Why Does Inflammation Matter?

Inflammation. Everyone’s talking about it, but what does it really mean? Think of inflammation as a message. It’s telling you that there’s a problem. If you twist your ankle, inflammation helps to isolate and protect the ankle and let you know to treat it. That’s called acute inflammation.

Chronic, systemic inflammation on the other hand doesn’t seem to have any single root cause, but rather, your immune system is in a constant state of flare-up. That then causes problems that weakens your entire body. Your system starts to break down as inflammation damages your cells, tissues and organs and it ages you prematurely and puts you at risk for a number of diseases. But the good news is that you can treat and even totally reverse chronic inflammation. Reducing systemic inflammation and reducing systemic and chronic stress is going to help you slow down the aging process and to live a longer, healthier life.

How Does a Keto Diet Lower Inflammation?

Enter our healthier take on the classic keto diet: A plant-rich keto diet is one of the best ways to eat to reduce inflammation. That’s because the keto diet specializes in one really key area: it eliminates two of the most inflammatory foods that we tend to eat, refined sugar and carbohydrates. By getting those out of your diet, you’re removing the inflammatory response.

But that’s not all a keto approach to eating can do. Along with removing sugar and carbs from your diet comes something called metabolic flexibility. What metabolic flexibility means is that you have the ability to burn both carbs (or sugar) and fats and synthesize your own ketones, an amino acid that’s synthesized in the liver from your own body fat.

What’s Metabolic Flexibility and Why Do I Want That?

Having metabolic flexibility means that you eat when you’re hungry, but you aren’t chained to eating all the time. See, many of us are slaves to our meals and don’t even realize it. We’re constantly in a state of trying to regulate our blood sugar through the food we eat rather than having really stable blood sugar and using stored fat for fuel instead. Doesn’t that sound so much more efficient and ideal? Who doesn’t want to use up stored fat instead of scarfing down yet another meal?!

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