— Sophia Marchese

Um, excellent question, you know, there's a way to think about this is that the foods that we eat generally have an inflammatory or an anti-inflammatory effect in our body and the anti-inflammatory foods are obvious. It's sugar, you know refined Foods refined flowers oils the foods with a lot of preservatives saturated fat in animal products can be inflammatory for a number of reasons, which won't go into right now. Dairy is inflammatory generally to the human system. And so those are the inflammatory foods by adding in anti-inflammatory foods. It reduces inflammation in a number of ways and one of the ways is that the phytochemicals the little chemicals the antioxidants in the food actually turn off genes and they can turn off key Gene switches which deactivate up to 400 genes in the inflammatory Cascade. And so by eating these anti-inflammatory foods, you're actually turning off switches that turn off entire systems of inflammation in the body anti-inflammatory foods also have antioxidants and that antioxidants look for these little free radicals that come from radiation and from toxins and food and from Keem iron and other areas that are causing damage to the cell and the antioxidants will donate an electron to bind to that free radical and stabilize it and prevent it from causing any further harm. So antioxidants have this big reserve of extra electrons that they can donate to mitigate all the damage that's being caused by these free radicals and you know, Common antioxidants are vitamin E in vitamin A and those are in you know, plant-based food. So as we're eating plants in multiple ways, our body is reducing inflammation. So some of the best anti-inflammatory Nodes are the ones you probably can already guess dark leafy greens including kale colored bok choy. Cruciferous vegetables broccoli cauliflower brussels sprouts Kale's in that same family berries are an excellent anti-inflammatory blackberries blueberries strawberries raspberries. Cherries are very good. Especially the tart cherries are excellent anti-inflammatory. Mushrooms are helpful in that process you can use onion which is a great anti-inflammatory. A lot of herbs have a very potent anti-inflammatory effects including basil oregano. And then a number of spices. The number one spice as we've talked about in the past is the curcumin and others like cinnamon cloves. Holy basil. Oh, yeah that whole family of spices are very very excellent anti-inflammatory spices. So it's generally, you know that a whole food plant-based diet focused on those Foods is a very potent anti-inflammatory diet and we see in lots of cases people that have inflammation and their fingers and their joints and you can even see inflammation and people's skin and in their faces and as they eat an anti-inflammatory diet the tissue inflammation does go And gets better. So hopefully that gives you some good guidance. It's all the multi-specialty colors of the rainbow that tend to be anti-inflammatory foods. So that's a great question. Thank you.