Here’s something that most people don’t realize. Most illnesses and most chronic pain have some type of inflammation at their core. The secret to keeping inflammation at bay is to keep your body’s acidity level down, and the secret to doing that is knowing what foods to avoid.
What foods are those, exactly? We’ll give you a short list now:
• Refined Sugars – We might as well get the worst of the bunch out of the way first. Most sugars are extremely bad for you, including the stuff you add to your coffee every morning, confectioner’s sugar, and brown sugar. That’s bad, because a) almost everyone loves sugar, and b) because it’s in just about every food item you buy that comes out of a box or jar. The only way to avoid, or at least minimize your sugar intake is to start reading labels. It’s annoying and can be frustrating, but it’s the only way to be sure.
• HFCS – This stands for “High Fructose Corn Syrup” and if you can believe it, this stuff is even worse than the sugars we mentioned just above. Not only does it have absolutely no nutritional value, but it’s essentially a slow-acting poison. Do you want to know why such a high percentage of Americans are overweight and saddled with a whole raft of health problems? HFCS is at the root of that. Unfortunately, like sugar, it’s in a lot of the processed foods we eat on a regular basis, so avoiding it altogether is extremely difficult. Read labels and keep your consumption to a minimum.
• Gluten – It’s a little known fact, but almost everyone has some level of gluten intolerance. Some people just have a more severe reaction to it than others. Gluten is found in most grains, and the people with the highest gluten sensitivity develop Celiac disease. However, long before you show symptoms of that condition, your body is suffering from varying degrees of inflammation, all courtesy of gluten.
Avoiding those three things can be a real challenge, but if you are successful, your pain level will decrease right along with the inflammation.
