A few more thoughts on inflammation...

Your inflammatory response is vital to your overall health. It’s needed to fight infections and heal injuries. The problem comes into play when inflammation lingers long after it’s needed. You can think of it like a fever. A fever is one of your body’s natural ways of fighting an infection, but a fever that runs too hot or for too long can cause various complications, including death in some cases. Inflammation isn’t much different. The leading causes of death and disability worldwide are chronic degenerative conditions, like cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and type II diabetes. Deaths from these types of conditions currently exceed all the historical causes of death like famine, war and even all the infectious diseases combined. So what changed? There must be a common underlying element. And there seems to be. All of these chronic degenerative diseases are linked to chronic levels of inflammation wreaking havoc on arteries, joints, brain tissue and immune function. If inflammation is at the root of many of our most deadly modern health conditions, it makes sense to take a look at what in our world changed to influence chronic inflammation in the body in such a devastating way.

One of the biggest contributors to the inflammation epidemic is the modern diet. Changes that can be made to improve this has already been discussed in the previous two posts about food to eat and food to avoid. Other than improving your diet you can sleep more. A lack of restorative sleep enhances inflammation in the body. And it’s well documented that people with sleep disorders have an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer and Alzheimer’s.  

Sleep problems, as well as inflammation problems, are further enhanced by chronic stress issues. You release the hormone cortisol when you’re stressed, which releases stored sugar back into your bloodstream, keeping you from getting a deep sleep. But the process of releasing this stored sugar from your cells is itself inflammatory, not to mention the fact that sugar has its own inflammatory effect on the body. In summation, try to eat less inflammatory foods, but also try to think less inflammatory thoughts.