Lifestyle

What are your rules for better health? Do they include calorie counting? Or going to the gym? Or eating a salad every day for lunch? Do you eat a low-fat diet, limit your sodium intake and practice intermittent fasting? Perhaps you stress over emotional eating and fight cravings, so you deprive yourself through willpower.

While these tools may help you in the short term, my rules for lasting, vibrant health start with getting enough primary food – nourishment for the soul. Then I focus on secondary food – what you put on your plate.

In my view, the #1 rule for better health is balance. This includes mental, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being. Then, I have 10 more rules to help you achieve that balance.

Two Crucial Rules for Better Health Through Primary Foods

1. Breathe. Deeply. With gratitude. The air you breathe and the thoughts you think have a much more significant impact on your health than the food you eat. Why? Because they are more pervasive. Your nervous system is always eavesdropping on your thoughts – so you can’t hide your stress! By regulating steady, deep inhales and long exhales, you reset your nervous system. Practicing gratitude improves both physical and mental health.
2. Drink heavy draughts of beauty, grace, joy… and pure water each day. Humans simply do not thrive in isolation. Covid taught us that. Connection is like life-giving water to us. Connect with art, music and nature. Connect with humans and animals. Connect with the divine. And don’t forget to stay hydrated. (Caffeinated beverages and fruit juices don’t count)

Two More Essential Ways to Get Your Primary Foods

1. Go to bed with the sun. Greet the new day with sunlight in your eyes. Sleep is perhaps the most under-rated instrument of better health. A fundamental way to improve the quality of your sleep is to sync your sleep with the natural light and dark cycles of the earth. Scientists have found that light to the eyes in the morning is key in regulating your circadian rhythms.
2. Move more than you sit. Be in nature more than you eat. Many of us think that exercise is something we do during a work-out at the gym. I propose that exercise is continuity of movement throughout the day, especially outside. The outdoors is where we find light, fresh air, and contact with other life forms. Weed or water a flower garden. Swing or splash in a stream. Go to a playground or do yoga in the back yard. Plant a tree. Jump in the leaves. Catch a snowflake on your tongue. These are just a few of the ideas from this blog.

A Vital Rule for Better Health Through Eating

Eat earth’s food. Not man’s food.

As much as possible, eat real, whole foods in their natural state. Not stripped through processing. Not adulterated with additives. Eat them as nature designed them, fresh, and without nutrition labels. For animal products, this means grass-fed, pastured, wild-caught, and organic.

Our biggest food enemies are industrial seed oils (corn, cottonseed, canola, soy, and safflower), high fructose corn syrup, and non-caloric sweeteners. These are man-made and toxic. Butter and olive oil, honey and pure maple syrup are earth’s foods.

More Rules about Eating

1. Make half your plate vegetables. Serve them with salt, fat & acid (lemon, vinegar, tomato, etc.) to help absorb their nutrients. While it is necessary to be aware of the amount of protein, fat, and carbohydrate in the diet, micronutrients matter! Vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants come from plants. Fruit is good, too, but most of us don’t need added fruit sugars. It is imperative for gut health to eat the compounds that give vegetables their color. Eat at least one serving of dark leafy greens every day and a sulfur-containing vegetable, such as an onion, mushroom, or cruciferous vegetable.
2. Front-load your meals. Eating 70% of your calories in the first 2/3 of your day helps regulate your circadian rhythm for better sleep. When you eat your dinner 3 hours before bedtime, you burn instead of store most of those nutrients. It is important to have plenty of protein and fat in your first meal of the day to help stabilize blood sugars.
3. Feed your microbiome. You are eating for two, er rather, two trillion or more! At least two pounds of your weight is your gut bugs. They help digest your food, manufacture vitamins, regulate inflammation, and even affect your mood. The happier they are, the happier you are. Eating probiotic-rich food (yogurt, kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, and other traditionally pickled vegetables) helps support your native colonies. But that’s not enough. You need fibrous food, known as prebiotics, to keep them vibrant. These include onions, garlic, leeks, asparagus, jicama, apples, chicory, and other plant foods.

The Last Two Rules for Better Health

1. Spare the meat. By this, I don’t mean skimp on your protein! But by all means incorporate other sources of amino acids. This includes organs and bones. Every cup of bone broth you use in cooking provides roughly 10 grams of amino acids that you don’t have to digest by eating beef, chicken, pork, or fish. Dairy products, legumes, nuts and seeds also provide important protein.
2. Balance your macros. It’s not wise to focus your diet on just one of the three macronutrients: carbohydrate, fat, or protein. We need them all. If your diet is either 80% protein, or 80% refined carbohydrates, take another look at how you can better balance it.

