One of the most serious – and common – causes of chronic disease is inflammation. Despite it being a very necessary process for defending and repairing tissue, high levels of inflammation in the body cause your cells to deteriorate and lose their ability to function properly. In turn, this leads to the development of diseases such as diabetes, cancer, autoimmune dysfunction, and other disorders.

The level of inflammation in your body is influenced by a number of factors, including diet, lifestyle, and environment. We will discuss gut inflammation and what we can do to eliminate this problem.

1. What causes inflammation in the gut?

There are certain kinds of food that are considered to cause inflammation in the gut. These foods are mostly fatty and contain simple sugars. Other than these, inflammation can be as a result of imbalance of microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract. When harmful microbes or yeast such as Candida grow and spread, they can severely damage the lining of the gut. The resulting immune response can cause further inflammation and damage.

The same foods that cause inflammation are generally considered bad for our health, including sodas and refined carbohydrates, as well as red meat and processed meats. Some of these foods have even been associated with an increased risk for chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Below are foods that can cause inflammation:

• refined carbohydrates, such as white bread and pastries
• French fries and other fried foods
• soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages
• red meat (burgers, steaks) and processed meat (hot dogs, sausage)
• margarine, shortening, and lard
• Sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.
• Artificial sweeteners, except for small quantities of Lakanto.
• High-mercury fish.

You should try to avoid or limit these foods as much as possible.

2. What can you do to resolve your inflamed gut?

There are several things you can do to reduce your gut inflammation:

2.1 Get on an anti-inflammatory diet.

What does an anti-inflammatory diet do? Many experimental studies have shown that components of foods or beverages may have anti-inflammatory effects. If you choose the right anti-inflammatory foods, you may be able to reduce your risk of illness. If you consistently pick the wrong ones, you could accelerate the inflammatory disease process.

Some anti-inflammatory foods you can take are:

• Fruits and vegetables such as blueberries, apples, and leafy greens- These are high in natural antioxidants and polyphenols—protective compounds found in plants.
• Nuts – These have reduced markers of inflammation and a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
• Coffee – This contains polyphenols and other anti-inflammatory compounds which may protect against inflammation.
• Curcumin –This is the active ingredient inturmeric, a bright orange spice. It’s one of the most powerful, natural, anti-inflammatory remedies on earth, especially for the gut.
• Whole grains
• Fish
• Healthy oils

In addition to lowering inflammation, a more natural, less processed diet can have noticeable effects on your physical and emotional health. A healthy diet is beneficial not only for reducing the risk of chronic diseases, but also for improving mood and overall quality of life.

2.2 Drink More Water to Get Rid of Toxins

You come into contact with toxins through air pollutants, heavy metals, mold, and airborne pathogens without even noticing. Many of our foods also contain toxins like pesticides, antibiotics, and even added sugars.

These toxins contribute heavily to inflammation. They ‘turn on’ genes that promote inflammation causing cancer, T2DM and heart disease. These toxins can also cause imbalances in your gut flora thus allowing inflammatory chemicals to be released. This inflammation can start a chain reaction in the body that could lead to chronic diseases.

Drinking water helps in flushing out these toxins. It also helps in moving waste efficiently through the gut and out of the bowels and optimal function of the liver and kidneys.

Try and drink 2-3L of water each day, or six to eight glasses. Make sure your water is fresh and filtered, or at least free of contaminants such as chlorine, fluoride and heavy metals. Carry a bottle of water with you throughout the day if possible, so you can keep sipping it instead of drinking a large amount of water at once. You can also have it with a squeeze of lemon juice, which is rich in vitamin C and can boost your immunity.

2.3 Exercise regularly

Physical activity stimulates your body’s major detoxification organs, including your intestines, urinary tract, sweat glands, circulatory system, and lymphatics. When these systems are able to move toxins and waste out of the body, inflammation is kept to a minimum.

As little as 20 minutes of exercise a day could have anti-inflammatory effects on the gut and the entire body. Exercise improves the body’s anti-inflammatory response by activating the sympathetic nervous system. This boosts your heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate. Consequently, your body releases hormones including epinephrine and norepinephrine into the bloodstream, which have the job of activating the adrenal receptors of immune cells.

Exercise also forces fresh blood to your tissues, which reduces inflammation by helping flush away metabolic debris. It provides nutrients to inflamed or damaged tissues, which facilitates repair and restoration.

Just like hydration, exercise also keeps your digestive system moving and promotes good digestive health, further reducing inflammation in your gut.

You should also avoid sitting for extended periods of time. In case you work long hours, set a timer to get yourself up and moving on a regular basis, at least every hour.

3. Keeping Gut Inflammation at bay….

When reducing inflammation in your gut, your first priority should be to reduce the amount of pro-inflammatory factors in your diet and lifestyle.

