Digestion Causes Inflammation

Digestion causes inflammation as well as consuming a great portion of our bodies energy production as we learned in the previous article Digestion Uses a Lot of Energy.

“When you eat food, you also increase inflammation in the body. This happens even when you consume so-called “anti-inflammatory” foods. This is because the actual process of digestion stimulates inflammation.

A healthy diet will produce significantly less inflammation than an unhealthy diet, but both will increase inflammation in the body. The harder the meal is to digest, the more inflammatory activity it will provoke.” from https://thetruthaboutcancer.com/how-to-intermittent-fast/

What Causes Inflammation?

Your body’s natural defense systems go to  work to correct a problem. With the assault of a wound, the immune system gears up by releasing chemicals and white blood cells as part of the healing process. That’s pretty common knowledge, but have you ever realized that eating stimulates a similar response.

Eating stimulates the immune system to send a lot of white blood cells to the gut to respond to the inflammatory processes of digestion. The junkier the food is, the greater the inflammatory response since over-processed, over-cooked food contains a lot of free radicals that damage tissues.

However, even digesting  healthy raw fruits and vegetables initiates some inflammatory response and production of free radicals since the body has to produce a lot of chemicals to break down and assimilate that food.  

What Do We Feel  in Response to Inflammation?

OUCH!

It hurts. It makes us uncomfortable. Our bellies bloat. Our joints ache. We feel yucky. The inflammatory substances get stored in some body tissue that translates to pain in that area.

Science tells us that fat tissue contains a lot of inflammatory substances. Perhaps that’s where the body stores the inflammatory by-products of digestion so they don’t interact with our nerves and cause so much pain and discomfort.

But We Have to Eat. How Do We Minimize Inflammation?

That’s the rest of the story and takes us back to our original observations that people who eat small quantities of food, even though it may not be the highest quality food, seem to stay fairly healthy and live longer.