To change your diet may seem intimidating. Perhaps you know you need to eat better, but you don’t have time to cook. Or maybe you have food sensitivities and crave the foods you react to. It’s possible you believe that the whole idea of planning, shopping, and controlling intake is utterly overwhelming.

No problem! Micro habits are attainable because they are easy, usually something you can do in the next 30 seconds. Not only that, but micro-habits help you change your diet because your motivation to accomplish them is going to be much higher than it would be for something that’s causing you stress. Micro habits fit into your schedule seamlessly. You can remember to accomplish them because you attach them to something you are already doing.

Start with hydration

You probably read that heading and had a nagging feeling of guilt. You know you are supposed to drink more water. It doesn’t taste good, or you forget, or you’re simply addicted to your caffeine. That’s okay! Keep your routine for now and add some micro habits.  Here are six suggestions you can implement immediately to galvanize your ability to change your diet.

• Drink a glass of lemon water first thing in the morning while your coffee brews. You can even set it out on your nightstand or your kitchen counter the night before, so you don’t forget.
• Fill several water bottles to carry with you throughout your day. Do this when you feed the dogs/cats/kids in the morning. You can even drop in an herbal tea bag to cold infuse so that your water has some flavor.
• Supercharge your water glass or water bottle with a sugar-free powdered electrolyte mix, such as Ultima Replenisher or LMNT.
• Sip from your water bottle every time you enter or exit a building.
• Grab a drink every time you use the restroom.
• Request herbal tea or water instead of soda or coffee at restaurant and convenience stores.

Change your beverages before your change your diet

I believe that before the industrial age, people mostly drank water, except for a morning coffee or an afternoon tea. To the detriment of our health, many of us now only drink soda, or rely on multiple cups – or even pots – of coffee to keep going throughout the day. Then we need a nightcap in order to calm down at night. Micro-habits to the rescue! You can frontload your diet changes by taking tiny steps that keep the ritual but change the nutrition of your beverages.

Downregulate your coffee intake with any of these swaps:

• Swiss water process de-caffeinated coffee. Also called the Water-Only process, this method uses water no chemicals to remove the caffeine from coffee beans. As a result, you don’t get harmful chemical residues for your body to detoxify, and the product tastes better.
• Organic matcha. Much less caffeinated that straight coffee, a matcha latte with milk, stevia, vanilla & cinnamon might be satisfying to you in the morning.
• Green tea. Served with honey, this serves as an afternoon pick-me-up that contains a small amount of caffeine along with l-theanine to increase focus and calm your nervous system.
• Sip a coffee alternative. Many brands have been developed to support the coffee habit without the caffeine. A few of these are Dandy Blend, MUD/WTR, Rasa, Four Sigmatic, and Harmonic Arts Elixirs.

You can wean yourself from soda by switching to Zevia first. Later, you can try kombucha or mineral water before graduating to plain water.

To reduce your alcohol intake, search the internet for mocktail recipes to enjoy, or try virgin Wilderton, distilled from botanicals and 100% alcohol free.

Change your dietary habits with substitutions

Unfortunately, many of us want results yesterday. So, we try to make big changes all at once. When we don’t implement them perfectly, we get frustrated, lose our motivation and give up.

The beauty of a micro habit is that it allows you to make a small movement that doesn’t disrupt your rhythm. Soon, you are able to take on even more healthy changes to your diet. Like the tortoise who beat the hare, you reach your goal by slow and steady progress rather than intermittent spurts.

Below are some trades you can make to increase the nutrient density of your food.

• Olive oil or coconut oil for vegetable oil (canola, corn, soy, safflower, cottonseed).
• Rutabaga for potato (try it mashed or air-fried).
• Cassava crackers for potato chips
• Organ-based seaasoning for table salt
• Zoodles (zucchini spirals) or Miracle Noodles for pasta
• Grilled chicken for fried chicken

Additionally, you can boost your meals by slipping in extra protein, natural fat, or vegetables. Sneak in some of these:

• Avocado, coconut milk, or flax seeds in your smoothie
• Collagen in your yogurt, juice, oatmeal, salad dressing, or tea
• Bits of frozen spinach or kale in your soup, marinara, pizza, scrambled egg, or rice
• Simple sauces on your vegetables to make them taste better.

If you like the idea of micro habits, check out my post on Tiny Steps to Decrease Your Stress. To learn more about small changes guaranteed to improve your lifestyle, read Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.

