How Nutrition may improve your inflammation
By Max Cuneo – Nutritionist
What we know – if people lose weight, inflammatory markers go down, as weight increases, inflammatory markers increases. Losing body water, doesn’t count as losing weight – it more specifically refers to body fat and lean mass.
Trivia fact: this is a common observable outcome when participating in a ketogenic diet during the initial phases.
Differences between systemic inflammation and localised inflammation : Systemic Inflammation is the amount of these inflammatory markers floating around in our blood. These can be predictive of things like cardiovascular disease and some types of cancers. Localised inflammation is the body’s healing response to small wounds around the body and doesn’t cause inflammation elsewhere. An example of this would be if you walk into a door and get a black eye.
If you’re like me and are allergic to gluten and eat gluten, I am going to have one angry bowel network resulting in inflammation in that area. However, neither of these are causing inflammation systemically.
The movie Game Changers (2018) demonstrated how eating meat increased inflammatory markers. This was observed soon after that meal was ingested. Funnily enough, fatty cuts of meat will have this effect however lean meats DON’T increase inflammatory markers. Some very low fat or no fat animal products have actually shown to actually decrease inflammatory markers. What is important to consider is that the short term changes in inflammatory markers aren’t anywhere near as significant as the long term changes in inflammation.
How’s this as a comparison – Exercise acutely increases inflammatory markers, however in the long term, exercise helps to decrease this inflammatory markers.
If you are somebody who is overweight or obese, losing a significant amount of body weight (mainly body fat) will bring down your inflammatory markers. This can be achieved using ANY weight-loss methodology. Ketogenic, Low-fat, Atkins, CSIRO, Mediterranean, Fasting all help. What’s important to recognise is the BEST diet is the one you can adhere to sustainably and fits in with your lifestyle.
For practical strategies to help those wanting to lose weight and improve those inflammatory markers, please come in and see me for a personalised consultation to address specific issues.
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