Pain specialist Anneleen Malfliet therefore questions typical Flemish fare such as steak and chips. “Our diet is not in line with a healthy diet, although the story is a bit more complex than that.”
Those who do not feel well, sometimes dare to reach for unhealthy food. However, people who think that their pain will go away are disappointed. After all, what you eat has an influence on how intense you experience pain.
“That’s what it comes down to, although the story is a bit more nuanced than that,” Anneleen Malfliet, pain specialist at the VUB, told this afternoon in “Nieuwe Feiten”. According to her, everything has to do with balance: “If you eat sugars or fats once or consume them in an otherwise balanced healthy diet, there is no problem. But if your diet mainly consists of fats and sugars and unhealthier choices, you will experience pain more.
Sweet and greasy food lowers pain threshold
So someone’s pain threshold is lowered by eating sweet and greasy things. This certainly applies to people with chronic pain, but also in general. Sugars and fats contribute to making our nervous system more sensitive to all kinds of stimuli, including pain.
According to Malfliet, pain is a complex problem: “There are probably several phenomena that contribute to this. What is certain is that nutrition has an impact on how people experience pain.”
For example, foods such as vegetables, fruit and legumes are very important. They contain essential vitamins and minerals that are also called antioxidants. Those antioxidants fight against free oxygen radicals, a type of waste products that are released during various processes in our body.
The free oxygen radicals are formed as a by-product of your digestion and food intake. That happens anyway, regardless of whether you eat very healthy or unhealthy. That’s not bad, by the way. In a healthy body there is a balance between the antioxidants and the free oxygen radicals. If there are enough antioxidants to neutralize the free oxygen radicals, there is nothing to worry about.
Brain responds more strongly to pain signals
Anyone who consumes too much unhealthy food may experience this as a nuisance. Unhealthy food ensures that too many free oxygen radicals are produced. Unhealthy food is often accompanied by few fruits and vegetables, which means that the number of antioxidants is also limited and there is therefore an imbalance between the free oxygen radicals and antioxidants.
And that’s where the problem begins: having too many free oxygen radicals and too few antioxidants causes his or her body to completely ignite. It is a systemic inflammation that occurs everywhere in the body and from which the central nervous system does not escape. Therein lies the link with pain. It is because of the central nervous system that people feel pain.
If your body is fully inflamed, your central nervous system will send pain signals to your brain much faster, which will react much more strongly because of the inflammation. So you feel much faster and more intense pain when your body is completely inflamed.
Questions about typical Flemish food
With products that are high in calories but have little nutritional value, such as fast food or chocolate, our body can do little. According to Malfliet, it is therefore not a bad idea to consider the typical Flemish diet.
“Our typical Flemish fare often leans towards an unhealthy diet. When we think of classics such as ham rolls or steak with fries, we have to admit that they contain little variety, lots of fats and few vegetables. On top of that, the Flemish often bake with butter instead of olive oil.”
“The conclusion is therefore simple: our food cannot be reconciled with a healthy diet. We would be better off switching to the healthy food triangle that we know. It has been set up completely differently from the standard Flemish diet.”
More complex story
Malfliet emphasizes, however, that people with chronic pain are sometimes helped by a different diet, but that it is actually a more complex story than that: “Chronic pain is a lifestyle problem. Food is often an element we can work on. If those people adjust their diet to a healthy diet, it will certainly have a positive effect.”
“But if they are also not active, sit a lot and sleep poorly, just tackling the diet will not be enough to remedy the chronic pain. You do have to respond to several factors. Of course, that does not alter the fact that nutrition is an important element with which we can certainly achieve results.”
Listen to the entire conversation on Radio 1 Select
Source: vrtnws.be and New Facts
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