sprain your ankle and quickly start to experience heat, swelling, redness, and pain, this is your immune system rushing in to protect and heal the injured tissues. Acute inflammation is temporary, lasting only a few days or weeks at most. Without it, wounds and infections couldn’t heal. But fever is a damaging form of acute inflammation, as is the severe inflammation that puts burn victims into shock and threatens their lives.
Not all inflammation is acute: Chronic inflammation is long-term, and can last for several months or even years. Instead of helping thebody heal, it stresses cells and tissues, and is linked to chronic illness. There are few symptoms at first to indicate that damage is being done, or even none. Normally, when you are feeling healthy and well, there is no need for the inflammation response, and yet it seems to be present in many people. The cause for this chronic condition is complex and not fully understood, but whenever your body goes out of balance, tissues can become inflamed, with the most likely cause being chronic low-level stress. Excess weight, belly fat, and lack of sleep may be contributors, too, since all are connected with stress hormones and metabolic imbalances. Toxins in herbicides, pesticides, and various chemical additives are suspect, leading some researchers to blame highly refined, processed foods as promoters of inflammation in the body, especially given the widespread use of hormones in animal feed to speed up muscle growth and increase milk production in dairy cows.
Chronic inflammation is also what medical researchers and nutritionists are referring to when they talk about inflammatory foods or diets. Some foods apparently contribute to chronic inflammation, while others help decrease it. Trans fats, sodium, and preservatives are potentially major sources of chronic inflammation. Whole, fresh foods decrease inflammation and provide valuable fiber, which may act as a buffer against inflammation.
In general, if you avoid FLUNC foods and favor fresh, real food, you can be assured that you are offering your body anti-inflammatory nutrition.
The Six Tastes at Every Meal
According to Ayurveda, a simple way to make sure that you are getting a balanced diet is to include every taste in each meal. Six tastes are recognized: the four usual ones—sweet, sour, salty, and bitter—along with two more, pungent and astringent, as described shortly.Essentially, these six tastes are supplied by the whole range of foods in nature. In the centuries that preceded modern nutrition, including all six in every meal ensured that the major food groups and nutrients were represented, but it also provided a feeling of complete satisfaction, which in Ayurveda is just as important. When you finish a meal feeling satisfied, you will be much less likely to find yourself raiding the refrigerator two hours later, driven by a sense of lack.
The typical American diet tends to be dominated by the three tastes that the makers of snacks and fast food rely on as the most addictive: sweet, sour, and salty (the main flavors of the “special sauce” in a Big Mac, for example). You do need these tastes, Ayurveda says, but in excess they create cravings and therefore lead to imbalance; at the very least, fixating on sweet, sour, and salty is the same as excluding green leafy vegetables, the chief source of bitter taste, and most beans and legumes, which are astringent in the Ayurvedic system. In the Western scheme, these two tastes also act as anti-inflammatories.
To translate Ayurveda into Western terms, the six tastes are the codes that inform your nervous system about a meal’s nutritional content. Evolution has matched taste with the benefits of food—this is the wisdom of thousands of years of experience. The experience of taste is so subtle that unlike mammals whose nutritional requirements are satisfied with a narrow range of foods (e.g., lions subsisting on gazelles and other antelopes) or even a
Not all inflammation is acute: Chronic inflammation is long-term, and can last for several months or even years. Instead of helping thebody heal, it stresses cells and tissues, and is linked to chronic illness. There are few symptoms at first to indicate that damage is being done, or even none. Normally, when you are feeling healthy and well, there is no need for the inflammation response, and yet it seems to be present in many people. The cause for this chronic condition is complex and not fully understood, but whenever your body goes out of balance, tissues can become inflamed, with the most likely cause being chronic low-level stress. Excess weight, belly fat, and lack of sleep may be contributors, too, since all are connected with stress hormones and metabolic imbalances. Toxins in herbicides, pesticides, and various chemical additives are suspect, leading some researchers to blame highly refined, processed foods as promoters of inflammation in the body, especially given the widespread use of hormones in animal feed to speed up muscle growth and increase milk production in dairy cows.
Chronic inflammation is also what medical researchers and nutritionists are referring to when they talk about inflammatory foods or diets. Some foods apparently contribute to chronic inflammation, while others help decrease it. Trans fats, sodium, and preservatives are potentially major sources of chronic inflammation. Whole, fresh foods decrease inflammation and provide valuable fiber, which may act as a buffer against inflammation.
In general, if you avoid FLUNC foods and favor fresh, real food, you can be assured that you are offering your body anti-inflammatory nutrition.
The Six Tastes at Every Meal
According to Ayurveda, a simple way to make sure that you are getting a balanced diet is to include every taste in each meal. Six tastes are recognized: the four usual ones—sweet, sour, salty, and bitter—along with two more, pungent and astringent, as described shortly.Essentially, these six tastes are supplied by the whole range of foods in nature. In the centuries that preceded modern nutrition, including all six in every meal ensured that the major food groups and nutrients were represented, but it also provided a feeling of complete satisfaction, which in Ayurveda is just as important. When you finish a meal feeling satisfied, you will be much less likely to find yourself raiding the refrigerator two hours later, driven by a sense of lack.
The typical American diet tends to be dominated by the three tastes that the makers of snacks and fast food rely on as the most addictive: sweet, sour, and salty (the main flavors of the “special sauce” in a Big Mac, for example). You do need these tastes, Ayurveda says, but in excess they create cravings and therefore lead to imbalance; at the very least, fixating on sweet, sour, and salty is the same as excluding green leafy vegetables, the chief source of bitter taste, and most beans and legumes, which are astringent in the Ayurvedic system. In the Western scheme, these two tastes also act as anti-inflammatories.
To translate Ayurveda into Western terms, the six tastes are the codes that inform your nervous system about a meal’s nutritional content. Evolution has matched taste with the benefits of food—this is the wisdom of thousands of years of experience. The experience of taste is so subtle that unlike mammals whose nutritional requirements are satisfied with a narrow range of foods (e.g., lions subsisting on gazelles and other antelopes) or even a
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