I had just been to a Nutrition and Health Seminar at UCLA. This seminar inspired me to briefly talk about inflammation. But before we talk about inflammation, we must talk about stress.
Stress leads to inflammation. Now when most people think of stress, they think about emotional stress. But stress that leads to inflammation is not limited to emotional stress. For instance, when you drink too much, that is placing stress on your body. When you eat too much junk food, that is putting stress on your body. When you smoke, when you binge watch TV, when you sleep only two hours, etc. All of this, creates stress upon the body. And as stated before, stress leads to inflammation.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, inflammation is viewed as a heat issue. When one has inflammation, there is swelling, redness, and heat. This unmanaged heat tends to lead to pain. Why? Your body is working over time to make things better but because you’ve been taxing your body too much, it doesn’t know how to do it properly.
Have you ever been given too much to do at work with impossible deadlines? And when you thought that you were just managing it, work gives you another to add to the load. Anger is usually the first reaction. Anger is also a heat condition. Much like an angry, overworked employee, your body reacts in a similar fashion by way of inflammation.
Did you know that 117 million adults in the US suffer from one or more chronic conditions? Did you know that hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year to treat chronic diseases? Did you know that the majority of chronic diseases are preventable? And did you know that chronic diseases are essentially inflammation?
117 million people in the US suffer from inflammation in the body. And most suffering from inflammation could have prevented it. How could we let this happen? It’s simple. Though we as humans have evolved slowly, technology has evolved at an incalculable rate. We must get things now. Whether it’s news or food, we must get it now. Patience has become a lost virtue. And because of this, we have lost the patience for our bodies to naturally heal itself. We look to “quick fixes”. Overweight? Take a pill for that. Have pain? Take a pill for that. Insomnia? Take a pill for that. These pills, though they help relieve ailments temporarily, they will not cure. Whatever you suffer from, will come back.
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