Want to stop being hangry? Do you feel like a dragon when you get hungry. Help is here for the snarky creature you become. Your irritability happens because your blood sugars drop too far. But that doesn’t mean you should grab a candy bar or eat every 2-3 hours. On the contrary, fueling yourself with well-spaced traditional meals may be more effective to help you stop being hangry.

Eat a Balanced Breakfast

When you break your fast is not as important as how your break your fast. It is true that eating sooner than later definitely brings relief if you want to stop being hangry. But having a balance of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins for your first meal of the day weighs in more heavily to maintain your blood sugar balance. Your mocha and muffin actually exacerbate your grouchy crankiness. They drive your blood sugars abnormally high and set you up for an even greater crash. This starts of cycle of alternating highs and lows for the day.

So, for breakfast, consider a combination carbs, fats, and proteins to keep you running smoothing for hours. For example, you might try one of these combinations:

• Oats, protein powder, and chia seeds, with (nut) butter, cream, or coconut milk
• Whole grain sprouted toast with ham, swiss, and poached egg
• Cottage cheese, strawberries, hemp seed & pistachios on whole grain toast
• Scrambled egg, black beans, cheese and salsa in a corn tortilla
• Fried egg, smoked salmon & avocado on a sweet potato half
• Greek yogurt, ricotta, lemon zest, almonds, berries, and chia seeds
• Sausage patty, pineapple ring, and cheese in a lettuce wrap

Stop Being Hangry with Smart Snacking

When the hunger dragon strikes, your urge might be to snarf a bag of cookies or chips. However, combining an unrefined fat (such as nuts or seeds) with a slow-burning carbohydrate (such as a vegetable) will stabilize your blood sugars and keep you fueled longer. Therefore, wise combinations of whole foods stop you from being hangry. Here are some suggestions:

• Strawberries & pistachios
• Pico de gallo & boiled egg
• Baby carrots & hummus
• Celery & sunflower seed butter
• Snap peas & tahini
• Mandarin oranges & guacamole
• Cherry tomatoes & olives
• Banana & walnuts
• Whole grain cracker & smoked salmon
• Blueberries & Greek yogurt (Fage Total)
• Dates & goat cheese

Count Quality as Much as Quantity

Many people think they must eat a low-carbohydrate diet in order to stop being hangry. Rather than reducing your carbohydrates, consider changing the type of carbohydrates you eat. Grab a handful of berries instead of a glass of juice in the morning. Build your pasta with squash or sweet potato instead of noodles. Choose a whole fruit instead of pastries when you want something sweet. Maximize your vegetable intake. Avoid sugary, sweetened beverages, products made with refined flour, and commercial snack foods. Instead, choose plant foods in their natural form that don’t come with a nutrition label: whole grains, nuts, seeds, fruits, and especially vegetables.

Don’t Skimp on Natural Fats

You may have been taught to eat a low-fat diet. Unfortunately, to satiate your hunger, you have tried to fill up on crackers, chips, sodas, and other processed foods. These are like kindling on your metabolic fire. They flare up in a burst of energy, then fade away quickly into ashes. On the other hand, fats are like logs. They burn long and slow. That doesn’t mean you should eat fries and fry sauce to stop being hangry. Nature’s foods are naturally balanced with fats, proteins and carbohydrates. Milk, eggs, meat, nuts, and seeds all have fats that work in harmony with your body. So capitalize on foods such as olives, avocados, butter, pastured and wild-caught meats, and other traditional foods to keep your blood sugars balanced.

Lower Your Stress to Stop Being Hangry

Did you know that stress can wreak more havoc on blood sugars than a poor diet? When you are under pressure, you need a ready source of energy to fight your dragons. Of course, this sets up cravings for fast fuel: empty carbohydrates. So, if you want to stop being hangry, you might need to take a few deep breaths and get back in control of your stress.

What is the ideal diet? Is it Keto or Vegan? Should you employ the Flexitarian approach or try Intermittent Fasting? What about Volumetrics?

Truthfully, none of the above diets are ideal for everyone. Because our physiology, genetics, stressors, food tastes, energy expenditures, and budgets are all different, there is no one-size-fits-all diet!

However, there are some principles that can be applied to every eating style. These principles have guided international cuisines through the ages. They have kept humans alive and thriving for millennia.

