Foods and Inflammation
Usually if I mention a food in one of my talks on my TikTok account, someone will tell me that it is “inflammatory,” even if it really isn’t. Well what does that even mean?
Inflammation is a natural part of your body’s process to fight disease, repair damage to your tissues, and help you heal after an injury. If we would magically get rid of inflammation in your body now, you would be dead by tomorrow.
There are 4 stages to inflammation so let’s go through them and then see what food has to do with the process.
The first stage of inflammation is after an initial injury – in this case let’s say you get stuck with a cactus needle that has some bacteria on it. Your body recognizes the injury, and immediately starts to signal for help from the rest of the body to deal with both the injury from the cactus thorn and the bacteria. You will usually see redness (in latin it is called ‘rubor’). Your white blood cells perceived both the injury and the bacterial threat and are asking for help and the rest of the body quickly responds by sending more white cells the the area to battle the infection.
The second stage is – those white cells start to release chemicals that will both be toxic to the bacteria and begin to break down any bits of the cactus thorn that is still in you. White cells have highly oxidative chemicals (think hydrogen peroxide) and those are toxic to the bacteria. This causes some heat in the area – both from the influx and swelling of blood cells to bring in reinforcements and the chemicals being released to kill the bacteria. Heat around inflammation is called by the Latin name, ‘calor’.
The third stage is when things start to swell at the same time as reinforcements come (swelling is called ‘tumor’) and all of that swelling and heat can cause pain (Latin is ‘dalor’) – which is the fourth stage.
That is all the immediate response of how your body responds to infection or to an injury. Once the threat is neutralized, the body begins to fix the area, and lay down some scar tissue. Then over the next few months that scar tissue starts to reorganize – this is why surgical scars are so red at first but then over time they become hard to see.
This basic system of inflammation works throughout our body all day long. Imagine if you have a heart attack – no blood to a small area of the heart. Your body responds with an inflammatory response – sending cells there to clean up and get rid of the old cells that have died and lay down scar tissue. If you didn’t have that system then your heart would rupture and you would die.
You can sometimes feel the effect of your inflammatory response when you get influenza. Fever (‘calor’) is a body’s response to the virus and the bacteria and makes it harder for those foreign invaders to take hold. Still too much fever and it is bad for you. So we take drugs to reduce the fever – those drugs are called anti-inflammatory drugs – aspirin being the more common one. What about those muscle aches? That is your inflammatory system, not the flu virus, and a bit of aspirin or some Motrin (which is in a class of drugs called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or NSAIDs) are used to calm down the inflammatory process and make you feel better.
Too much inflammatory response will hurt you. Those toxic chemicals your white blood cells spew out to kill invading bacteria or parasites are not just toxic to them, they are also toxic to your normal cells. Too much inflammatory process or if the process goes wild then you can harm normal tissue. When people have auto-immune disease (like celiac disease, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis) – inflammation can harm the normal tissues. For these diseases we have more powerful inflammatory drugs like steroids, or maybe Humera etc.
Your body not only has an entire system in place to start the inflammatory process, it also has a system in place to stop that process. Think of inflammation like fire. A campfire is good, you can cook food, keep warm, but if that campfire gets out of control you have a forest fire, then things are bad. The same is true with inflammation, so your body has a whole lot of systems in place to stop inflammation almost the second it starts.
Think of foods as either wood for the fire, or water to suppress the fire. Sometimes you need kindling, to get the fire going and keep it going but if it gets out of the campfire and spreads into the forest you need to suppress it.
There are a lot of chemicals in your body that help suppress the inflammatory process so that it doesn’t go too far. Some of those chemicals you get right from your diet, and some your body can make. Supplements have not shown to be helpful with inflammation.
Here’s the good news, if you have obesity, diabetes, heart disease, then intervention with these food groups: vegetables, fruit, tea, wine, cocoa, and olive oil are a great deal of help to a person. Other foods that are helpful include tomatoes, nuts, and fatty fish.
What foods make inflammation worse? Those include refined carbohydrates, sodas, lard, fried foods, and processed meats.
People who eat a diet rich in the anti-inflammatory foods above (which is the basis of the Mediterranean Diet) not only have a profound effect to reduce heart disease, cancer, and auto-immune diseases, but so do the spices and herbs you cook with. Why buy turmeric when you can cook with it and it is less expensive? What has been shown in a number of studies is that while you can deconstruct a tomato (the anti-inflammatory parts are like lyc-o-mato) don’t work well without the rest of the tomato.
What foods did I eat Three Day Cycle:
Breakfast: 3 days this week I had overnight oats for breakfast. The recipe – click here. I usually make these Tuesday night and have them on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. In the early hours I take them the overnight oats out of the jar and usually add a bit of plain yogurt to them, then a teaspoon or two of peanut butter and whatever fresh fruits I have (blueberries and strawberries). That keeps me satisfied for hours.
Lunch: I always have two fruits – it is the season, so usually a nectarine or peach and an apple or banana. And I usually bring ice tea with me to drink during the day. Some days I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread (peanut butter is a legume and thus worth a point). On Thursdays I love stopping in Anderson’s for some split pea soup and a half tuna sandwich on whole wheat bread.
Dinner: I poached some salmon one day – once I get the salmon from the grocery store I like to poach salmon the day I get it. Then I can refrigerate it and it is good for adding to a salad, for lunch or dinner. Poaching is also the easiest way to keep salmon from being smelly. I made a lemon-caper sauce and had it with some broccoli and a bit of rice.
One night I had some nice Achaar chicken with Naan bread. That is a simple Indian dish made with tomato Achaar and yogurt that I marinate and then bake the chicken in. Another, night I had some glazed chicken with peanut noodles.