In recent years, as the number of people with chronic diseases has rocketed, the role of inflammation has become a hot topic. Inflammation is our body’s natural response to an injury, infection or toxin, like the redness of a wound or the swelling caused by a virus. Yet, Western diets can cause our bodies to become chronically inflamed.
This has been tied to a number of diseases, including heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and even premature ageing. “The immune system responds to the Western diet as it would a noxious germ,” explains Dr Shilpa Ravella, the author of A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet and Disease . “Stress cells are activated and the body produces an overload of inflammatory molecules.
What we put into our mouth matters.” Yet you don’t need to eat a monk’s diet to avoid inflammation. “Our dietary pattern is always more important than individual foods.
Our body can cope with a minority of our foods being potentially pro-inflammatory, as long as the majority of our diet supports our health,” says Dr Federica Amati, head nutritionist at Zoe, a science and nutrition company. If you want to limit inflammation, the following foods should be on your “watch list”. 1.
White sliced bread Processed white sliced bread has been stripped of its fibre. Even though it’s not sweet, it causes a spike in our blood sugar, which triggers a release of insulin to bring this back down. Other white carbs like white rice and pas.