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I love my family to death, but several family Christmas gatherings ago I was looking around and realized that none of us were free of diagnosed medical conditions. Most of my family members are overweight and have some sort of metabolic issue whether it be hormone related, heart disease, or diabetes. Half of us have been diagnosed with autoimmune conditions and the other half (some of them overlapping) have mental health imbalances. I, myself, was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 14.
As you can imagine, this was not an exciting realization. Happy Holidays, right? It seemed that my genetics were dooming me to a life filled with disease and medication. As a pharmacist, I know what all the side effects of these various medications are and that didn’t excite me either.
I was on the verge of becoming depressed about my future, but then I ran across research during my Functional Medicine certification about how pretty much every chronic illness out there can be related back to underlying inflammation. I also found that you actually have lots of control over your own level of inflammation by looking at what you put in your body.
This tidbit of information totally changed my outlook on my future. I had the control, not my genetics. I didn’t have to live through the same conditions the rest of my family was experiencing. I could change my health for the better.
This was, and still is, so empowering.
As I continued my research, I also discovered that eating to lower your inflammation helps you age slower. Jaw drop! Yes, all of those inflammatory reactions that result in chronic medical conditions also makes you age a lot faster. While chronic diseases and the gradual physical and mental decline known as aging are common, they’re not normal! So, targeting inflammation to prevent chronic disease also prevents early aging.
Mic drop.
I’ve recently tweaked how I eat to prevent Alzheimer’s disease and optimize my brain’s performance. However, what I’m about to share with you is how I got started and it made such a difference in my energy levels, weight, and mood.
If you are struggling with a chronic medical condition, want to prevent a medical condition, or just want to help your body look and feel young for a long time, you’re in the right place. This is where you will find out how to build a healthy, anti-inflammatory foundation for yourself so you can enjoy the upcoming years without fear or worry.
Let’s get started!
What Is Inflammation?
Inflammation is a protective response that your immune system launches in response to any perceived threat (real or not). Today, we tend to think of inflammation as bad, but in reality we wouldn’t be here as a species without it. The inflammatory response is what allows your body to fight off infection, allows your blood to clot when you cut yourself, and more. So, inflammation is not all bad.
However, the inflammatory response is designed to fend off the threat and then go back to surveillance mode. When this happens, the body’s clean up crew has time to come in and clean up all the collateral damage left by the inflammatory response. Then, our bodies go back to a normal resting state, waiting to take care of the next threat.
Here’s where the issue comes in. In today’s environment, the threats are chronic, don’t go away, many occur at the same, and they can become quite intense. This means that your inflammatory response never stops. It’s fighting many things all the time and that response can also get quite intense.
It’s no wonder Americans are “getting” more and more chronic diseases every year and at an earlier age! We are aging ourselves and that’s no bueno.
There are many potential causes of inflammation. The specific ones affecting you will be different than someone else. However, I’d like to give you an idea of just a few of the things that could be contributing to a chronic low-level of inflammation.
- Foods and food-like substances
- Food intolerances, allergies, or sensitivities
- Leaky gut
- Medications
- Chronic infections
- Poor oral hygiene
- Total toxic load
To really get control over your own level of inflammation, you’ll want to minimize the impact of as many of these things as possible. Some may require further testing or conversations with a doctor or functional medicine practitioner (like me).
As an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner and self-proclaimed Inflammologist, finding the root causes of inflammation is my bread and butter. It’s also the foundation to preventing or reversing cognitive decline and optimizing brain health.
To see how we might be able to work together, click here. However, if you’re ready to jump in and start feeling your absolute best, click here to book a free Discovery Call with me.
Back to inflammation though. Let’s talk more about one of the biggest contributors I’ve found in myself and my patients thus far. Food.
How Food Causes Inflammation
You probably eat numerous foods several times throughout the day, am I right?
Every single time you eat or drink something marks a time that your body could be introduced to something potentially inflammatory. That adds up quickly.
Some food substances are naturally inflammatory to most people because of how they break down (or don’t break down) in the body. These include gluten, dairy, sugar, and pretty much anything processed. We see these all the time in the Standard American Diet – cheeseburgers, French fries, ice cream, pasta, bread, cereal, cakes, candy, soda, and on and on.
Other inflammatory foods may be specifically inflammatory to a particular person because of their genetics, which may prevent them from digesting and tolerating those foods or food chemicals.
Still other people may develop sensitivities to certain foods because they have a leaky gut barrier that allows larger food particles than normal to enter the blood stream and be seen by the immune system as a foreign invader.
All of the situations I just mentioned will trigger the immune system to launch an inflammatory response because your immune system thinks these things are harming you. While some of them do actually cause damage (such as the gluten, dairy, sugar, and processed foods), many don’t unless one of the other factors is in play.
A side note on processed foods. If your grandma or great-grandma wouldn’t recognize an ingredient as a food, it’s probably not something you should be putting into your body. Let’s eat food, not food-like substances.