First and foremost, the ideal diet for you will be one the that supports your lifestyle the best. No approach is any good to you if you can’t implement it consistently over the long haul. Sure, anyone can “white-knuckle’ a diet for a few weeks. But is it sustainable? Is it enjoyable? Further, can you do it without endlessly charting, counting, and tracking? In addition, are the ingredients readily available?

Once you have determined what foods are accessible that you are willing to cook and eat on a regular basis, you might consider these additional keys. I deem these tenets as ideal for mankind’s diet across the planet.

5 Keys To An Ideal Diet

1. No industrially processed or refined foods. If you think about it, you will realize that food labels are a relatively modern creation. If you were to travel to the Inuit, the Maori, or the Maasai of yesteryear, you would find no commercial foods whatsoever. Now, I’m not glorifying primitive life. I’m only pointing out that strong people require strong natural foods.
2. A balance of animal and plant foods. Your physiology is that of an omnivore. Nature did not design you to be purely carnivorous nor utterly vegan. You need the phytonutrients of the plant kingdom, and the fats, amino acids, and vitamins of the animal kingdom.
3. Nutrient dense. Foods from nature have comparatively lower calories and higher nutritional value than man-made foods. For example, contrast a stalk of broccoli with a protein bar. There are so many wholesome plant chemicals in the broccoli that we haven’t even discovered them all! But we know there are upwards of 500.
4. Cooked plant foods and raw animal proteins. In the ideal diet, vegetables are best raw and animal foods are best cooked, right? Not necessarily. We can learn from traditional cultures that some plants are more digestible when cooked. Some proteins are best consumed with the raw enzymes that help us digest them. Nature and history are good schoolmasters to help us weigh the benefits of cooking against eating raw.
5. Some fermented foods or beverages. Until the commercialization of modern foods, there was no culture in the world that did not eat fermented products regularly in its diet. Some examples are kimchi from Korea and chutney from India, natto from Japan, and togwa from Tanzania. Mexico had its horchata, and Finland had its sima. These help stabilize your oh-so-important microbiome.

Additional Tenets for Optimal Eating

1. Soaked, soured, cultured grains, legumes, nuts & seeds. Is it possible that today’s allergies, sensitivities, and intolerances are partially due to improperly-prepared food? In temperate regions all over the globe, societies pre-treated their seeds with extensive methods of sprouting or fermenting. These approaches neutralize the “anti-nutrients” that make them indigestible.
2. A wide variety of saturated and monounsaturated fats. Certainly, we should understand the science by now proving that a fat-free diet is absolutely detrimental to human health. But which fat is best? Perhaps olive oil is optimal for the heart. However, you cannot build a brain without saturated fat! No single fat has the corner on the health market. The best diet contains fats from both animals and plants, from a diverse range of foods.
3. Colored salt. Since when was stripping any food down to a single molecule advantageous to your health? Nature brings us food with all the co-factors we need to utilize it. In the case of salt, the other trace minerals are crucial to maintaining our electrolyte balance.
4. Skin, bones, and organs, too. Just as it is unnatural to eat food that has been processed down to a component or two (think sugar and white flour), it is also just as short-sighted and unhealthy to eat only the  muscles of a creature and to throw away the rest. All societies from the beginning of time made use of the whole animal in their cooking. Each part has its special contribution, such as collagen, minerals, or vitamins.
5. Special nutrition for select groups. Soon-to-be parents, mothers, and children have an especially high nutritional need! Nature requires these individuals to eat better for the propagation of the race. Our rising generation should have the best diet of all, instead of the most deficient! It is deplorable that we bribe our little ones with treats, send them with puffed bits of artificial food for lunch, and serve them dinners of instant, processed, microwaved substances.

For me, the ideal diet is the one that is closest to nature!

Stepping on the scale, counting calories, and exercising more are old school tools for weight loss. If you’re feeling stuck, try these more effective measures for trimming down your body weight.

Measure fat loss, not weight loss

Since your body fluctuates 2 to 3 pounds daily, and loses weight in fits & starts, it seems futile to be constantly monitoring the scale. The scale isn’t a measure of health, anyway. A person can be very muscular and actually weigh more than someone who is “over-fat.” Therefore, it’s better to assess your progress in terms of fat loss. Use an article of clothing that your try on once every couple of weeks. If you are truly in better shape, your clothing will fit differently, even if can’t measure weight loss in pounds.

Eat fat to lose fat

Fats are necessary for life, so a fat-restricted diet will stress the body. Bodies under stress tend to hold onto their weight as a survival mechanism. Only when your body is convinced there is no threat, will it begin to release its reserves.

