Hello Health Champions. Today i'm going to talk about inflammation and the foods that may or may
not cause inflammation. And the reason i say may or may not is that people will react very
very differently to different foods so it makes no sense to talk about foods causing reactions unless
we first understand a little bit about what those inflammatory reactions are inflammation is exactly
what it sounds like it's a flame it's something that hot red swollen and painful and we need to
understand it's an immune response that it's your immune system getting into action for some reason
and this is something that's not happening to the body it's not the food causing the inflammation
but it's something that's done by the body it's the body responding it's interpreting
and reacting to that food and this could be a local inflammation or it could be systemic and
we'll talk about both of those kinds and number 10 on the list is dairy a lot of people love dairy
it's a very popular food especially if you're going low carb you're reducing carbs to reduce
inflammation from insulin resistance but if you are sensitive to dairy now you're just
trading one type of inflammation for another so it could backfire that way so it all depends on
if you are sensitive to that same thing with lectins and oxalates there's a lot of talk about
that people ask me all the time are lectins bad for you should i eat spinach because of
all the oxalate well it depends on if you have a sensitivity and it's not that easy to figure
this out you can run some blood tests but a lot of it is going to have to be trial and error
if everything is working if you're getting healthier then you're probably doing fine
but if you're still having some inflammation if you have some aches and pains if you hit plateaus
and your weight loss if you're having some issue then you want to start thinking about these things
so what are lectins and oxalates well they're plant defenses lectins are compounds produced by
plants so they can defend themselves from getting eaten and dairy again has a lectin called casein
we have a very popular group of plants of vegetables called nightshades and while these
foods are fantastic for most people like tomato potato eggplant bell pepper and if you notice
the dots that means the list goes on and on and on these are just examples these foods could be
fantastic for most people but if you are sensitive to lectins then the lectins create inflammation
then they're not good for you same thing with legumes there's probably even more
people that have trouble with them legumes have lectins in lentils beans peanuts etc
and most grains especially the popular ones wheat rice and oats also have lectins
so part of the reason that people get healthier when they cut this stuff out especially the grains
is that they're reducing their carbohydrate load they're reducing the insulin but another part
can be that they're also cutting out some lectins causing inflammation oxalates are another thing
that can cause inflammation they're mostly associated with the formation of stones especially
in the kidneys so kidney stones can be some of the most excruciating back pain you've ever
experienced and spinach tops the list but we have rhubarb soy beets buckwheat almonds potatoes and
navy beans and there's lots of other foods that have oxalates as well again a lot of people will
do just fine but if you have a tendency to make stone or if you are susceptible to these causing
irritation then they will cause inflammation as well in that person and when i go over the foods
i'm going to talk about two basic categories of food on the one hand it's foods that are bad for
certain individuals like in a crowd there might be one person reacting very severely to peanuts
or shrimp or something like that and these are of course known as food allergies and it could range
anywhere from an anaphylactic shock like some people could just smell peanuts and they could die
if they didn't get treatment other people might have symptoms that could be acute or delayed
some people eat a food and within five minutes they have a reaction they feel bad other people
would have a delayed reaction of three four five days a delayed hypersensitivity reaction
and now it's very difficult to relate the symptom to the food that they ate and there are tests that
you can have but they're kind of expensive and there's just way too many things that they find
so it's always better just to kind of try to improve your overall digestion i think and the
healthier you get the better you'll be able to tolerate a lot of these things it could also be
that it's creating a little bit of inflammation but that you're asymptomatic and then
you would never know but it still sort of adds up over time the bottom line though is that this
again is not something that the food does to your body it's an interpretation that your body makes
about the food and then there are foods that are basically universally bad they're bad for
everybody and these would be foods that cause insulin resistance because insulin
resistance will increase inflammation in the body a chronic low-grade inflammation foods that cause
oxidative stress that create reactive oxygen species and free radicals they create inflammation
and it could be either that the food provokes that response in the body or it could be that the food
itself has been oxidized so you're introducing a lot of oxidative material in the body it could be
that the oils have a very high omega 6 to 3 ratio ideally historically this should be about a one to
one or maybe we can push it to about a three or a four to one but most diets today if you're eating
modern standard food you're gonna get about a 20 to one ratio which is highly promoting
inflammation so these are things that these are foods that affect everyone
to a degree but again their differences so one person could be extremely sensitive just one
little bit will totally overwhelm their system and someone else will still be affected but it takes
50 60 years before they get sick and then they're still not as as sick as the other person the
problem with these are also that they're not going to cause as strong a reaction it's not
like a food that you eat and five minutes later you know that something happened these are more
silent it's a very low grade chronic inflammation and you're not really aware that it's going on
and that's why so many people have it and so many people are affected because it's part of
our lifestyle it becomes chronic and it goes on year after year but if inflammation is so bad
why does the body create it because it is a natural necessary part of healing and anytime you
have a trauma or infection the body goes through certain phases in response so the acute phase
is right when something happens when you have some tissue damage or an acute infection
then the body goes to seal off that area so it's just like the police at a crime scene they
fence off the area to protect that area and that's exactly what the body does first it reduces the
blood flow so you'll stop the bleeding and then as it stabilizes it increases the swelling and you
have migration of white blood cells and increased circulation and metabolism so you can bring more
activity to that area so it gets all red and hot and this should only last for hours two days maybe
