Vitality hacks: Fight inflammation through your diet

What’s your super power? FOOD.

Health is wealth. While this truth is certainly no ground-breaking revelation, we usually only appreaciate its essence, when we are not healthy, whether that’s with regards to our physical or our mental state or both. Health is the ultimate luxury good, we can own. Nothing else matters more nor should it.

In this day and age, we also have it deeply engraved in our brains that the pathway to recovery from feeling unwell leads us via pills, medical support or nutrition supplements (be it powders, shakes or more pills). While all those things have their merit and are certainly often necessary to combat whatever illness you are fighting (like cancer for instance), there are a lot of times, where we can find salvation in the food that we eat as vitality hacks. Therefore, eat yourself healthy.

We all know the term soul food. We connect it to the amazing feeling of home, coziness, family and just the great sentiment of satisfaction we feel after we ate it. Soul food heals the soul while it nurishes us. But what about healing our bodies. For as long as humanity exists, we have known the effect of certain herbs, vegetables, meat, fruits or entire meals due to the effect of their unique chemical balance on our health.

Throughout the millenias, we might not have known why exactly certain things we consume heal us or how it all works inside of us, we just knew what mattered: it helped. They were tried and tested vitality hacks. Today, we lost that trust in nature and rather give ourselves (quite literally) to the achievements of technology and artificially manufactured products.

Back to nature

How about we allow ourselves to trust nature again. Especially when it comes to inflammations, since this is certainly superior to popping a pill or enduring whatever plagues us. An inflammation is actually a perfectly „healthy“ reaction of your body. It’s angered and irritated by something that isn’t good for you.

Inflammation is linked to leading to a whole lot of severe health issues from cancer, heart disseases, arthritis or depression, to name just a few, if we allow it to become chronic. The crazy thing about this is that we are often not really aware that we not well. Not everything is as obvious as a raging headache or stomach acid. Sometimes it’s just this background feeling of not being quite as energetic, feeling lethargic or looking tired despite having slept long enough. It might be, because your body is occupied elsewhere.

Discover your bodies fighter spirit

Our body is a complex powerful machine with a remarkable healing capability. But just like the challenge to repair anything while still operating it, our body faces the same obstacle. It needs to keep all basic functions running, while it deals with fixing what’s broken or compromised. This inevitably means, it needs to focus its ressources on where they are most needed. Hence our hair looks dull or falls out, because our body is fighting something essential, and hair (while an important asset to how we define us) is not essential for survival. Therefore your body drives attention away from non-essentials to what matters (like basic functions of survival), e.g. resulting in hair loss or grey skin.

So if you are immune compromised or if you feel that you generally want to incorporate more healthy food options that help fight inflammations, this article provides you with a list of food based vitality hacks with lots of options that support your body and also a second list with food that’s best avoided as it causes inflammation or slows down the healing process of your body.

Nature gives us an abundance of great opportunities to create nutricious and tasty meals without missing out. If you want to avoid eggs for instance, but still bake a tasty cake, replace them with overnight oats. Check, if any of the vegan milk alternatives work for you to replace dairy in your morning coffee.

What makes food help you fight inflammation

One common demenor of anti-inflammatory food is that they tend to be rich in anti-oxidants. They are important agents, as scientists have shown in many studies (e.g. Journal of Nutrition and British Journal of Nutrition) to decrease blood markers of chronic inflammation. Harvard University conducted research around this topic as well.

On the other hand, research (such as this one) has also shown the inflammatory effect of certain types of food, like processed meat. That also doesn’t mean that you need to avoid the items on the list below like the plague as they can have positive effects on other aspects of your health. Like beef for instance, it’s a great source for vitamin B12 and iron. So a healthy YOU should have red meat, just in moderation as a vitality hack. A few things on the list of inflammation enhancing food are in fact not total no-go’s. Another one in that category is dairy. You should have dairy as it provides you with calcium. Again, moderation is key. If you however find another great source for your calcium, like beans, lentils, seeds (chia, sesame, poppy), almonds or dark leafy greens, consider ditching the dairy.

An egg-celent vitality hack

Some food is literally ambivalent. As in it depends on certain factors whether they help you cure an inflammation or might accelerate one. One of the more common items on the list are eggs. It completely depends on the food that the chicken were fed, which turn the egg takes. If the chickens ate unnatural food (e.g. grains), the eggs can have an intensiving effect on inflammation, if they are fed their natural diet (insects, which is veeery rare), then they actually can help you get healthier.

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Food that supports your body fighting inflammation

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Check out some tasty recipes that follow the low inflammation princple:

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Food either causing inflammation or slowing down the ability to fight it