One of the hard lessons we are learning from the COVID-19 pandemic is that we cannot sit idly by, waiting for the government, healthcare system, and scientists to develop a reliable therapeutic or vaccine that will allow us to return to “normalcy." This can seem overwhelming and even hopeless for people as they come to this realization that we may be facing a lag time of 6 months to 2 years before there is a safe, well-studied, intervention that can be widely distributed to the masses. It is during times such as these where we must take responsibility for our health and decide to reroute our current course towards a lifestyle that nourishes and provides for our bodies, rather than slowly killing them. After all, we only get one body. We might as well make it last as long we can!

Step 1 in this process is to remove the highly processed “foods” from our diets that are forcing our bodies to work overtime, trying to sort through all the junk added to the mixture, to get to the small amounts of nutrients it can actually use. You can think of it like a garden: trying to harvest vegetables from a garden overwhelmed with weeds requires significantly more effort than one where the vegetables are in neat, tidy rows with plenty of room to grow. This added stress over time would obviously wear the body down and decrease its ability to recovery quickly, operate at a high level, and fight off infections when it needs to. 

We also see increased systemic inflammation because of that constant, unnecessary stress, which is now being linked to higher mortality rates, increased organ injury, and more medical interventions in patients who acquire COVID-19 (links below).  Researchers are also finding that when we consume these types of foods, our immune system becomes more aggressive, and inflammation becomes even more pronounced. This massive influx of inflammation into the lungs is partially why we are hearing about people essentially drowning from COVID-19. You and I as individuals cannot control how our immune system responds to an infection, but we can at least set it up for success by giving it an acceptable place to start.

Lastly, more and more research is linking not only COVID-19 to higher inflammation levels, but cancer and dementia as well. I believe that these links will only strengthen in years to come but that doesn’t mean we can’t start lowering inflammation in our bodies right now. We don’t need randomized clinical trials, the World Health Organization, or Dr. Fauci to give us the “green light” to start avoiding fake foods that are slowly destroying our bodies, our healthcare system, and our country. We can take the matter into our own hands with every meal.  Every time we eat whole, nutrient dense, REAL food, we give our bodies the ammunition it needs to heal, strengthen, and fight off any intruders. If it comes off a tree, out of the ground, or off an animal, go ahead and eat it. If the ingredient label looks like a science experiment, leave it on the shelf.

That is something YOU can control. Today.