How Your Body Responds to Inflammation

Inflammation is important to our survival. It is the bodies initial reaction to injury or infection. When the injury occurs, the tissue at the site of infection gets damaged. Your white blood cells and platelets come rushing in and release chemicals like histamines to the site. This in turn causes the blood vessels to dilate and increases blood flow to the site which is why we sometimes experience inflammation as heat or swelling.

When this natural bodily process get’s out of hand, it is usually because the inflammation starts to aggravate the surrounding tissue and the inflammation spreads. The good news is, you can take steps to support the bodies ability to get inflammation under control.

The route to doing this may surprise you, we are going to start tackling inflammation problems by addressing our immune system and our gut! Why you may ask? Well our immune system first lives in the gut and it is a key player in helping us respond properly to infection and injury which triggered the inflammation in the first place. Before we get there I want to share with you some simple lifestyle changes you can make.

Lifestyle Changes for Reducing Inflammation

• Focus on breath work! When you are focusing on breathing, you are sending oxygen to your cells. Yogic breath has been shown to be particularly helpful.
• Get movement. This helps to get your blood flowing better throughout your whole system.
• Hydrate you cells. 6-8 glasses a day.
• Epsom salt baths. Magnesium sulfate is the mineral that makes up epsom salts. When they are dissolved in warm water, they can be taken in through the skin. Magnesium is an important mineral involved with muscle and nerve function and could help reduce swelling. Also, it is pretty good for the soul to take a nice long soak.

Foods To Reduce Inflammation

Diet is on of the most important places to look at when tackling any wellness issue. What we consume and the health of our gut, greatly impacts us not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. The best diet to get on to help reduce inflammation would be to get on a  plant based diet. A plant based diet puts the focus on fresh minimally processed produce. This is made up of 90% fresh produce and the remaining 10% on brown or wild rice, a bit of dairy or a bit of meat. Why a plant based diet? Well, our bodies were created to run on fresh produce and processed foods with additives are unfamiliar to our body.

There are some foods in particular that can aggravate inflammation in the body and some that can even help. If you have arthritis or leaky gut, you may want to look at eliminating night shades vegetables for some time. This includes peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, garlic, cayenne, exc.

You will be happy to know of the foods that can help such as pineapple and papaya. These two fruits are particularly helpful due to their anti-inflammatory enzymes. Alkaline foods like your greens are also easier on the body to process and help to lower the bodies PH.

Reduce Inflammation With Supplementation

In addition to some easy lifestyle changes and making improvements to your diet, supplementation can help fill in the gaps and provide additional support where it is needed. Below are my favorite natural and high quality supplements to help reduce inflammation.

Alfalfa Complex

Omega Guard

Vita-Lea Multivitamin