In addition to specific foods being a problem, imbalances in your blood sugar cause peaks and valleys of energy supply for the brain and contributes to inflammation itself as well as insulin resistance (when your body doesn’t listen to insulin signals anymore, your blood sugar starts to increase, and you move one step closer to a diagnosis of diabetes).
Blood sugar imbalances are seen most often when a person mostly eats carbohydrates (both simple and complex) in comparison to healthy fats and proteins. That’s because the energy provided by carbs is much shorter lived than that of protein and healthy fats. Basically, when this happens your body is on a roller coaster going between well fed and starvation mode many times a day. If that’s not exhausting I don’t know what is.
Last but not least, inflammation causes your body to use up nutrients faster than usual as it’s trying to bring your body back to balance. This means vital nutrients that help you make energy, send brain signals, and even make up the structure of your skin begin to become scarce. These processes and structures begin to break down, sending your body into panic mode and, you guessed it, causing more inflammation.
Overall, when preventing early aging, it’s best to avoid foods that cause inflammation. The main culprits are gluten, dairy, starchy foods that are turned quickly into sugar (like white potatoes, rice, and grains), as well as processed foods.
How To Decrease Inflammation With Food
Since certain foods can contribute to inflammation, it makes sense that to decrease inflammation you’d want to avoid those foods as much as possible. Having these foods occasionally (such as once a month) may be okay for you. It may not. You’ll have to listen to your body when you do eat them again.
The longer you eat the way I’m about to expand on, the more your tastebuds will change. You’ll be able to taste when something is processed and it won’t be as tasty as you used to think it was. This has certainly been true for me. On one hand it’s somewhat disappointing that my once favorite foods don’t taste great anymore. But on the other hand I’m so excited to know that my body has adjusted to be able to tell me just based on taste whether a food will help my body or hurt it. My body now knows what is real food and what isn’t. Yours will too.
At this point, you may be thinking… if I’m supposed to avoid gluten, dairy, sugar, and pretty much any processed food, what am I supposed to eat?
I thought that too, but it turns out there’s about a bajillion and one whole foods that don’t contain any one of those things.
And guess what? Many of those foods have been found to help decrease and inhibit new inflammation in your body too! That’s a win-win.
Below is a list of yummy anti-inflammatory foods for you to try. I recommend starting with foods you already know you like and trying one or two new foods each week. That way, you don’t overwhelm yourself with new foods AND you get a good variety of foods. This actually helps to lower your inflammation since your immune system isn’t exposed to the same food all the time, decreasing your chance for food sensitivities.
- Proteins – Salmon, shrimp, grass-fed beef, venison, turkey, chicken, mozzarella cheese
- Dairy Alternatives – Coconut kefir, almond milk, plant-based yogurt
- Nuts & Seeds – Almonds, cashews, chia seeds, dried coconut, flaxseeds, pecans, walnuts
- Fats & Oils – Avocado, dark chocolate, canned coconut milk, extra virgin olive oil, olives, pesto
- Legumes – Edamame, pinto beans, hummus
- Non-Starchy Vegetables (my favorite category) – Lettuce of all kinds, greens, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, bok choy, asparagus, leeks, mushrooms, onions, sprouts, spaghetti squash, tomatoes, turnips, zucchini
- Starchy Vegetables – Sweet potatoes, parsnips, butternut squash, plantains
- Fruit – Berries, apples, grapes, kiwi, plums, peaches
- Gluten-Free Grains – Quinoa, steel-cut oats, buckwheat
Click on the image below to pin this list for later.
In general, eating this way lowers inflammation in the body and brain, helps heal leaky gut and prevent it from occurring in the future, and helps optimize your gut bugs (or microbiome). Healing leaky gut and optimizing the microbiome also helps keep inflammation down. Double win!
On top of that, eating as many different colors as you can helps the body keep inflammation down too. Each color means the food has different phytochemicals that help your body function properly, including your immune system. The more colors you eat, the more likely you are to get a wide range of these healthy molecules. This is why I say “eat the rainbow.”
To take your food game to the next level, read this post on how to eat for optimal brain health and this post that discusses the differences between the two.
Your body is rather resilient and can function at near optimal levels even if what you’re eating isn’t 100% perfect. So while it’s important to try your best to stick to the eating plan I’ve outlined above to keep your inflammation levels down, please give yourself some grace if you eat something less than ideal. We are human after all.
Plus, the goal is to be able to eat this way long-term. It’ll take some time to get used to it and for your tastebuds to change.
I’ll caveat that with my own testimony. Every time I stray away more than just one meal or snack, I feel my old moodiness, concentration issues, and general lack of energy come surging back. Re-experiencing my old symptoms is definitely a great motivator to move back towards this way of eating as fast as I can.
Don’t worry though! The more you eat this way, the less appealing the foods that contribute to inflammation become. This has certainly been true for me! There are now foods I don’t ever crave anymore and more still that I crave, but then stop eating after a couple bites because it doesn’t taste as good as I remember.
The bottom line is, if I can do it you can do it too.
To make getting started even easier and take it one step further to optimize your brain health, I’ve put together a guide on how to eat for your brain. You can download it for free by filling out the form below and I’ll send it your way.
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