Can What You Eat Affect Pain?
Let’s talk about how your food can be a factor specifically in how prone to pain and injury you are, and how you heal from problematic pain. Understand that with pain that is indicating an underlying problem (the most common type – as opposed to pain from a workout) the most important step is making sure you are getting the problem addressed. That is one reason people seek chiropractic care at our office.
The question that comes out of that problematic pain is how can two people have the same injury on MRI or X-ray yet have totally different pain levels. Some of that is complicated; it can relate to pain threshold or tolerance, which often relates to how much pain someone has experienced and their attitude towards pain. My experience as a parent leads me to believe that if parents give pain meds at the first sign of pain and choose to always numb pain from day one rather than comforting and consoling and helping their child cope with pain, it results in their child not having a very high pain tolerance. Teething is our first test as parents to let our kids cope with mild pain as we comfort them and help them soothe the pain naturally rather than numbing it or medicating it all the time. But that’s another article.
A key factor in how much pain each person feels from the same injury is the inflammatory state of your body. Nutrition is a big player in this. The inflammatory state of the body is also a big factor in heart disease, inflammatory cancers, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, arthritis, and many other chronic diseases. So, like always, lifestyle choices that improve your health also benefit you by reducing pain, disease etc.
What you eat is rarely what caused the problem leading to pain, but it can affect how much pain is caused by the problem. It comes down mainly to inflammation and some hormones that are used by your brain to create pain. Women notice more pain during their period, mainly because of an increase in the hormones that are also used to make pain- so a slightly achy joint becomes more intense for those few days. The main way to use nutrition to reduce symptoms while you are correcting the cause of the problem is to reduce your body’s inflammatory state. This is done by reducing omega 6 fats and increasing omega 3 fats, and by increasing antioxidants. As mentioned before this also reduces risk of heart disease and certain cancers and other health concerns so it’s good all around!
Here are my 10 steps to an anti-inflammatory, pain reducing and health promoting diet:
- Avoid ALL vegetable oils (our main source of omega 6 fats) – use coconut oil, avocado oil, or olive oil.
- Take 1 tbsp of Innate Choice Omega Sufficiency fish oil daily (available at our office) – this omega 3 fat is proven to lower inflammatory markers in weeks and helps get pain relief faster during initial chiropractic care.
- Eat loads of green vegetables and fresh fruit – local organic is best, then local unsprayed, then foreign organic.
- Flavour foods with fresh antioxidant rich herbs and spices – onion, garlic, rosemary, thyme, ginger, sage, turmeric, cinnamon, and cloves.
- Avoid processed food, refined sugar and white flour – sweeten foods with fruit, use whole grains or no grains.
- Eat wild fish, free range poultry, and grass fed red meat for proteins – grain finished beef is pro-inflammation.
- Drink a cup of bone broth daily – simmer / crock pot / or instant pot – bones, 1 tbsp ACV, veg, herbs 10-24 hrs.
- Take 1-2 Innate Choice probiotics daily (available at our office) – efficient digestion produces less inflammation.
- Take Vitamin D drops daily (available at our office) – take 1 drop per 25lbs minimum, 2 drops initially.
- Avoid drinking alcohol – If you hate this suggestion, try sticking to grain free alcohol like polish vodka, blanco tequila, gin, and wine.
I have had many patients who were blown away by the effect of avoiding alcohol and taking fish oil and vitamin D along with their adjustments when they start care.