However, not all fats are created equal. Avoid chemically-extracted vegetable oils (soy, cottonseed, canola, safflower, and corn); they loose their antioxidant protection during processing and become oxidized. Oxidized oils are one of the top contributors to free radical damage to your body tissues. And damage = inflammation = stress. Also stay away from trans-fats; they make your cell membranes stiff and less able to take in nutrients and excrete wastes.

Good sources of fats include unprocessed raw nuts and seeds, butter from grass-fed cows, and virgin fats that are cold-pressed and unrefined.

Track sugars, not calories

Counting calories is not a natural or intuitive way of life. In fact, it seems a bit obsessive. It certainly isn’t something I would want to do for the next 25 or 30 years.  In my opinion, any weight loss plan needs to be sustainable in order to head off yo-yo dieting.

Additionally, calorie restriction suppresses thyroid hormone. Hypothyroidism is a fast-track to weight gain, not weight loss. So, eat plenty of protein and fat to increase satiety, stimulate fat-burning, and provide amino acids and fat-soluble vitamins to the thyroid.

The root barrier to weight loss, in many cases, is high insulin hormone. Unfortunately, you can still have insulin-driven fat storage on a restricted diet. So, if you’re going to monitor anything, let it be sugar. Your fat-free yogurt that seems such a healthy breakfast alternative may have the same amount of sugar as a Red Bull energy drink. Some smoothies have more sugar than Coke, and a medium Jamba Chocolate Moo’d  has more sugar than a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Butter Pecan ice cream.

Differentiate between carbs

With all the media about ketogenic diets, it’s easy to think that carbohydrates are bad. However, they are not bad any more than a knife is. It can be very useful; or it can be very harmful, depending on how it is used. Obviously, a diet of high-sugar, low-nutrient carbs isn’t going to be very health-promoting. Too much bread, pasta, and cereal is going to lead to imbalance. But did you ever stop to think that fruits, vegetables, and legumes are carbohydrates, too?

A helpful way to think about carbohydrates is in terms of their calorie content and their potential to be absorbed into your bloodstream quickly. A food that is calorie-dense and quick-absorbing (such as a grain or a sweetener) is going to signal your body to store all that extra energy for a rainy day. Of course, energy storage is the antithesis of weight loss.

But calorie-light and slow-absorbing foods (such as vegetables) can be very beneficial. Medium-calorie carbohydrates, as long as they are slow-absorbing (whole fruit, legumes, nuts, and seeds), can also be helpful for a weight loss plan.

Be mindful of when you eat

Think of your car. After you gas it up, you can drive a long distance, or you can park it and keep the fuel in reserve for another time. The same principle applies for your body. If you want to burn the fuel, you can’t park yourself in a bed or chair for a great length of time and expect your meals to not become reserves. So, it’s best to front-load your meals. That is, eat bulk of your food when your are going to be most active. That’s because anything you don’t burn within 3 hours of eating is stored as fat. It doesn’t make sense to eat your heaviest meal just before bedtime. It’s a good idea to eat 3/4 of your food by mid-afternoon.

Remember, you’re not the boss

We have been conditioned to believe in the simple equation Energy In – Energy Out = Weight. Therefore, more energy expenditure will equal greater weight loss. But this equation neglects the fact that your hormones are in control. Thyroid hormone is king of metabolism. Cortisol reigns over your state of relative stress or relaxation. Insulin dictates how much fuel gets stored.

No matter how much you exercise, you will not lose weight if thyroid hormone is low, or if cortisol or insulin are chronically high. Exercising under these conditions just creates more stress for the body. Then, it switches to survival mode, and hoards fuel to help you fight or flee.

Ultimately, you have to balance hormones first. A functional practitioner can help you with this process.  Engage in “movement,” as opposed to “exercise” to promote stress-relief.

Address “food on the wrong side of the tracks”

Inflammation prevents weight loss; it’s a physical stress, so your body conserves until it is “safe” to let go of those pounds. Guts can be damaged by antibiotics, stress, chemicals, and sugar. Then, when the gut lining is thin and worn, food gets “on the wrong side of the tracks” and causes inflammation. We then say you are sensitive to those food proteins that are causing the inflammation.

If you’re serious about weight loss, you may have to remove triggering foods and heal your gut for a minimum of 3 months before your weight begins to drop, because it takes a while for inflammation to subside.

Support your liver before weight loss

Your liver is responsible for detoxifying everything that needs to be eliminated from your body. But if that organ is overburdened, it will send toxins to fat tissue to be stored where they cannot damage other tissues in your body. Naturally, weight loss frees those toxins from your fat tissue. If your liver is already overtaxed by medications, chemicals, or hormonal and blood sugar imbalances, your body will not release those toxins and you will continue to retain the fat.

