The internet age is ripe with trendy diets. We’re sure you’ve heard of intermittent fasting and the Atkins diet, the list goes on, but one of the more interesting diets is the one rooted more in fact. While weight watchers is a great campaign and helps hundreds of people lose weight, other diets are more about helping you focus on giving your body the nutrients it needs while still making food taste good. One of the more popular diets on the rise that was created with that goal in mind is the anti-inflammatory diet. But why concern yourself with inflammation? Because the lack of inflammation is an integral part of your health.
What is Inflammation in The Body?
Don’t misconstrue inflammation and chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is obviously unnecessary and acts as a sort of glitch in the human body’s general processes. Inflammation in general, however, is your immune system’s reaction when it finds something foreign in your body. It responds with inflammation to things like illnesses, infections, weird microbes, environmental irritants, chemicals, injuries and all other potential ailments that might upset the body’s interior equilibrium. It operates by sending more red or white blood cells to the source of this issue, depending on the type of issue and because there’s a higher volume of cells in the area, it inflames. Inflammation is often demonstrated with symptoms of swelling, pain and usually some redness wherever the body thinks there’s something off. In this way, the body cuts off and starts dealing with the issue quickly and efficiently so it’s not permitted to spread to the rest of your body and make the issue worse.
This response is glitchy in a sense and is sometimes triggered by things that are causing no harm to your body. However, you’ll still get those symptoms of inflammation again and your body will suffer for it. For usually, inflammation goes down when a problem is solved, but if there’s no problem to solve, it doesn’t go away again and becomes a chronic issue that can cause things as big as heart disease and as annoying and chronic as back pain.
Why Avoid Inflammation?
Inflammation is one of the key causes of quite a few chronic conditions that you, likely, want nothing to do with. What’s daunting, however, is inflammation is hard to control and prevent, yet is easy to conclude as the cause of an ailment down the road when it’s too late. What’s frustrating, is treating inflammation is no easy task, and while you can opt for a life-long prescription of medication to solve your inflammation problem, you’ll have to take the side effects from that medication with it. However, controlling inflammation could be as simple as investing time in finding the right diet for you.
As you likely already know, putting better foods in your body creates a better outcome in how you feel and perform. You can think better when you have better nutrients, perform tasks better and make physical activities of all kinds easier when you have the right nutrients flowing through your bloodstream. What’s better still, is that you can pursue better eating and an anti-inflammatory diet (which go hand-in-hand) to prevent inflammatory disease and keep your body running like a dream.
Inflammation Triggering Foods
The best way for you to avoid unnecessary inflammation is by bettering your diet. If you’re not introducing inflammatory foods, your body won’t create an inflammation response when there isn’t one needed. In fact, certain foods are attributed more to speeding up inflammatory diseases than they are to just causing the body to react to their stimuli with inflammation. Some foods even make your existing issues with inflammation far worse in this same way. There are a few that are rather easy to avoid and there are others that will be harder to cut out of a diet.
For example, if you already lead a fairly healthy lifestyle and have a good diet, you likely don’t partake much in processed meats. Cutting these out entirely is a great step to improving your diet and avoiding inflammation-causing foods. Specifically, you should watch out for hotdogs, sausages, and bologna of all types as they’re very inflammatory due to salt content and other things put in them. Let’s just say, they’re not all just meat.
Other foods that are known for causing inflammatory responses and exasperating current inflammatory disease are things like trans fats (think shortening, vegetable oils and eating anything that’s been fried, even if it’s just zucchini). Sugary drinks like soda and juices, despite potential vitamin content, are best avoided, as well as refined carbs like white rice, pasta, and bread. The real bummer is that processed snacks that are nation-wide favorites like crackers, cookies, and chips are the worst for you as well as anything overly sweet like cake and ice cream.
Do you have to cut these out of your diet completely? Certainly not. Everything in moderation is fine, but if these are common staples of your household, you’ll find that you’re exasperating your own inflammatory response and suffering for it.
Curious about how to combat these diet-caused inflammations? Join us next time to find out what anti-inflammatory foods you can add to your diet to give your body a sense of balance so you can control your inflammatory response better.
Worried About Your Back? Reach out to The Spine Care Center in Manassas
If you’re concerned about the inflammation harming your back, you might reach out to the experts at The Spine Care Center. We’re passionate about helping people live pain-free and we provide a variety of treatments for back pain that ranges between dietary changes to surgery when it’s needed. Schedule an appointment today.