Bone broth helped my aching joints

Jules Canterbury had become used to condensation dripping from the walls of her galley kitchen in Camberwell, south London. A long-time sufferer of fibromyalgia, a rheumatic condition that causes pain all over the body, she had taken to boiling “vats” of stock after a Sunday roast each week after finding it relieved her symptoms.

She would leave a chicken carcass or lamb bones with onions, carrots and lemon to simmer overnight, doling out portions of the stuff to her husband Richard, 41, and son Sacha, four, during the intervening days.

“The stench was vile – every time I’d go to prepare a batch, I’d wonder if the house would burn down,” recalls Jules, 39.

Convinced that others must be going through the same unpleasant process, she and her husband Richard began mulling over how things could be simplified. As the founder of Love Smoothies, which supplies frozen fruit and vegetable sachets that are blended with apple juice to the likes of Pret a Manger and Champneys, Richard hoped to use that same logic to bring a just-add-hot-water broth pod to the mass market.

At the time, bone broth was already developing a following as an unlikely wonder health drink, low in calories but highly nutritious. In late 2014, chef Marco Canora set up Brodo (the Italian word for broth) outside Hearth, his Manhattan restaurant, declaring broth to be “the world’s first comfort food”.

Producing three flavours enriched by hours of stewing and seasoning, cups at $9 a pop soon became a sensation, with models at New York fashion week queuing up to buy the drink, said to give healthy skin, nails and hair.

Encouraged by its apparent ability to soothe Jules’s aches and pains – as well as the fact their son had become enamoured with the drink - Richard started making calls, and a discussion with friends in New York cemented his belief that a fuss-free liquor would be a hit. “I asked whether it was just a craze, but they said they were seeing it everywhere,” Richard remembers. “While it started out as the preserve of hipsters, it was becoming more mainstream, and whatever happens in America generally comes through over here.”

Indeed, bone broth is championed by the Hemsley sisters, the British faces of the 'clean eating’ trend and formed the basis of many recipes in their best-selling cookbook, The Art of Eating Well, with the pair enthusing that “it is instrumental in maintaining a healthy gut and an easy-to-digest source of energy that doesn’t make you crash or give you jitters like caffeine.”

Bone broth is said to help with joint conditions such as fibromyalgia because it is rich in gelatine - gelatine supplements have been shown to improve pain and stiffness in osteoarthritis sufferers. However, in spite of what the Hemsleys and the like purport, there is currently no scientific evidence to support the idea that bone broth has medical benefits.

Jules Canterbury had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia at the age of 21 - research suggests it may affect as many as one in 20 people, and seven times as many women as men, although the causes remain unclear.

The condition causes muscle stiffness, irritable bowel syndrome and fatigue, and is notoriously painful; for Jules, the symptoms became so debilitating that she had to take a year out of university and “just lie in bed doing absolutely nothing”.

Fibromyalgia is often triggered or worsened by physical or emotional stress; after giving birth, her pain and 'fibro fog’ were so crippling that she was referred for cognitive behavioural therapy, with doctors assuming she had post-natal depression.

Having tried an array of prescribed medicines and alternative therapies such as homeopathy, none of which provided relief, she read an article about fibromyalgia and a potential link with diet. It suggested that reducing intake of oxalate - a naturally occurring chemical found in foods such as spinach, beetroot and berries – had dramatically reduced symptoms for sufferers.

“I had been broken by the lack of hope,” she says of living with fibromyalgia, which includes symptoms such as muscle stiffness, irritable bowels and fatigue. “It’s soul destroying because so little is known about it, and it wasn’t until I read about that woman’s experience of certain foods affecting the condition that I even knew it was related to diet,” she says. With “nothing to lose,” Jules replicated the low oxalate diet cited in the article and began drinking bone broth as a soothing, low oxalate source of energy. “After a few weeks, I felt 90 percent better,” she says.

It was from there that she began cooking up her own bone broth batches, and the idea for individual, on-demand portions was born.

The final product, which comes flavoured with either chicken or beef, was more than two years in the making. Many would argue the pods are no different to a stock cube, but Richard and Jules say the key difference is that they are free from artificial ingredients. Made with water from a natural spring at an organic farm in Worcestershire, the 30g pods are frozen at -40 degrees almost instantly, which ensures more of the nutrients are sealed in.

“Hopefully we’re not only providing an amazing quality bone broth but a process that will make it easier for people to drink on a daily basis,” Richard says. “It’s not new, it’s just something that has been reinvented a little.”

He has taken to drinking one during the “mid-afternoon slump”; Sacha can’t get enough, and often glugs down a mug in the morning alongside his porridge.    

They are keen that the broth does not only reach trendy yoga bunnies “who would think nothing of spending £6 on a single cup,” but that its health benefits become more widely adopted in British culture. “I’ve been really impressed by the diversity of people who want to drink it,” Richard says, of customers he has met while debuting the pods. “Everyone does this kind of comforted huddle when they take a sip; one man said it tasted just like his Jewish grandmother’s chicken soup.”

For Jules, at least, bone broth has been a revelation. “It’s such a horrendous illness and there are no obvious solutions, so having something that helps the symptoms is amazing.”

Love Bone Broth pods come in packs of five and are available through Ocado for £4.99