The bottom line is that you need to support your liver first! This includes drinking ample water and eating abundant cruciferous vegetables to help your liver with the “rinse cycle” of laundering out your toxins. Potassium-rich fruits and vegetables are also important to help your body flush its wastes. Be sure to eat enough protein, for detoxification requires ample amino acids.

“Find your happy” at your current weight

It’s easy to think you will be happy when you lose those pounds. But your body follows your mind. Stated another way, your mind decides whether life is good and you can release your garbage, or whether your are unsatisfied and need to hold onto things that protect you (such as body fat). So, if you are genuinely grateful and joyful with who you are, your body can let go of those things that no longer serve it.

Don’t moisten your food with beverages

As mentioned above, healthy weight loss requires plenty of amino acids, vitamins, and minerals to support detoxification. Breaking down and absorbing those nutrients from your food requires good digestion with plenty of strong stomach acid. Although hydration is critically important, it’s best to sip your water between meals. After all, high liquid intake at meal times will dilute stomach acid. Hence, it will impair digestion. If your food seems dry or tasteless, chew it more. Your saliva will moisten it and sweeten it the longer you massage it in your mouth.

You need antioxidants for inflammation. Simply put, inflammation flares when free radicals outnumber antioxidants in your body. While this is a good thing because of surgery or an acute trauma, it’s trouble if it continues chronically. Inflammation is the sign of tissue damage. You want to stop that damage and quench the fire. That’s why you need to eat antioxidant foods AND make antioxidants within your body.

Common Triggers for Chronic Inflammation

You’ve probably heard it before. However, the textbook answers are still true. Here’s a short list of lifestyle factors that contribute to inflammation.

• Sleep deprivation (Anything less than a consistent 8 hours per night is considered inadequate.)
• Extreme exercise
• Sustained elevated blood sugars
• Eating oxidized or rancid fats (Hint: this includes transfats and vegetable oils such as canola, cottonseed, soy, safflower, and corn.)
• Toxicity from heavy metals, chemicals, or pathogens
• Chronic simmering infection
• High levels of emotional or physical stress

What are Antioxidants?

If your body were a car, the antioxidants would be the steel brushes that removed the rust from your parts. While you don’t actually rust like metal, you still have natural processes at work that can damage your tissues. Without antioxidant molecules, you wouldn’t be able to reverse this damage.

Antioxidant Foods for Inflammation

Look for rich, deep natural colors in whole foods to signal high antioxidant content. For example, dark, leafy greens and bright, red berries are great choices. Interestingly, spices are among the foods highest in antoxidant content. Use both warming spices and cooling herbs in your cooking! In particular, include cumin, ginger, turmeric, parsley, mint, and cilantro.

Another category of antoxidants for inflammation is dark-fleshed fish, such as sardines, salmon, herring, and mackerel. Undoubtedly, these are high in antioxidant omega-3 fatty acids.

How to Synthesize Antioxidants for Inflammation

As important as antioxidant-rich whole foods in your diet are, it’s even more critical that your body be able to make its master antioxidant, glutathione. Indeed, your ability to quell inflammation hinges on this molecule, made from three amino acids, glutamine, glycine, and cysteine. The latter requires methionine for its synthesis. Therefore, getting the essential amino acid, methionine, in your diet is imperative. Eggs, meat, fish, nuts, and seeds are the best sources of methionine.  Legumes, though protein-dense, have very little methionine. Most fruits and vegetables have almost none.

Two other substances necessary to create glutathione are sulfur compounds and vitamin B-6. When you use onions & garlic in your cooking, your are adding sulphur compounds. Also, cruciferous vegetables contain high amounts of sulfurs. This class of vegetables includes broccoli, kale, cauliflower, cabbage, turnips, spinach, Brussels sprouts, horseradish, and wasabi!

While prominent in many foods, Vitamin B-6 serves several essential functions besides making glutathione. If your diet and lifestyle are putting heavy demands on your body, it’s easy to be short-changed on this lifestyle. Some conditions that make it likely you have insufficient B-6 include smoking, diabetes, alcoholism, celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease.

The key to vitamin B-6 sufficiency is being able to convert it to its active form. Eating more foods high in this vitamin is not helpful if you can’t convert pyridoxine to pyroxidol 5-phosphate. You can work with a functional practitioner to remedy this problem.