Shifting to a plant-based diet will boost your mood, your health. How? It might be related to inflammation in your body. Let us explain:
When you are stung by an insect or arachnid, your skin turns red and swells. The same happens when you get a spine or splinter on your hand. The area turns red, swells up, and the temperature in the area increases. That's inflammation.
What happens in your body is that on the affected area the widen the blood vessels increase blood flow and weep fluid and proteins into the injured area. That's where the redness and swelling come from. Your body also sends in white blood cells that produce antibodies attacking bacteria and viruses destroying them before they can harm us.
This process can be triggered mistakenly by food, i.e. by dairy products among others.
A diet change can put out the fire. Many years ago, studies showed that avoiding animal products could reduce the inflammation of arthritis. A vegan diet has been shown to lower CRP levels by about one-third.
Inflammation can affect all our body, including the brain. By causing chemical changes in the brain. Years leading to depression showed by teste of higher levels of inflammatory proteins in their bloodstream, compared with people who were not depressed.
More worrisome is the fact that inflammation may actually damage the brain. In other words, it does not just impair the brain cells' ability to function. It may be contributing to their destruction.
Just as inflammatory foods can affect the body, they can also affect our brain. Thus explaining the anti-depressant effect of plant-based diets. They allow you to steer clear of inflammatory foods.
Apart from food triggers, the type of fat in the diet may make a difference, too. Researchers have suggested that an excess of uric acid, an inflammatory fat found in chicken, eggs, beef, sausage, and fish, can promote inflammation in the brain and interfere with normal brain function.
Stay tuned with us, we know that plant-based foods are good for the brain; the explanation as to why they help may become clearer with time.
