How Your Diet Can Help Reduce Inflammation

YOU GO OUT for a long run or a hard workout, and the next day that familiar soreness creeps into your muscles.

- AMANDA LOUDIN

In many ways, it’s a sign of a job well done—your training session produced microtears in your muscles, leading to natural inflammation. Given the proper rest and nutrition, those tears will heal and make you stronger and faster.

But if you skip recovery tactics like downtime and eating right, you might find yourself in a state of progress-plateauing fatigue. What’s more: If you ditch recovery efforts enough times, you may set yourself up for chronic inflammation, which can lead to big health issues like heart disease, dementia, diabetes, and even cancer, per Nature Medicine research.

While it’s okay to have some inflammation in the body—inflammatory cells fight off injury, infection, even disease—if inflammation sticks around for months or years, that’s when other problems can arise.

For runners, mitigating chronic inflammation is crucial, says Jamie Lee McIntyre, RDN, an East Coast-based dietitian. That’s because, as a Frontiers