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July 24, 2013
Inflammatory Triggers
Hi ,
I have written many articles about inflammation as the root cause behind most disease and illness. At times I write about a specific food that will cause inflammation and how we should not eat that food.
The truth of the matter is everyone does eat those foods and most of these people are still here to talk about it. What is that all about?
The reality is our body has many mechanisms for fighting inflammation. The number one organ for that purpose is the liver, but inflammation fighting takes place inside every cell every day. Inflammation is a constant ongoing battle in the  body. It is not like the Ebola virus in which you get the virus and are most likely dead within 2 weeks.
Inflammation causes a gradual decrease in function. Since 90% of the functions within our bodies happen behind the scenes without our conscious awareness, we are usually blind to the gradual decrease in function of the tissues involved until things hit a critical level. For instance, inflammation causes atherosclerosis in the arteries. You usually have no idea that this is happening until it gets so bad that you have a heart attack. Usually by the time this critical point has been reached, little can be done about it. Surgeons may open you up and remove a few inches of the atherosclerotic plaque around the heart arteries to help the blood flow to the heart, but this does nothing for the plaque that is built up in the hundreds of miles of other blood vessels going to other body tissues.
Inflammation gradually takes you down. It might take 20-30-40+ years before you feel some of the consequences of all the previous years of loosing the battle with inflammation. Eventually inflammation will kill you, but that does not dissuade the average person. In fact in my experience, the awareness of probable negative consequences to eating a certain food rarely stops a person from eating that food.
Ellen and I were discussing this observation the other night and came to the conclusion that pain and suffering do not motivate hardly anyone to change their behavior. What does motivate people is not being able to have or do something  they want. I have heard too many stories of people in treatment for lung cancer that just keep right on smoking. Anyone in recovery for drug or alcohol use knows that a person never stops using until they hit bottom first. They are all perfectly aware of the negative consequences of their behavior. But until their using threatens to cause them to lose something they don't want to live without more than they want their using, they keep right on doing their using.
Fear of death does not stop people. If it did, no one would be crazy enough to ride in a car. I see every day that fear of pain does nothing to stop most people from doing things they know are likely to throw out their backs and cause them pain. The desire to do what they want to do is stronger than the possibility or even likelihood of pain.
For me, I want to be in possession and control of my faculties when I get older. That desire has driven me to avoid all my favorite foods for years now in that quest. Before I knew about the connections between brain health and diet, I would have reactions to food, but didn't care. The possibility of back pain, headache, or upset tummy did nothing to stop me from eating what I wanted. Those  consequences just were not important to me. My brain is important to me. I am addicted to being conscious, and the ability to think and feel is vital to me.
Every one of us has our own vital something that is a central value in our lives. We may not be consciously tuned in to exactly what it is, but we immediately feel it if it is threatened or it is missing. Maybe it is our ability to play sports, or our ability to have conversations with our friends. Maybe it is our ability to pursue our interests and hobbies. For someone else it might be the ability to read and contemplate religious texts. Inflammation will eventually interfere with all of them. Anything and everything we can think, feel, or do is affected by inflammation. Enough inflammation will stop us in our tracks on every level.
Eventually inflammation will cost you whatever is most dear to you. You might say your spouse is the most dear thing to you and inflammation can't take them away. True, but it is your ability to relate to them that is dear to you and yes it can take that away - either through the distraction of pain, or through the loss of brain function.
Hopefully I am getting across to you how personally important it is to you to manage the inflammation levels in your body - not because of the annoying symptoms they create here and now, but because of the much greater losses it will create down the road.
But how can we manage inflammation?
Nothing day to day impacts our inflammation levels as much as what we put into our mouths. That is something we can control.
With every bite, every breath, every swallow, we are either increasing our inflammation or decreasing it. If you want to cover almost the complete story, add with every thought and every feeling that we are either increasing or decreasing inflammation. But that part is a story for another day. Right now we are focused on what comes into our body through the mouth.
I have been in the health field so long that I lose touch with the fact that everyone does not know what things cause inflammation. I mistakenly assume everyone knows what to eat, drink, and inhale and what not. In an effort to correct that faulty assumption, I put together a simple little checklist for your life over the last week to see where you stand.
Most people do not need to be perfect with this stuff. As I said before, we have many systems in our body to handle the stress of the inflammatory toxic burden many foods provide. A healthy person can easily handle 7 or 8 inflammatory triggers during a week's time and their body would just take care of it without any consequence at all. But other people are so sensitive that they will get symptoms from virtually every exposure to a trigger food or substance.
 It used to be that youth offered a lot of protection. A brand new jeep will handle the back roads and cross-country travel a lot better than an old beat up clunker. But I am finding young people today that handle these burdens are more like forty to fifty year olds. The levels of poison being pumped into us in the guise of "foods" we have been conned into believing are the desirable best choices for us has increased to the level that kids are now eating this junk at every meal. Their bodies are worn out before the reach the tender age of twenty.
