Lifestyle Factors That Can Lead to Inflammation

Inflammation is often thought of as just swelling from an injury, but did you know it can affect your entire body—even at a cellular level? Many of the foods we eat and daily habits we follow could be silently fueling this hidden inflammation, making it harder for your body to heal.

I am Lauren Masi, a physical therapist and Board Certified Orthopedic Clinical Specialist. I’m also the owner and Clinical Services Director of Bay Area Physical Therapy and Lafayette Physical Therapy. Today, we’re going to talk about lifestyle factors that can lead to inflammation. 

What Is Inflammation?

When most people think of inflammation, they think of the obvious, large accumulations of swelling that can be visible under the skin. 

Sometimes those happen due to trauma, or sometimes wear and tear can encapsulate fluid in bursa, which are fluid-filled sacs located throughout our body. We have them in our shoulders, knees, and all over the body. 

How to Treat Inflammation at Home

If you have inflammation, usually people are going to reach to their medicine cabinet for nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), or over the counter medications like Advil, Aleve, and Motrin. A lot of people are going to follow those bottle instructions and take that as an anti-inflammatory. 

Even more conservative than that, we recommend icing. Ice in a Ziploc bag with a little bit of water works just as well as a bag of frozen peas or a gel pack. We recommend putting that on the inflamed area for about 10 minutes, and definitely no more than 20 at any given time. Before reapplying ice, you should wait for your skin to warm back up; and always keep a thin layer of something between the ice and your skin. This can be a paper towel, a thin kitchen towel, anything between the cold pack and your skin to prevent freezer burns. 

Sometimes we’ll often recommend CBD creams or some topical that can help decrease the inflammation in an area. If the inflammation is too significant, people might seek out the help of their physician to go in and actually drain the area. But sometimes draining the inflammation is not as simple as it sounds. 

What Is Cellular Inflammation?

Sometimes we find other types of inflammation that are not encapsulated in a way that can be drained. It’s more cellular inflammation, where there’s a little bit of swelling in a whole bunch of cells in an area. 

You could have cellular inflammation that’s widespread throughout your body, not just one joint, maybe not even in muscles. It could be systemic. Your organs, all of your body can be inflamed, and that’s what we have to look into. 

Lifestyle Factors That Can Cause Cellular Inflammation

I want to make sure that, as a medical provider, I’m not so pigeonholed to think that this is just a musculoskeletal issue. I want to make sure we’re looking at all the systemic contributors. We might have a talk about what kind of things are in your diet or a part of your lifestyle that might be creating inflammation. 

  1. Food sensitivities: Very commonly in today’s society, we have people who are allergic to soy, gluten, and dairy. That doesn’t mean you’re having an anaphylactic kind of inflammatory reaction, but your body just isn’t liking it. 
  1. Pesticides: We have a lot of pesticides and chemicals in the foods that we eat, and this type of low level inflammation over time can slow our healing. It can make us inflamed. 
  1. Sugar: Sugar is also highly inflammatory. So too much sugar can heighten, on a systemic level, our body’s reaction to different things where one little injury that you might have that’s not healing could be prevented from healing due to these other factors that we want you to consider. 
  1. Smoking: Another detrimental factor can be smoking tobacco. It affects blood flow, and what do we need the blood for? Blood helps carry all those inflammatory byproducts and negative things out of our injured tissues and carry good, oxygenated blood into areas to help things heal. So, if we don’t have good blood flow, we’re going to heal more slowly. 

Schedule a Consultation at Bay Area PT

Your physical therapist can help guide you on a holistic approach to make sure that all aspects of your health are promoting healing and minimizing inflammation. And if you already have inflammation, we can help you get back to function as quickly as possible. 

Some other vlogs that we’ve written that might be helpful on this topic include How a Sedentary Lifestyle Impacts Your Health and How Balancing Rest and Activity Improves Your Health. Please check those out for more information. 

And if you need any help, or if you’re concerned that you’re not healing from an injury as quickly as you should, please reach out to our expert physical therapists today.