Inflammation has a bad rap, both as an agent of pain and a risk factor for chronic illnesses like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer. Even the word itself sounds like something is going up in flames—and that’s pretty accurate: Inflammation is your body’s response to injury or infection, and triggers redness, swelling, heat, and loss of function, S. Louis Bridges Jr., MD, PhD, a board-certified rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery, in New York, tells SELF. But that’s by design: You need a little fire to defend yourself. Where you can run into trouble is if those flames keep smoldering even after you’ve healed.
The key difference here is between acute and chronic inflammation. With the former, your immune cells detect a threat and spurt out substances that widen your blood vessels, allowing more blood (and immune cells) to get to the affected area—an essential process for fighting germs and recovering from physical trauma. After they’ve dealt with the danger, those cells typically retreat, and your symptoms die down. But with the long-lasting version of inflammation, that response keeps percolating. At low levels, it isn’t always something you’ll notice (though it may play a role in fatigue, GI issues, and joint pain); it might only be detectable via a blood test or skin biopsy, Dr. Bridges says. Over time, however, the constant immune activity can damage tissues and put you at risk for those infamous inflammation-fueled diseases.
It’s still not clear exactly how much inflammation is too much or at what threshold it causes symptoms you would notice, Shilpa Ravella, MD, a board-certified gastroenterologist and author of A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet and Disease, tells SELF. And some factors that may drive your susceptibility to chronic inflammation are out of your control—like your genetics and history of infections. But science also suggests that certain lifestyle habits (like healthy eating and physical activity) may have a “cumulative effect” in lowering and helping stave off inflammation, Dr. Ravella says.
Below, experts share how to reduce your chances of developing chronic inflammation that might erode your health over time.
1. Eat a lot of plants—including a variety of types.
Plants are the beating heart of an anti-inflammatory diet, thanks to a few different effects they can have on your body. The ones that come in the punchiest colors—dark leafy greens, berries, apples, tomatoes, carrots—are especially loaded with phytochemicals (a.k.a. plant chemicals) like polyphenols and carotenoids, which are powerhouse antioxidants. As SELF previously reported, these help neutralize the effects of free radicals, which are unstable molecules that your body generates as a result of normal activities (like digestion and exercise), as well as exposure to sun, stress, and pollution. (It’s normal to have some in your body, but when you wind up with too many, they can cause cell damage and inflammation.)
The wider the variety of fruits and vegetables you eat, the more distinct anti-inflammatory phytochemicals you consume, Julia Zumpano, RD, LD, a registered dietitian with the Center for Human Nutrition at the Cleveland Clinic, tells SELF. In fact, multiple studies have found that people who eat a greater diversity—not just quantity—of plants also tend to have lower inflammation levels than their less culinarily adventurous counterparts, Dr. Ravella notes.
Another major benefit of a plant-heavy diet comes from fiber, which is found in not only fruits and veggies but also whole grains, nuts, and legumes. You might know it for its gut-friendly properties, like helping you poop and feeding the vibrant community of bacteria in your colon—but it may serve an inflammation-busting role too: Research links a high-fiber diet to both lower levels of inflammatory markers (substances in the blood that are associated with inflammation) and less risk of related conditions like heart disease. All the more reason to get your garden variety.
2. Cut down on ultraprocessed foods.
Processed foods—ones that have been altered from their whole, or totally natural, state—have been villainized in the wellness world for some time now. But let’s get one thing straight: Not everything canned, frozen, dried, or preserved is terrible for you. The real inflammation troublemakers are the ultraprocessed foods, which bear little resemblance to whole foods and are mass-produced via industrial techniques (think: packaged cookies and chips, sodas, frozen meals, and instant noodles). They tend to be loaded with sugar, salt, and fat, as well as a bunch of non-nutrient additives like artificial sweeteners and emulsifiers—all ingredients that have been linked with various inflammatory responses in the body.
Ultraprocessed foods can prompt even more inflammation by screwing with your microbiome, which is the community of healthy organisms that live in your digestive tract. When these gut bugs only have access to such foods (versus the fibers that they love to chow down on), they behave differently; some of them may start munching away at the healthy mucus layer lining your gut (which can spark inflammation), while others spit out more inflammatory byproducts, Dr. Ravella says. There’s also the opportunity cost of filling up on super-processed stuff. “It’s not only that what you’re eating is inflammatory, but also there’s a big chunk of anti-inflammatory foods that you’re not eating because the processed items are taking up all this space in your diet,” she says.
3. Spice your meals with a heavy hand.
For their relatively tiny size, spices can pack a powerful inflammation-busting punch. “Even if you sprinkle just a little bit of cinnamon or cumin into a dish, for example, you’re greatly enhancing the anti-inflammatory potential of that food,” Dr. Ravella says. Why? Research suggests that a diverse array of spices can quiet the signals that tell cells to pump out inflammatory chemicals. Plus, a good deal of them—like turmeric, clove, nutmeg, red pepper, and ginger, to name a few—also contain potent antioxidant compounds, which may help negate the inflammatory power of those nefarious free radicals. The question of how much of these you’d have to consume to see a benefit, however, is still up in the air, given a lot of this research has explored the effects of spices on cells in petri dishes or animals.
