Inflammation – What It Is and What You Can Do About It

Stop ignoring those achy joints, bursitis flare-ups and stomach aches. Inflammation is one of the most common as well as most serious causes of chronic disease.

Here’s why: high levels of inflammation in the body cause your cells to deteriorate and lose their ability to function properly. In turn, this leads to the development of diseases such as cancer, autoimmune dysfunction, and other disorders.

And, inflammation is a necessary biological process that kick starts your immune system. Chemical mediators alert the body to the areas that need defending or repairing. So if you ignore, or let inflammation go untreated for too long, it can have serious consequences.

In your gut, inflammation can also be caused by an imbalance of microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract. When harmful microbes or yeast such as Candida grow and spread, they can severely erode that the lining in your stomach and intestinal walls, and the resulting immune response can cause further inflammation and damage.

The level of inflammation in your body is influenced by a number of factors, including diet, lifestyle, and environment. This is actually good news, because it means that reducing gut inflammation can be a matter of altering the choices you make in everyday life. In fact, the simplest two things you can do to reduce inflammation is drink water and exercise. Yeah, that’s it! Both drinking water and exercising aid in flushing toxins out of your body through your kidneys, liver, urinary tract, lymphatic system, and sweating it out through your skin, which is also an organ, in case you didn’t know.

By supporting your body’s detoxification functions with adequate exercise and hydration, you’ll be dramatically reducing the amount of harmful toxins that your immune system has to fight every day. Fewer toxins means your body can focus more on healing!

Photo Credit: arka38 / Shutterstock.com