Dr. Shilpa Sayana breaks down what drives chronic inflammation: processed foods, recent infections, toxin exposures, and stress. She shows how a Big Mac spikes blood sugar on a CGM, then offers concrete fixes like eating real food, adding fiber, and using sauna to help your body eliminate toxins.
Um, and so with that note, right, how if someone is like, yeah, maybe I'm having these problems, how can they start? Or what are maybe some of the tips that they can start doing to help with that inflammation? Yeah. So the first things they're doing is where is this inflammation coming from? And a lot of times sources of inflammation can be food. Processed food is a big source. Like there's lots of good studies. If you have a Big Mac and check your inflammatory levels right away, super sky high. And we have a lot of patients are wearing those continuous glucose monitors. Now one of my patients that she ate like the in and out French fry, which only has a few ingredients compared to the McDonald's french fry, and her blood sugar was super high. So it's processed food is a big one. So as much as you can, try and make sure your food is real and it's clean, ideally organic. And if you are eating packaged food, make sure they're not like a list of resilient ingredients. Just try and keep it simple as I'm sure that's your expertise on so really trying processed foods. A second source of inflammation is if you've had any kind of recent infection. So Covid is a big source of inflammation. Or if you were traveling to like India or Mexico and had food poisoning, that's going to be a source of inflammation. And then another big source of inflammation is toxin exposure. So if you were exposed to toxins such as, you know, current LA fires, or you had silver fillings in your mouth and have a ton of mercury, in la, we see a lot of mercury toxicity mainly because of sushi. Like my patients love sushi and they think it's really healthy, which should be. But our oceans are not healthy. And if you don't detoxify, you can have high levels of mercury causing inflammation. And another source of toxins, which is again fairly common in LA is mold. You've had, we had a lot of rains two years ago and they cause a lot of water damage. And mold can be a source of inflammation. So again, it's important to know how you process these toxins. And these could be obvious sources of inflammation that are causing that you need to look at. So in terms of practical things you can do is watch your food, take enough fiber so you are binding these toxins and eliminating them naturally. And make sure you're not constipated. If you have access, go to a sauna, like someplace where you can sweat, like a sauna at the YMCA or at your gym. See if you could put some sort of sweating practice. It doesn't have to be for long, like 10, 15 minutes to just open up these detox pathways. But the last thing about inflammation, which is the biggest source of inflammation, is chronic stress.
