid the viscosity of egg white, so that it cushions the joint under sudden load, flows thin when the joint moves fast and thick when it moves slowly, and holds the two cartilage surfaces apart on a film of fluid during movement. The second is lubricin, a protein that coats the cartilage surfaces themselves and acts as a boundary lubricant, letting the surfaces slide over each other with almost no friction even when the fluid film is squeezed out under a standing load, which is why healthy cartilage on cartilage is slipperier than ice on ice. The lining cells that make these molecules respond to the joint being used: movement increases the production of fluid and of hyaluronan and stirs the fluid through the joint, while inactivity lets production fall and the fluid pool, and inflammation, whether the low-grade inflammation of an osteoarthritic joint or the florid inflammation of an arthritic one, releases enzymes that break hyaluronan into short pieces so that the fluid thins and loses its cushion. That is the biology behind two things every reader has felt. A joint is stiffest after a night's sleep or an hour in a chair, because the fluid has pooled and thickened at rest and the lining has made little, and it loosens within a few minutes of moving, as the fluid is stirred, warmed and renewed, which is the gelling phenomenon that makes the first steps of the morning or the first stairs after a film the hardest; and an inflamed joint stays stiff for longer in the morning, past the half-hour that separates mechanical stiffness from inflammatory stiffness, on the joint stiffness page, because its fluid is thinned and its lining is busy with something other than lubrication. The fluid does a second job that makes the pump more than a comfort: it feeds the cartilage. Articular cartilage has no blood supply, and its cells are nourished by the synovial fluid being squeezed out of the cartilage when the joint is loaded and drawn back in, carrying oxygen, glucose and the building blocks of matrix, when the load comes off, so that every cycle of movement is both a lubrication stroke and a feeding stroke, and a joint that is not moved is a joint whose cartilage is going hungry as well as dry, which is the astronaut's lesson on the regenerate knee cartilage page.

Lubricating naturally, which means moving, with the supporting conditions, why lubricating from outside is not a route, and the protein that is not a lubricant

Lubricating a joint naturally therefore means moving it, and the honest page gives the movement its shape, since the pump has a dose like everything else. The joint is taken through its full range, because the fluid is stirred and the cartilage fed across the whole surface only when the whole surface is used, so a knee is fully bent and fully straightened and a shoulder is reached overhead and behind, which a day of sitting and a desk's narrow movements never do. It is moved gently and often rather than hard and rarely, because the lining responds to use through the day and the gelling returns after every hour of stillness, so that a few minutes of walking or stretching every hour does more for the fluid than one session a day, and a few minutes of easy movement before demanding use, a walk before a run, light sets before heavy ones, moves the joint through its stiff first minutes before the load arrives. It is moved under moderate cyclic load, walking, cycling and swimming, which drive the feeding stroke without the impact that a sore joint resents, and which raised cartilage composition on contrast MRI in the exercise trials. The supporting conditions are three and the shelf sells none of them. Warmth lowers the viscosity of a fluid that is thick when cold, which is why a warm joint moves more easily than a cold one and why a warm shower or a few minutes of movement loosens the morning; a joint kept warm is a joint whose first movements come easier, though warmth lubricates nothing by itself. Hydration is ordinary rather than special: the fluid is mostly water and a dehydrated body has less of everything, but a glass of water reaches a joint no faster than it reaches the rest of the body, and the claim that drinking more water lubricates joints is true only for a reader who was dehydrated. Body weight sets the load the fluid has to cushion, at around four kilograms across the knee per kilogram carried, and a lighter body is a joint whose oil has less work to do. Lubricating from outside is not a route, and the honest page is specific about the two products that promise it. Oral hyaluronic acid is a very long sugar chain that the gut digests like any carbohydrate, with small randomised trials on skin and joint outcomes and no authorised claim, so that a capsule of hyaluronic acid does not arrive in a knee as hyaluronic acid; the hyaluronan in a joint is made in the joint, from sugars the body has in abundance, by lining cells that respond to movement and not to supply. Injected hyaluronan, viscosupplementation, puts the molecule directly into the knee, and in the knee osteoarthritis trials it has small and inconsistent effects, enough that most guidelines do not recommend it and some advise against, which is the strongest evidence that lubrication from outside is not where a joint's problem lies, since even the direct route does little. Fish oil holds no joint sentence and does not reach the joint fluid as oil. And collagen is not a lubricant: it is a protein digested to amino acids, with no sentence about joints or their fluid, whose small effect on knee pain questionnaires at 10g in the trials came with no change in cartilage or fluid on any scan, with the water and glycosaminoglycan of the cartilage itself examined on the increase cartilage naturally page. The worked example is the protein that is not a lubricant, stated on its true terms: two capsules, 1200mg hydrolysed type 1 marine collagen with 12mg vitamin C at 15% of its reference value plus zinc, 120 for £16.99 at 28p a day, lab tested and UK made, carrying vitamin C's collagen formation sentence for the normal function of cartilage and no lubrication or joint claim of its own. How can I lubricate my joints naturally: move them, through their range, gently and often, under moderate load, kept warm and carried lightly, because the joint makes its own oil and nothing swallowed arrives as oil.

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