three to four days at the most then the body should shift it should be done with that part
and it should start healing proliferation means making new cells so you break down the old cells
you make new cells and that's how healing takes place and this can go on depending on the size
and the extent of the injury could go on for days or weeks or even months like if you break a bone
it could take two three months to heal that but then everything is kind of intact and together
and then the body goes into remodeling and now it kind of smooths off the edges and cleans it up
and tries to get it as close to 100 as it can and this could go for weeks or even up to a year
and then we hope that after all that the issue has been resolved that we're back exactly
like we were before the injury and for the most part if we have a small cut on the skin
then it will go back to a hundred percent but larger injuries they rarely go all the way back
so they don't quite get resolved or if it's a systemic inflammation and it's because we keep
reintroducing it's part of our lifestyle we keep putting in the things causing the inflammation now
the body also can't resolve it so non-resolved inflammation is basically the cause of all our
problems today chronic low-grade inflammation is associated with cardiovascular disease with cancer
with dementia and the list goes on and on we can also have latent infections causing inflammation
when you get an infection you fight it off but you don't get rid of it a hundred percent just like 99
and you still have some pathogens that go high in the corners they're just waiting for
an opportunity when you get a little bit stressed and your immune system goes down now they pop up
and now you have infections that come and go come and go and it seems like you just never quite
get rid of them like Lyme's disease and Epstein-Barr and things like that
and also old chronic injuries where you injure something and there's a little residual
inflammation you don't quite get the full range of motion and the strength back in that body part
and of course you could have a combination of all of these so you could have an old chronic injury
that's made worse by a low-grade inflammation from food habits but basically all disease that we're
talking about is a result of inflammation that is not resolved and when i say disease i'm not
talking about a cut on the finger your body heals that that's just part of what the body can do
if you get a cold or you get a covet infection or the flu when you recover your body has just
done what it's supposed to do that wasn't really a disease disease is when a trauma happens when a
challenge happens and it lingers and your body can't quite get rid of it that's disease and
virtually all of that is non-resolved inflammation so the first foods mentioned here are bad for you
if you're sensitive to them people ask me are is dairy bad are lectins bad not for everybody
they're bad for you if you react to them because then they cause inflammation some more foods that
affect a lot of people they're very very common allergens are soy corn wheat gluten and grains so
we're not just talking the wheat with the gluten we're talking rice and barley and rye and oats and
so forth because they affect people in different ways wheat is probably the worst especially modern
wheat but a lot of people are sensitive to grains and they cause immune reactions but just like corn
they're also a grain they're high in starch and sugar so they will also affect insulin resistance
number five on the list is alcohol and alcohol you don't really have an immune reaction to it per se
but it does absolutely affect insulin resistance both because in many ways alcohol acts as a sugar
but also because alcohol is a tremendous burden on the liver so together with fructose alcohol is
the factor that mostly creates a fatty liver and promotes insulin resistance and then of course
alcohol is also a form of toxin it will create oxidative stress and reactive oxygen species
number four is sugar sugar of course is 50 fructose so that's almost as bad as alcohol
on the liver then the glucose triggers insulin that promotes insulin resistance and of course
we also have a tremendous amount of toxic effects and reactive oxygen species the glucose can
destroy blood vessels it leaks out into tissues and causing swelling so we can get a lot of tissue
trauma also from sugar number three on the list is seed oil and now we're getting into the really
really bad stuff when it comes to inflammation because first of all you can't have an allergic
reaction to it because they're made from things that are very common allergens like corn and soy
but then we get into the things that are universally bad that these seed oils they promote
insulin resistance even though they don't trigger insulin per se they fit into insulin receptors and
kind of change the balance of that whole system but maybe the worst part about the seed oils is
that they are so harshly processed they are super heated they are produced under high pressure
and in order to get almost 100 of the fat out of those seeds and beans and grains
like corn is a grain then they use solvents because you can't just squeeze and get oil
out of corn you have to use solvents and then with all this harsh processing these oils get
very very toxic and very very highly oxidized they taste terrible so now they have to bleach them
and deodorize them and de-gum them and clean them up in all sorts of ways so that you could even
tolerate the stuff but all of these damaged molecules all that oxidative stress is still
in the oil and you're introducing that into your body and this is probably the biggest reason
why seed oils are so bad for you but as if all that wasn't bad enough sea dogs are even going to
check that last box because it's extremely high in omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids and that shifts the
metabolic pathways the inflammatory pathways in the body so we're promoting the pro-inflammatory
from that perspective as well and number two on the list is trans fats so what they do now that's
how they made margarine that's how they make frying oils that will be more tolerant to heat
is they start off with the seed oil but then they mess with it even more now they change the
molecule further on purpose they hydrogenate it they saturate it so again all of the factors that
relate to seed oil are now true for trans fats as well but in addition to that we've changed the
molecule further so now it does additional damage to your cell membranes and to the communication in
the body and now you're wondering what's going to top the list how can you get any worse than
checking all the boxes and then messing further with it as trans fats well the answer is by
combining virtually everything on the board and it's called fast food because fast food is high in
grains it's high in corn and soy it's very often has lectins often dairy and then to top it off
virtually all of that food even if it's not fried they still use these seed oils and if it's fried
that makes it even worse and of course they're very high in sugar alcohol is basically the only
thing that you don't routinely find in fast food so we're checking all the boxes combining most of
the worst of the entire board here. If you enjoyed this video you're going to love that one, and if
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