5 Ways Food Causes Pain

When we think of pain in the muscles or joints, we often think of poor posture, a wrong movement, or repetitive strain- namely a physical cause. However, what if food was to blame as well? What we eat determines how we feel. A Western diet is known to be full of processed foods and fast foods, which were created for speed and convenience. But the only thing it is speeding up is disease, and there's no convenience when someone is stuck in a hospital.

This is not an exaggeration, statistics show that deaths from poor diet and lifestyle, which lead to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and other conditions, have now surpassed deaths caused by smoking cigarettes.  Bad food drives diseases because it depletes your gut microbiome, and your gut microbiology lacks diversity when it gets depleted. If you don't have a wide variety of microbes in your gut, then your body also doesn't have a large capacity to deal with things like stress, anxiety, mood management, sleep, and more. So, it's not just about how you the person, handles stress with your mind or emotions, but the capacity to handle anything is based on what's inside your body, more specifically your gut!

Furthermore, if you're having gut issues that are leading to stress, anxiety, and less sleep, let alone more serious conditions, then chances are that you are also experiencing aches and pains in your muscles, joints, head, and stomach. This mainly occurs because eating bad food overtime will lead to a leaky gut and inflammation rises in your bloodstream.

Here are five ways that food causes pain.

5 Ways Food Causes Pain

1) Stomach & Body Aches: Gut dysbiosis occurs after ingesting things like seed oils, HFCS, pesticides, and gluten, which all cause inflammation, then pain! Both inflammation and pain can be felt in the gut, in the joints, and in the muscles.

2) Fatigue & Posture: A low-nutrient diet leads to low energy, which can then become chronic fatigue. When we're constantly tired, we have low resiliency to handle anything, and our bodies have no energy to even endure gravity. When gravity wins, our posture and positions drop, our spine becomes compressed, joints become misaligned, and pain signals from short muscles or rubbing joints gets turned on.

3) Headaches & Brain Fog: Daily intake of sugars and starches causes blood sugar to spike and drop. When blood glucose isn't stable it impairs cognitive function, lowers focus, and can even diminish vision health. If our eyes cannot calibrate properly this can be painful in and around the eyes, and cause headaches or migraines, and may even cause nausea. These symptoms are painful, aren't they? Changing your diet by lowering carbohydrate intake has been scientifically proven to decrease many medical symptoms including headaches and pain.

4) Stiff Fascia: The amount of water that we drink also plays a major role in pain. Lack of hydration causes thick, stiff, and dense fascia to develop. When fascia is dehydrated, we lose mobility, and movement restriction increases because there is less space for tendons and joints to move freely. If this state becomes chronic, adhesions and trigger points can build, leading to long-term imbalances in the body’s structures, like the shoulder girdle, gait walking patterns, and the spine’s alignment.

5) Neurological Issues: Lastly, with all these things combined, such as low-nutrient diet full of sugars and starches, low amount of water intake, and constantly eating junk food, causes mitochondrial deficiency. When mitochondria, the powerhouse of our cells (and ourselves) loses energy, it develops low bioelectric capacities, and the ability to communicate to other cells becomes disrupted. If a body-wide disruption occurs, how can one system properly tell the other to turn on inflammatory genes, stop pain signals, and feel better?

All these aches and pains can truly be avoided by fixing your gut. Fixing your gut means fixing your health, leaving you clear-minded, energized, and pain free. A diet full of whole foods like fruits and vegetables, organic unprocessed meat protein, and drinking plenty of water is what our bodies were built for.

Functional nutrition is gaining popularity as a new field of medicine because it restores function to our gut, our brains, and our bodies after industrialism made its way into our homes and on our plates. However, eating the way our ancestors did, with a diet rich in whole foods is simply how things used to be. A new statistic posted by functional medicine and longevity expert Dr. Mark Hyman, states that just 10 days of eating whole foods and cutting out junk foods will decrease any sort of painful symptoms by 70%! That is real change.

Start shopping local, buy fresh foods, and cook what's on your own plate. This will shape your body and free your body to feel amazing!