Anti-Inflammatory Foods and Diet

By guest author Ben Mester

I’ve been doing a lot of research recently into inflammation and how it affects our lifestyles and quality of living.  Eating anti-inflammatory foods and herbs seems to be an overarching way of increasing the quality of a person’s life over a long period of time.

In the modern day and age, people are living longer than ever before.  But is the quality of that life improving as well?  One has to ask themselves the question, “Is it really worthwhile to live till I’m 90 if the last 15 years of my life are filled with things like chemotherapy, Alzheimer’s, and arthritis?  It seems that even though people are living longer and longer, the amount of illnesses and ailments present in the modern world seem to be on the rise as well.

A big cause of this seems to be the diets that we eat.  I don’t think anyone would argue that our Standard American Diet is filled with foods that aren’t really all that healthy.

The sheer volume of preservatives, artificial colors and sweeteners, pesticides, processed foods, and other things in the Standard American Diet is pretty monumental.  Much of the Standard American Diet seems to bring about a general state of inflammation inside the body.

Inflammation as a concept is a very good thing, protecting regions of our bodies from harmful and hazardous things.  Inflammation happens when a person gets bit by a poisonous bug, or when a sudden impact causes blunt force trauma to a particular region of the body.  By swelling and isolating the region, the body can best protect itself from further harm and take steps to repair the damage.

A problem seems to occur when the body is encouraged toward a pro-inflammatory state through the consumption of certain foods.  Foods in general are said to either be anti-inflammatory or pro-inflammatory.  As you can imagine, foods that are pro-inflammatory will increase the amount of inflammation a person experiences in various parts of their body.  Pain will generally increase, and the risk of many chronic diseases also seems to go up. Foods like junk foods, fast foods, sugar, processed foods and high fat meats are at the top of the list of pro-inflammatory foods.  As a person’s body enters into an elevated state of inflammation, corresponding ailments like arthritis seem to grow more intense and more painful as well.

Consuming foods that generally promote an anti-inflammatory state seems to have a positive effect on a person’s health and wellness over the long haul.  There is a lot of literature that has already been written about anti-inflammatory diets and anyone interested in the topic should definitely continue to do research on the subject.

I initially started researching the topic when I was made aware that arthritis runs in my family.  I wanted to see if there was anything that I could do that would help stop the arthritis before it ever started.  That brought me to researching anti-inflammatory foods and herbs.

I found that in general, to keep a mindset of avoiding foods that caused inflammation in the body would lead to an overall state of wellness and would help the body fight chronic diseases like arthritis and other things.  So in a way, having a heritage of arthritis in my family was almost a blessing because it led me to research about ways to improve my overall health.
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I hope you learned something about anti-inflammatory foods and herbs.
http://hubpages.com/hub/Anti-Inflammatory-Herbs

Dr. Jo’s comments:

If you want more information about anti-inflammatory food take a look at my cookbook – all the foods in it are anti-inflammatory.