Inflammation: 7 Things You Need To Know About It and 7 Foods That Cause It
Time Magazine once titled inflammation as “The Silent Killer”. Amen and applause TIME! They linked inflammation to heart attacks, cancer, alzheimers, and other diseases. This amazing and educating article happened way back in 2004. It jammed about the world-wide role that inflammation plays on pretty much every disease’s process contributing to major illness or death.
In my health coaching, without the client knowing it or not, I [and I know all my other fellow amazing Holistic Honeys] are constantly working on ingesting anti-inflammatory foods, and keeping inflammation away from our precious innards.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT IT
1. Inflammation is our immune systems natural response to dis-ease, irritation, infection, or injury. Disease or dis-ease in our body is a simple interruption in the natural healthy flow of our being.
2. Our organs and internal pieces are directly hurt and injured with inflammation. Just like a sprained ankle or an open-wound on our glowing skin, our inside systems become red, infected, painful, swollen, and lose their ability to perform perfectly and fully.
3. So many factors effect inflammation in our bods:
- Stress
- Blood sugar levels
- Sleep habits
- Smoking
- Mother Earth pollution
- Lack of exercise
- MOST OF ALL Eats
4. Every body is unique. That includes every body’s response to these lifestyle choices. Some 100 year young humans can smoke every day of their life and not pass onto heaven with lung disease. Some humans can eat 1000 calories worth of white sugar per day and have a 25 inch waist. Some humans can get 4 hours of sleep and glow all day long without coffee or complaining.
We are all so pleasantly individual, and we all have different inflammatory levels and limits. But eventually something will find a way to interrupt your ease-in-being, and you’ll have 99 problems with THAT bitch being one!
5. The Glycemic Index plays a huge roll when talking inflammation. Eating low glycemic styles, DECREASES inflammation.
6. Any aches and pains in our body’s can for sure thank chronic inflammation. Constant stress, eating these terrible inflammatory foods, or lack of exercise will lead to chronic inflammation, which will guarantee you sore joints, a pain in your neck [literally] or a stiff body upon waking in the glorious morning.
7. In addition to your insides, inflammation is the silent killer to your youth! The causes for the immune system to inflame also become the causes for premature aging. Saggy skin, bags under the eyes, lack of glow, brittle hair, weak nails, and lack of energy are all brilliant reasons to avoid the seven food mentioned below, and great reason to educate yourself further on the serious results of inflammation.
FOODS TO AVOID
Every time one of these foods are eaten our immune system [aka Our entire insides starting with our mouths ending with the tips of our toes] is attacked and begins to fight its way back to solid health.
Imagine this cycle happening in your body at least 70 times per minute over a 20 minute summer BBQ meal.
- White sugar and refined starch
Your body will thank you in more than one sexy way if you eliminate this food from your life all together! - Vegetable Oil
So many vegetable oils are high in omega-6 fats. While these fatty acids are super healthy fats to a balanced body, too much of them result in way too much omega-6 fatty acids which leads to an imbalance in omega-3 to omega-6 fats, which leads to imbalance in blood sugar … enter inflammatory chart here … Cooking with small amounts of coconut oil is perfection and using small amounts of Olive oil for salads or dressings will a - Dairy products
Due to the insane amounts of production dairy products have to go through to be approved to sell and purchase, our bodies cannot recognized its nutrients and ingest it as a toxin. Our insides fight to get rid of the foreign product leaving our guts and our precious insides attacked, exhausted, and inflamed. - Red meat
Most of this red meat explanation is super cool learnings for a more intense blog post for another day but for now:
Red meat contains an acid called Neu5Gc [N-glycolylneuraminic acid]. This acid is found quite abundantly in read meat and when ingested causes immediate inflammation. ‘Cause there is so much acidity in red meat, it can lead to insane inflammatory immune response, which can lead to some serious disease within out awesome body’s. - Gluten
Wheat, rye and barley all contain this common allergen. Just like a pollen allergy, when you ingest food your body is allergic too your insides begin to sneeze, develop a runny nose, and just as if you had watery eyes, your body immediately becomes inflamed to fight the allergy against the over-used grain ingredient, gluten. - Processed foods
CORN is found in tons and tons and tons of processed foods. Corn derivatives such as high-fructose corn syrup, or corn starch is crazy cheap so the food industry uses it to fill their food boxes with more stuff to trick you with more nutrients. Seriously so sad that we are tricked like that. But anyways, this refined corn starts at the beginning of our inflammation flow chart, and swells up our insides like a birthday balloon, creating huge pathways for riskier, worse disease.
Also, packaged foods contain trans fats, which are LDL [low density lipoprotein] which attack the walls of your blood vessels causing inflammatory response to occur to fight against this dis-ease in being.
Understanding Cholesterol in a Nut Shell
Cholesterol is carried in the blood atteache to proeitns called lipoprtoeins.
There are two main forms of lipoproteins:
Low Density Lipoprotein = Bad Cholesterol
High Density Lipoprotein = Good Cholesterol
LDL carries cholesterol through your body, delivering it to our organs and tissue. But when in excess it continues to be delivered and dropped off and ends up sticking to the blood vessel walls and build up plaque, narrowing our blood vessels interrupting the natural blood flow, sometimes completely.
HDL sees the excess cholesterol as a hot date. HDL picks up the excess cholesterol and takes it back to our trusty liver where it is broken down and reduces our risk of dis-ease of the heart.
7. Food Chemicals
Regardless of how much we eat processed foods, our bodies will not become savvy in breaking down chemicals like food colouring, additives, articificcial sweeteners, and preservatives. All of these constant chemicals we eat as if they are a food group will never be nourishing to our insides and therefore always ignite our immune system to respond against it, and end each bite inflamed and pissed off.
So kinda like Brad Paisley said, “you’re not supposed to say the word “cancer” in a song.” I don’t like to put that kinda of juju out there, but thank you for learning a smidge more about inflammation. And thank you for taking this topic super serious, cause seriously, its serious. I love your life. Thank you for letting me be a part of it, today!
Big Love,
Jillian