I advocate for what is referred to as the anti-inflammatory diet. Also commonly referred to as High-Fat / Low-Carb (HFLC) or Ketogenic (Keto). But why is the ‘anti-inflammatory’ component the most critical? What is inflammation anyway?
Inflammatory Disease
As I discussed briefly in Healthy Oils are Making You Sick, the most common diseases and causes of death are commonly referred to as ‘inflammatory diseases’. And they are caused by, you guessed it, chronic inflammation in the body.
Inflammation, fundamentally, is an immune response from your body that occurs when it’s trying to REPAIR something that’s wrong. If you get sick from bacteria or a virus, your body mobilizes a bunch of white blood cells and attacks the dangerous foreign material. For more serious illnesses, the immune response is so severe that you may experience swelling, redness, fever, aches, and other common symptoms of “being sick”.
Well, when you eat stuff your body doesn’t like, a version of this same inflammatory immune response occurs. But why?
Because your body doesn’t WANT these things in your body, and it’s working hard to try and get rid of them!
What Foods Cause Inflammation and Why?
The biggest offenders I’ve discussed in previous posts are sugar, carbohydrates, and processed oils. So why are these inflammatory?
Sugars and carbohydrates both get converted into glucose and glycogen. You’ve often heard of this referred to as “blood sugar”, and your body is VERY determined to tightly control how much sugar is in your blood at any given moment.
This is why you should care about the Glycemic Index of your foods, because it is a measurement of how hard that particular food forces your body to work in order to remove the resulting glucose from your blood.
As I discussed in Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat, insulin is primarily what makes you fat. The reason for this is because the primary job of insulin is to get sugar out of your blood in any way it possibly can. This largely means storing the sugar in every available cell it can find, especially in your liver and adipose tissue.
This is BAD.
Your body wants to make cells out of the raw materials that cells are ACTUALLY made of: Fat, Cholesterol, and Protein. That’s what your body needs to survive and thrive. NOT SUGAR.
Our bodies evolved to be able to TOLERATE sugar, as a means of survival. The food we WANT to eat is often scarce in the winter (in regions that HAVE winter), and fruit ripens just before winter. We can eat this sugary food in order to get FAT and survive the winter, but we were never meant to live that way all year long!
Your body is constantly trying to ELIMINATE excess sugar from your blood. Your blood contains less that one TEASPOON of sugar, which is about 4 grams. ANYTHING BEYOND THAT is too much, and your body treats it as a foreign body that must be removed.
Hence the inflammatory response.
Inflammatory oils, on the other hand, contain high levels of Omega-6 fatty acids. Omega-6 fats are pro-inflammatory, meaning your body USES them FOR the inflammatory response. So you NEED these kinds of fatty acids in your body, as well as Omega-3 fats, but in the proper ratio.
Too many Omega-6s mean too much inflammation. You’re essentially CONSUMING inflammation when you consume inflammatory oils, which is why you can get chronic inflammatory diseases like diabetes even without being overweight.
Inflammation is the core cause of so many chronic health conditions we see every day that are considered ‘normal’: Diabetes, depression, heart disease, allergies, arthritis, cancer, degenerative mental conditions…
ALL inflammatory diseases. ALL fixable through diet!
When you consume healthy fat (SATURATED fat, despite the misinformation you’ve been fed!), a moderate amount of protein, and little to no carbohydrates, your body DOES NOT GET INFLAMED.
Your insulin stays low normal, you have a healthy balance of Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids, and you don’t suffer from the plethora of inflammatory diseases that plague everyone that eats the modern “healthy” western diet of whole grains, fruit, and lean meat.
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