Highlight the following section in blue and then hit control C to copy the checklist. Paste this checklist onto a blank page in your word processing program (control V) and then print it to have a checklist sheet to work with. We will also have them available for you to have at the office.
Pro-inflammatory Trigger Checklist
In front of each item write the number of times you have consumed them in the last week. All of these items trigger inflammation in your body.
Toxic Oils
All vegetable oils, e.g. Soy, canola, corn, safflower, cottonseed, sunflower
Deep-fried foods (like French fries, chicken nuggets, doughnuts)
Foods Pan-fried in vegetable oil (like pancakes, Chinese stir-fry, and chicken)
All commercial chips and crackers - even health food ones
Snack foods (except raw nuts & sprouted seeds)
Microwaved foods containing oils
Coffee- unless the beans are kept frozen/vacuum packed and freshly ground
Bakery goods with oils in them - doughnuts, muffins
Salad dressings, commercial (except avocado or olive oil based)
Packaged foods - generally contain oxidized oils
Whole grain bakery goods - yes they are all bad - worse than French bread
Nuts roasted in oil, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds
Margarine, shortening
Granola, granola bars, breakfast bars, toaster snacks
Sugar/fructose
Candy, all kinds except sugar-free
Sugar, brown sugar, natural cane juice, raw sugar, Sucanat
Honey, Coconut sugar, Molasses, date sugar
Agave syrup, corn syrup, Maple syrup, Brown rice syrup, sorghum syrup
Soda pop, fruit juice, & energy drinks - sweetened and diet; all
Dried fruit - more than ¼ cup per day
Excess fruit - more than 1 cup per day
Cakes, pies, cookies, ice cream, brownies, pastries, etc.
Yogurt (sweetened), chocolate milk, sweetened milk replacements
Breakfast cereals - all (either for the sugar or for the grains)
Inflammatory foods
All grains - wheat, corn, oats, rice, barley, rye
Anything made with flour - pasta, tortillas, bread
All alcohol containing beverages
All dairy products (except ghee) - milk, cheese, etc.
Nightshade vegetables - tomato, potato, peppers, eggplant, tobacco
Any foods you are allergic to e.g. Eggs, nuts, shellfish, gluten, corn, etc.
Overeating - Any time you over eat the food becomes toxic
Food chemicals
Artificial sweeteners - Equal, Ace K, Splenda, Saccharine
Artificial colors/flavors - in most packaged foods
Preservatives - in most packaged foods
Pesticides and herbicides - in most fruits, vegetables, and fish
Antibiotics - in most meat, dairy, & farmed fish products
Poisons - mercury, arsenic, cadmium - in many fish and most poultry
Poisons created by cooking/browning foods - acrylamides, HCA's, etc
_____ Total exposures over the last week - add everything up
Depending upon the strength of your liver detox system, you may be able to handle 7-8 exposures per week without consequence - some people, not any.
Simply jot down in front of each line how many times during the last 7 days you have eaten something in that line. Each one of these exposures will count as one trigger event. You may have several triggers in the same meal. And because many foods contain several different triggers at once, the same food may need to be written down in several places on the checklist. For example, eating a doughnut will show up as a toxic oil trigger, a sugar trigger, as an inflammatory grain trigger event, and as poisons created by cooking/browning. Four inflammatory triggers for the price of one!
Add up all your trigger event exposures at the bottom of the page. If you are super into health foods you may have very few triggers. But most people I talk to will have way more than the 7 to 8 triggers during the week that a healthy body can handle. That means tens of thousands of your cells are being poisoned by each exposure to an inflammatory trigger. They are then not able to function properly, or may even die.
Your body has trillions of cells in it. Tens of thousands of damaged cells a day may sound like a lot, but compared to the trillions you have it is not. It generally takes years for the cumulative effects of the poisons to show up as symptoms. By then it is too late to stop the downhill slide. We can slow the slide with the right nutrients, but not stop it.
My hope is that this information gets to moms early enough that they teach their kids to love foods that are actually good for them before their systems become permanently damaged. The rest of us have to make do with what we have got and try to keep things from getting any worse. Knowledge is the first step. If we don't know how to tell the good from the bad we can't make choices that will keep us connected to the things that are really important in our lives. That is what this health stuff is all about anyway.
Take care,
David
Ultrasound Physical Therapy
Now available in the office
Tuesdays and Fridays
How to find us -
Our address is 9725 Fair Oaks Blvd.
Finding the new location is very easy. Coming from highway 50 up Sunrise Blvd, you turn left and go up a block. We are on the right hand side - the building just past the Subway Sandwich shop. If you are coming down Sunrise from the Mall area then just turn right on Fair Oaks Blvd and up a block on the right.
If you are coming from the Roseville area you could come down Sunrise Blvd, but that is a long trek. It is probably shorter time wise to come down Auburn Blvd - San Juan Ave like you have been for the Sunset
office, but instead of turning left at Sunset, keep going straight 3
more lights to Fair Oaks Blvd and turn left. Go down 2 lights to New York Ave, go through the intersection, and immediately turn into the turn lane once the center divider ends. We are on the left.
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