Inflammation is a body’s defense to fight illness or injury. If you’ve ever over done it from physical activity, you may see the inflammation and feel the soreness. In past blogs, I’ve talked about ways to minimize inflammation through eating, taking an herbal supplement, or by engaging in recovery. In this blog I want to focus on why continued inflammation is bad and what is happening in your body, while short term your body is defending itself.
Research is still ongoing regarding what is going on with inflammation, and conclusions are evolving. But, even now there is a strong correlation between long term inflammation and diseases such as heart disease or diabetes.
When inflammation occurs, the immune system is releasing chemicals into your body that causes small blood vessels to expand. This will allow more blood to reach the injured tissue. The chemicals released at the injured point attract immune system cells to the injured area, where they help with the healing process.
So, for example, when you get the flu or a bug, your muscles and joints may ache, which make you feel under the weather. What’s happening is your immune cells are working together to fight the bug that you have. This immune response is caused by cytokines. These chemicals help individual immune cells work together to fight the bug.
However, when inflammation is chronic – it’s constant or fairly constant – you need to worry. It generally can be linked to cancer, arthritis, diabetes, and heart disease. You can take ibuprofen or focus on natural supplements for short term results. However, lowering chronic inflammation can help protect you against more serious problems such as heart problems. Therefore, people take statins. With arthritis, you want to control the inflammation because that is what causes joint damage.
Inflammation can be caused by smoking, stress, drinking or even eating high fat diets. Exercise can fight chronic inflammation. I would recommend that you look at the past blogs I’ve written located on the Knowledge page of the Pat’s Gym website to read more about foods/spices that fight inflammation. And here is another reason you should workout consistently.
DM me with any questions you may have….Again, do look at the Knowledge page of the Patsgym.comwebsite for blogs on eating well.
