Decreasing Inflammation and Oxidation After Meals

Michael Greger M.D. FACLM shared in his Nurtrionfacts.org blog that within hours of eating an unhealthy meal, we can get a spike in inflammation, crippling our artery function, thickening our blood, and causing a fight-or-flight nerve response. Thankfully, there are foods we can eat at every meal to counter this reaction.

Standard American meals rich in processed junk and meat and dairy lead to exaggerated spikes in sugar and fat in the blood, as you can see at 0:13 in my video How to Prevent Blood Sugar and Triglyceride Spikes after Meals. This generates free radicals, and the oxidative stress triggers a biochemical cascade throughout our circulation, damaging proteins in our body, inducing inflammation, crippling our artery function, thickening our blood, and causing a fight-or-flight nerve response. This all happens within just one to four hours after eating a meal. Worried about inflammation within your body? One lousy breakfast could double your C-reactive protein levels before it’s even lunchtime.

Repeat that three times a day, and you can set yourself up for heart disease. You may not even be aware of how bad off you are because your doctor is measuring your blood sugar and fat levels while you’re in a fasting state, typically drawing your blood before you’ve eaten. What happens after a meal may be a stronger predictor of heart attacks and strokes, which makes sense, since this is where most of us live our lives—that is, in a fed state. And it’s not just in diabetics. As you can see at 1:30 in my video, if you follow non-diabetic women with heart disease but normal fasting blood sugar, how high their blood sugar spikes after chugging some sugar water appears to determine how fast their arteries continue to clog up, perhaps because the higher the blood sugars spike, the more free radicals are produced.