How to Manage Inflammation

A) Clearing toxins: It is important to clear the inflammation from your system. We can do that by optimizing your bodies detoxing/flushing capabilities.

1) Though urination: Drink lots of water - especially in the morning - to flush your kidneys. The kidneys filter about 120 - 150 quarts of blood every day and we excrete 1-2 quarts of waste and water per day! The more water we drink, the more our kidneys are flushed and our blood is filtered. This is a great mechanism to clear waste from our system.

2) Through bowel movement: clearing out food waste and toxins with a good BM keeps your GI healthy and prevents/reduces issues like leaky gut. Here are some ways to have a smooth and complete BM:

- GREENS: Vegetables! Especially bitters like salad greens, spinach, chard...

- Probiotics: Bio K is amazing...but expensive. Garden of Life RAW probiotics, and Ultimate flora are also good brands. (just make sure they are refrigerated).

- Water, water, water...

- good oils will "lube the tube" as well.

3) Through oxygen exchange (aka breathing): remember that 70% of our waste is excreted through the simple act of exhaling. So breath deep! Breathing exercises and meditations are a great way to implement deep breathing (and they also decrease stress which in turn reduces inflammation so it's a win win!).

B) Reducing inflammatory inputs: autoimmune conditions are inflammatory by nature. We need to eliminate what is creating the systemic inflammation. Most often, this immune overactivity is created by allergenic foods and leaky gut.

Leaky gut is intestinal permeability. A possible cause of leaky gut is increased intestinal permeability or intestinal hyper-permeability. That could happen when tight junctions in the gut, which control what passes through the lining of the small intestine, don't work properly. This lets substances leak into the bloodstream. Those substances are perceived by the immune system as "foreign" and stimulate an immune response.

so.... we must heal the gut.

How do we do this? First and foremost, eliminate causes of inflammation - especially starches and sugars - from the diet.

A strict paleo diet for 30 days is a great way to help reduce inflammation and "hit the reset button" on your immune system. After 30 days we can start adding food back methodically so we can examine which foods you are having a reaction to (which foods make you have stomach upset, feel fatigued, etc..).

Chris Kresser is a amazing resource for autoimmune-nutrition.

Here are some links to relevant articles:

HLA-B27 and autoimmune disease: Is a low starch diet the solution?

https://chriskresser.com/hla-b27-and-autoimmune-disease-is-a-low-starch-diet-the-solution/

5 Steps to Personalize your Autoimmune Paleo Protocol

https://chriskresser.com/5-steps-to-personalizing-your-autoimmune-paleo-protocol/

He also has a series of articles called: Beyond Paleo

ALL of the Beyond Paleo articles are great and informative! if you had to pick...

Beyond Paleo: Don't Eat Toxins

https://chriskresser.com/beyond-paleo-2/

Beyond Paleo: Heal your Gut

https://chriskresser.com/beyond-paleo-6/