The Do's And Don'ts Of Reducing Chronic Inflammation

Inflammation has always been a medical mystery, but now it has become an enemy of long-term health. On the one hand, when your skin turns red, swollen, and painful after you burn yourself, which triggers acute inflammation, the response is normal and beneficial. Extra red blood cells, immune cells, and antioxidants are rushing to the wounded site to heal it. But carried too far, inflammation can be fatal, as when someone is too burned to recover.

Only in the past few decades has it dawned that low-level chronic inflammation, which usually goes completely unnoticed, plays a part in many lifestyle disorders such as hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. Chemicals known as inflammation markers can enter the bloodstream in various ways: From the intestinal tract (so-called leaky gut), as a reaction to infection, or through the action of the immune system in other internal ways. The slow drip, drip of inflammatory markers can take years to create major impairment, which means that each person must tailor his lifestyle to counter them.

Diet alone isn’t enough to keep chronic low-level inflammation at bay, but it’s a good start. By adopting an anti-inflammation diet, you aim at two positive results: keeping the micro-organisms in your intestines healthy and flourishing, thereby preventing the seepage of toxic chemicals into the bloodstream. There is also the indirect benefit that a healthy digestive system sends signals of well-being along the vagus nerve to the heart and brain.

The millions of bacteria that inhabit the intestinal tract are an essential part of our total DNA, contributing thousands of separate genomes. Together this vast colony is known as the microbiome. Here are some essential points to know:

We divide our advice into "Do" (adding something good to your diet) and "Undo" (taking something bad out of your diet). We tell people to choose only one change at a time, seeing how well they can follow it, and only then moving on to the next change.

A natural, organic, whole-food diet should be maintained over a lifetime to keep low-level inflammation at bay, but nutritional research has uncovered specific foods that have anti-inflammatory properties.

In their online health publications, Harvard Medical School adds a few other items to the list:

Leaving aside their anti-inflammatory effects, these are all healthy, whole foods, and making them a mainstay of your diet can only be beneficial. However, the science is still out on whether all of these foods actually have an anti-inflammatory effect in the body and also what effect, if any, they have on the microbiome. Still, fighting chronic low-level inflammation isn’t incidental or just one in a long list of positive lifestyle changes. It could be the key, along with stress reduction, to enjoying wellness for many decades into a healthy old age. There is every reason to go down this road and no reason not to.