The steps mentioned above are very easy to incorporate into your daily routines, and will help to minimize the inflammatory processes happening inside your body.

By supporting your body’s detoxification functions with adequate exercise and hydration, you’ll be dramatically reducing the amount of harmful toxins that your immune system has to fight every day. Fewer toxins means your body can focus more on healing!

Take these simple steps and start to reduce your inflammation today. Your gut will thank you!

References

1. Healthline (2019): The Microbiome Diet: Can It Restore Your Gut Health? Retrieved from https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/microbiome-diet

2. Harvard Health Publishing (2014): Foods that fight inflammation. Retrieved from https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/foods-that-fight-inflammation

3. Lifehack (2019): 3 Simple Steps to Reduce Your Gut Inflammation. Retrieved from https://www.lifehack.org/822113/gut-inflammation

Can certain foods really help you fight heart disease, arthritis, and dementia?

In health, as with so many things, our greatest strength can be our greatest weakness. Take our astonishingly sophisticated response to injury and infection. Our bodies unleash armies of cellular troops to slaughter invaders and clear out traitors. Their movements are marshaled by signaling chemicals, such as the interleukins, which tell cells where and when to fight and when to stand down. We experience this as the swelling, redness, and soreness of inflammation—an essential part of healing.

But when the wars fail to wind down, when inflammation becomes chronic or systemic, there’s hell to pay. I’m looking at you, arthritis, colitis and bursitis, and at you, diabetes, colon cancer, Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease.

Cardiovascular disease is the world’s biggest killer, and we’ve known for 20 years that inflammation (along with too much cholesterol) ignites the buildup of plaque in our arteries. Still, no one knew if runaway inflammation could actually pull the trigger on heart attacks and strokes—until this summer. Results from a large, well-designed trial showed that certain high-risk patients suffered fewer of these “events” (as doctors so mildly call them) when given a drug that precisely targets inflammation (aiming at interleukin 1). It was sweet vindication for the cardiologist and principal investigator Paul Ridker of Harvard University, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who had long contended that inflammation was as vital a target as cholesterol.

The patients in Ridker’s study had already suffered a heart attack and had persistent inflammation (as measured by blood levels of C-reactive protein). But it is tempting to extrapolate lessons for all of us. Given that chronic inflammation plays a nefarious role in heart disease and many other disorders, shouldn’t we all do what we can to keep it in check? And I’m not talking about taking drugs like ibuprofen, which ease short-term inflammation. I mean something we can do every day of our lives: eat right.

Hop on the Internet or visit a bookstore, and you will see “anti-inflammatory” diets galore, dishing out recipes and hope. Many aims at specific ailments—arthritis, breast cancer, heart disease, various autoimmune disorders. Health guru Andrew Weil goes so far as to offer an “Anti-Inflammatory Food Pyramid.”

The underlying science, however, is somewhat shaky. Sure, plenty of foods have been found to reduce inflammation—many of them in laboratory experiments as opposed to in people: turmeric, blueberries, ginger, tea, various vegetables, dark chocolate, fish. University of South Carolina epidemiologists James Hébert and Nitin Shivappa valiantly surveyed 1,943 such studies and published in 2014 a Dietary Inflammatory Index, with 45 food elements. They created it as a research tool for evaluating diets but concede it’s built from studies that varied widely in methodology.

When I asked Ridker his views on anti-inflammatory diets, he grew uneasy. “This has caught on like wildfire,” he says, “but I have seen extremely little data that say this piece of food is ‘anti-inflammatory’ and this piece is ‘pro-inflammatory.’” He advises his own patients to eat a Mediterranean-type diet, heavy on vegetables, whole grains and fish and light on red meat and processed foods.

That diet, long endorsed by cardiologists, has been shown in well-designed studies to reduce key markers of inflammation and the risk of heart disease. Would it be even more effective if it incorporated more blueberries and turmeric? No one knows for sure.

may work anti-inflammatory wonders for mice, but “that’s in the context of rodent chow with a whole different set of macro and micronutrients,” explains Martha Clare Morris, a nutritional epidemiologist at Chicago’s Rush University. And context matters. The typical Mediterranean diet calls for loads of seafood a week, and yet studies of people taking fish oils as a supplement has not found many benefits. The virtues of fish may lie elsewhere or have more to do with displacing meat.

That’s why researchers such as Morris prefer to study overall dietary patterns rather than particular ingredients. Her current project examines whether cognitive decline can be slowed with a regimen called the MIND diet, which combines elements of the Mediterranean diet with another well-studied diet called DASH. It will look at inflammation, but results won’t be out before 2021.

Until then, there is no harm in adding more so-called anti-inflammatory ingredients to your diet. Hébert suggests a spicy chai (loaded with ginger, turmeric, and pepper). But remember the context! So don’t drink it with cookies and chips.