What’s the deal with inflammation? When and why does it happen? Inflammation occurs when your body’s white blood cells (and the chemicals they produce) help to protect you from infection and injury. That’s a good thing. However, in arthritis and some auto-immune diseases, your immune system triggers inflammation when there is no infection or a reason to do so. This is a bad thing. Chronic inflammation along with stress, a sedentary lifestyle and consumption of inflammatory foods can lead to weight gain and various health problems and diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma and Alzheimer’s. Chronic inflammation is harmful to your body and can last for weeks up to years. Even low levels of inflammation on a chronic basis can lead to these diseases and others.

There are healthy foods that can help reduce inflammation and others that are associated with an increased risk of chronic inflammation. The choice is yours. Below are some examples of healthy foods you might want to consider and other foods you might want to avoid.