How Food Can Fight Inflammation

Did you know that our food was designed to be one of the most powerful weapons we have to fight inflammation? Even beyond avoiding foods that increase inflammation, research is now able to prove that the foods we do choose to eat have some powerful ability to decrease inflammation. Spoiler alert: The solution is simple. Eat more foods fresh from the ground that are rich in these nutrients and making simple choices like drinking unsweetened green tea will help our bodies fight disease.

Inflammation is part of a normal biological process in our body to avoid damage from bacteria, viruses, and other foreign organisms. But when that inflammation becomes chronic due to genetic, environmental, stress-induced, or dietary conditions our bodies can become inflamed constantly, a state called chronic inflammation (see Resource 1 below for more information). Excessive inflammation at any site in our body has the ability to harm normal tissue through a variety of ways including toxicity, loss of barrier function around the cells, abnormal cell growth, limiting normal function of tissue and organs and systemic (body-wide) disorders¹.

Flavonoids are a category of bioactive compound found naturally in food that can help fight inflammation. Flavonoids have been shown in research to be anti-viral, anti-carcinogenic, anti-oxidant, anti-microbial, anti-inflammatory, angti-angiogenic, and anti-thrombogenic. That’s a lot of protection from one small family of compounds. Well, in truth, it’s not such a small family. It’s made up of over 2000 different compounds. These compounds are native to certain fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and plants. It is estimated that on average we consume a few hundred milligrams to 650 mg per day in our diets. The trick to eating an anti-inflammatory diet? It doesn’t come from a capsule. It comes from tasting the rainbow.

If you immediately thought of this, you’re officially Skittles marketing department’s favorite subject. I’m referring to this rainbow.

Did you know that more than 8 out of 10 Americans aren’t getting in the recommended color variety each day? Check out the chart below for some amazing and depressing facts regarding how many Americans are meeting our recommended color variety each week. Why does color variety matter? Many of these flavonoids are found in the molecules that give foods their different colors. Want more of the nutrients? It’s simple. Eat a bigger variety of naturally colored foods. If your grocery cart is all green, way to be health conscious but let’s switch up for some purple lettuce or red or orange bell peppers and get some color variety in there.

Want to track your color intake? Here’s a worksheet from stuffed-pepper.com that I think is wonderful. Do you have to track your color intake on a rainbow coloring sheet? Of course not. But sometimes it’s fun to break out the crayons…

For a more nitty-gritty explanation of how these flavonoids are helping fight disease refer to the Chronic Inflammation & Disease blog post.