3 Tips To Begin An Anti Inflammatory Diet

What’s all the fuss about going on an anti inflammatory diet? There is growing awareness of the impact that inflammatory conditions in your body have on your long term health. Let’s get this straight, most of us in western cultures eat a diet that has a deleterious effect on our health.

That is because we eat too much Omega-6 fatty acids (read inflammation producing) and not enough Omega-3 which is anti inflammatory.

Alternative medicine luminaries (gurus) have for many years been imploring us to make changes to our diet to avoid the health consequences that come with ingesting high fat, sugar, salt  and processed foods on a daily basis. Only recently has mainstream medicine acknowledged that the cause of many leading health problems we experience today can be attributed to an inflammatory process going on in our systems.

Your doctor may even suggest you have a blood test to assess the level of C-reactive protein found in your blood. This is a test to see whether you have an “inflammatory disease”. When the body is stressed and the immune system is in overdrive coping with what we are eating, we produce these marker proteins in response.

The higher the levels of these proteins in your blood, the greater the risk of developing conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer to name a few.

So what causes this inflammation? As with any diet, the anti inflammatory diet avoids certain foods and promotes others. The main foods to avoid are:

• Grain fed beef
• Corn
• Processed foods
• Sugars

Anti Inflammatory Diet Tips

Making changes to your diet is challenging. To make it a little easier try introducing one or two different foods every other week and over a period of say three months the conversion to an anti inflammatory diet will have occurred. Let’s start with some easy changes first.

(1) Include Oily Fish

Add oily fish as a meal once or twice a week to get your fix of Omega-3 fatty acids. Salmon, tuna and sardines are excellent sources of high protein low fat nutrients. I know grass fed beef is more expensive but it contains 40% more Omega-3 in it than grain fed beef. So maybe just eat half as much.

(2) A Cup Of Cocoa At Night

There is an impressive amount of evidence (based on researched studies) that shows cocoa can lower the risk of heart disease.
A study conducted in Spain involving forty two males and females revealed that all of the subjects inflammatory markers (C-reactive protein) fell after drinking two cups of cocoa a day for a month.

The University of California performed a similar study on thirty two post menopausal women which resulted in enhance blood flow rates and a drop in lipid levels. Flavanols, which reduce blood clot formation and inflammation, are abundant in cocoa.

(3) Enjoy a Glass Of Red Wine

Red wine is made from dark skinned grapes. The antioxidant Resveratrol is abundant in the skin of the grapes and in red wine. Now of course I caution you not to “overdose” on Resveratrol via drinking wine. A glass every other night with your main meal is fine. It has been found that Mediterranean cultures (Greeks, Italians and the French) all drink red wine and enjoy a much lower incidence of heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

There are quite a few more aspects to an anti inflammatory diet but getting started with these three is an important step in improving your health.