How to use your grocery list to prevent chronic disease

Let’s say a genie could grant you one wish for perfect health for the rest of your life. However, there’s just one catch: This wish only applies to one health condition or part of your body. What would you choose?

You might wish for optimal heart health — an excellent choice. Avoiding any form of dementia would be another indisputable pick. Cancer prevention, impeccable digestion, high metabolism — all of these would be worthy candidates…

I know what I’d wish for: To alleviate the one issue found to be at the root of every single marker of health (good or bad)—including everything I just mentioned. I’m talking about chronic inflammation.

If you could guarantee that your body would never experience chronic inflammation, you’d be in near perfect health.

And while you may not have a magical genie, you do have what I’ll call “practical magic”: The simple, daily steps you can take to keep chronic inflammation under control.

The match that lights 1,000 fuses

If you’ve been reading my newsletters for a while, I’m sure you’ve seen “chronic inflammation” pop up quite often. That’s because this level of inflammation has such a powerful effect on your overall health… So much, that it affects every single bodily system.

And the scary thing is, most people are currently experiencing some level of ongoing inflammation… yourself included.

Simply put, the best time to start addressing this issue is now.

As Dr. Marc Micozzi notes in his Protocol for Eliminating Deadly Inflammation, an injury or infection prompts acute inflammation — a natural process of self-healing, and quite different from chronic inflammation.

He explains, “When there’s chronic damage deep inside your body — from poor diet, too much stress, too little physical activity, toxins, and other negative influences — your immune system sparks chronic, low-grade inflammation.”

And this is where inflammation becomes so dangerous. As Dr. Micozzi puts it, “It complicates every chronic disease of the 21st century.”

Complications from chronic inflammation ravage the body in the following ways:

  • Chronic arterial inflammation damages blood vessels and your heart.
  • Chronic joint inflammation erodes cartilage, increasing arthritis pain.
  • Chronic brain inflammation prompts cognitive decline and increases Alzheimer’s risk.
  • Chronically inflamed fat tissue destroys blood sugar balance.
  • Chronic cellular inflammation leads to cancer.

In addition, chronic inflammation also plays a role in autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and inflammatory bowel disease. These and other autoimmune diseases now afflict about one in five Americans.

But when it comes to solutions, we can’t rely on Big Pharma and their temporary stopgap approaches. As Dr. Micozzi notes, “Non-pharmaceutical remedies are typically more effective than medications in cooling chronic inflammation.”

Foods that stoke the inflammation fire

Of course, Dr. Micozzi’s unique protocol explores all of those non-pharmaceutical remedies — including specific supplements, science-backed botanicals, and management of stress, which he notes is a largely unacknowledged driver of chronic inflammation.

And as you can imagine, dietary factors make a huge impact on inflammation. Food choices can add fuel to the inflammatory fire, or they can create a healing, anti-inflammatory effect.

Foods that trigger an inflammatory response are mostly highly processed products, including fast food, junk food, and comfort food. By whatever name they go by, they deliver chemicals, excess sugars, refined grains, and other inferior quality ingredients that the various systems of your body struggle to cope with.

Meanwhile, whole foods like fresh vegetables have the opposite effect. And some of the key nutrients in these foods — such as polyphenols — influence your health in a way that processed foods never could.

Polyphenols are highly nutritious, anti-inflammatory compounds abundant in plant-based foods like fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, and other natural sources. And yet, 90 percent of the polyphenols you consume never even make it into your bloodstream.

They mostly take a different route to do their remarkable inflammation-cooling work…

Give your gut some love

Dr. Micozzi explains that polyphenols and other nutrients don’t need to be bioavailable — that is, they don’t have to be absorbed into the bloodstream to effectively tame inflammation.

“Instead,” he says, “they work directly on the good bacteria, or probiotics, right within the gastro-intestinal microbiome — balancing the microbiome, and thereby cooling the inflammation taking place in the body.”

Dr. Micozzi has coined a phrase to describe this process: Biome-availability. And these biome-available nutrients exert a powerful anti-inflammatory influence on your gut flora within the GI tract.

To put this plan into action couldn’t be simpler. Dr. Micozzi notes that you can enjoy polyphenols from many sources, including:

  • Fruits and vegetables (preferably organic) like apples, berries, onions, oranges, plums, pomegranates, and red cherries
  • Kitchen spices like cloves, cocoa powder, dried peppermint, and star anise
  • Whole grains (preferably non-GMO)
  • “Guilty pleasures” like dark chocolate, tea, coffee, and wine

In short, food is a perfect place to begin addressing chronic inflammation. But of course, diet modification is just the start. You’ll find many additional strategies for fighting inflammation without drugs in Dr. Micozzi’s Protocol for Eliminating Deadly Inflammation. Click here to learn more about this comprehensive healing tool, or to enroll today.