4. Cool it on the alcohol.
At a basic level, “alcohol is a toxin,” Zumpano says, so it can set off alarm bells in the cells lining your stomach as soon as it arrives there. Plus, consuming alcohol on the reg can wreck the balance of your microbiome, depleting your numbers of good bacteria and prompting excess growth of the bad guys that can inflame your gut. But its potentially toxic effects aren’t just limited to your GI tract. Research suggests that heavy drinking may compromise the lining of your gut, which could allow more inflammation-inducing components of bacteria to seep through and enter your blood too.
All that said, the occasional tipple is probably not such a big deal, Zumpano says. Other studies have found your body can metabolize small amounts of booze (say, two drinks in any given sitting) relatively unscathed. Not to mention, alcohol is often wrapped up in social moments, “and you don’t want to suck the joy out of life,” Zumpano adds. But it’s also important to recognize that no amount of it is considered healthy, she says, and avoiding an alcohol habit can go a long way toward keeping your inflammation levels in check.
5. Find practices that help you let go of stress.
Experiencing stress can get your body all up in arms—and for good reason. Throughout most of our time as a species, stressful experiences were ones that could physically harm us, like being chased by a predator, Melissa Rosenkranz, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells SELF. In response, our bodies learned to spurt out adrenaline and boost our heart rate and breathing to help us fight or flee, as well as rev up inflammation to shield against potential infection from a wound, she says. But these days we get stressed more often and for reasons that won’t be resolved by the above responses (like an argument with a partner or gridlock traffic). So our bodies get stuck with inflammation levels that are higher than they need to be, she explains. In fact, research suggests that the inflammatory nature of long-term stress is a key reason why it’s linked to so many chronic conditions.
It’s impossible to avoid stress entirely, but what Dr. Rosenkranz says you can do is learn to soften and shorten your response to it—which may in turn lessen the intensity of your body’s inflammatory reaction. One of the methods she’s studied for doing just that is mindfulness-based stress reduction. This practice, which involves meditation and other tactics for tuning into the present moment, helps to “bring more awareness to how you may be ruminating or perpetuating negative things in your life” so you can better control that response, she says. Therapy, grounding techniques, or even exercise can have a similar effect.
6. Move your body often.
If you’ve ever gotten really sore from a workout, you might know that a single bout of exercise can actually prompt some inflammation—your body perceives it as a stressor and deploys some of its immune army in turn. But with regular movement, your body tissues adapt to the stress. Over time, in fact, the effect of consistent exercise flips to an anti-inflammatory one: Muscle contractions release a particular protein called Interleukin-6 (IL-6) into your blood, which can in turn block the production of a pro-inflammatory molecule and amp up the release of a couple anti-inflammatory ones. Research suggests that the sustained muscle activity of aerobic exercise might produce the strongest anti-inflammatory effect, but that, to a lesser extent, you can also get it from strength training.
The key is to bake moderate-intensity movement (both aerobic and strength-based) into your regular routine—versus doing solely high-intensity exercise on rare occasions or all the time. (You can sprinkle in the high-key stuff, but some research has shown that vigorous exercise over a long duration or when your body isn’t used to it can over-stress your immune system.) It’s also important to leave time in between workouts for rest and recovery, Barb Nicklas, PhD, a professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, tells SELF. Without doing so, your body won’t be able to adapt to the stress of exercise, and you could wind up with higher inflammation, she says. She suggests leaving 24 hours between moderate sessions and 48 between intense ones. But otherwise, she adds, the more consistently you move, the better.
7. Get a full night’s sleep as routinely as you can.
While you doze, your body enters rest-and-repair mode: Your blood pressure drops as your blood vessels relax, and your immune system unleashes chemicals and cells to help ward off sources of infection and inflammation. Research suggests that missing out on sleep can throw that process off-track and send your body into a more inflammatory state.
When you’re sleep-deprived, your blood pressure doesn’t dip as it typically does at night, which may trigger cells in your blood vessels to create inflammatory chemicals. Plus, loss of shuteye puts your body under physiological stress, messing with your nervous system and potentially shuttling higher levels of cortisol and adrenaline through your system, all of which piles onto the inflammatory effect. Hence why it’s so important to clock the expert-recommended seven to nine hours of sleep per night, as often as possible.
That starts with setting aside the time for it, and making sleep a priority. If you’re struggling to doze off or stay asleep, take a look at what you’re doing beforehand too. Avoiding screens ideally an hour prior to your bedtime, plus embracing a soothing wind-down ritual (like reading or taking a warm bath) just before you plan to snooze can up your chances of securing truly restful—and inflammation-reducing—slumber. And as with the other practices on this list, the more consistently you doze well, the better equipped your body will be to keep the occasional inflammatory fire from continuing to burn.
Original article first appeared on SELF
