Eat This Tree
Patients of mine know I’m deeply fond of improving health with products found in nature.
Whether it’s vegetables from the garden or wild-caught salmon, I believe building a diet filled with natural foods and supplemented with natural products is one of the best ways to improve health.
Which is why it may not come as a surprise that I’d suggest eating a tree to improve health.
Now, if you’re wondering if I’m encouraging you to become a beaver, I am not.
In fact, I don’t even want you to eat a tree.
Just an extract from a tree.
Now I’m sure you’re wondering what the first person to eat a tree extract was thinking, and to be honest, it’s a great question.
All I know is over the past decade experts have devoted considerable time to researching this all-natural extract.
Which is why if you’re interested in helping your body deal with potentially harmful inflammation in the best way possible, I’m going to show you why you should add pine bark extract into your diet.
The #1 Reason Pine Bark Extract Is Great For Improving Inflammation Response
When you just read you could eat pine bark extract to help with inflammation did you all of the sudden think about getting out into the woods and gnawing on pine bark instead?
Maybe you did, but you can’t just eat any old pine bark.
Not that you’d want to anyways…
Pine bark extract comes from a specific type of pine tree; the French Maritime pine tree which grows in Europe.
A standardized extract of 95% proanthocyanidins from pine bark extract does something to your body most other pine barks can’t do.
It bathes your cells in phytochemicals, called proanthocyanidins, known to have potent antioxidant qualities.
Research indicates proanthocyanidins don’t just neutralize the potential harm of free radicals, but actively scour your body for free radicals so they can inhibit their negative health effects.
And if you know much about inflammation you know how important it is to support your body’s free radical fighting capabilities. Remember, inflammation in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. It’s little more than your immune system’s response to cellular damage.
However, if you want to maintain great health you want to ensure nothing is getting in the way of your body’s ability to keep inflammation under control. If your body experiences episodes in which inflammation isn’t contained then damage to critical cellular systems may occur.
Which is why adding pine bark extract into your diet helps to ensure excess free radicals don’t compromise your body’s natural response to inflammation.
The reason pine bark extract is unique as an inflammation support supplement is because of the proanthocyanidins. Pine bark contains a particular kind of proanthocyanidin called procyanidolic oligomers (OPCs).
OPCs are unique to just a few kinds of plants, and pine bark extract happens to be one of the most concentrated sources of OPCs in the plant kingdom.
And here’s what the research says about their role in helping your body keep inflammation levels in the healthy range.
Research Clearly Shows Pine Bark Extract Helps Your Body’s Inflammation Pathways
Pine bark extract isn’t a brand new supplement in terms of research. For more than a decade people have been using it for a wide variety of reasons.
And this is because the research supports its use as a supplement that helps with inflammation.
In an animal study published in the Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics, rats were divided into 3 groups and the researchers performed surgery on them to see how they’d respond to pine bark extract as a healing agent post-surgery.
Just to clarify why they organized this study in such a manner. Inflammation happens after injury of any kind. In this circumstance, the rats who’d had surgery were dealing with surgery wounds. The researchers wanted to see if pine bark extract helped enhance wound healing, which would show pine bark extract was helpful at inducing an enhanced response to inflammation.
The 3 groups in this instance were divided as such. Group 1 had no drug treatment, group 2 had pine bark extract mixed with a saline solution given to them for 10 days and the third group had saline only for 10 days.
At the end of the 10 days the pine bark extract group were rated to have healed the fastest.
In another study, researchers showed pine bark extract inhibited the generation of COX-2 and 5-LOX, two naturally occurring enzymes associated with problematic inflammation.
When these two enzymes are released in a continuous state it may cause your body’s ability to control inflammation to become compromised.
In the study they asked healthy people aged 35-50 to take 150 mg of a trademarked form of pine bark extract for 5 days in a row right before breakfast.
Before the start of the study the researchers drew blood from the individuals to see how their cells would respond to inflammation. Then at the conclusion of taking pine bark extract they repeated the same process.
At the beginning of the study inflammatory stimuli caused a rapid response of COX-2 and LOX-5 enzymes. After taking pine bark extract for 5 days the reaction promoting a COX-2, LOX-5 response was almost non-existent, which showed how well pine bark extract helped to create a healthy inflammation response.
Dr. Raffaella Canali of the National Research Institute on Food and Nutrition in Rome, Italy, who helped run the study, said this “This study reveals that [pine bark extract] can actually decrease pain and [improve how the body responds to inflammation], as has been previously reported, by shutting down the production of specific enzymes involved with inflammation”.
Here’s What You Won’t Read About Pine Bark Extract
While it’s easy to see why pine bark extract is great at helping improve your body’s response to inflammation you won’t often hear people tell you it’s an incomplete supplement for inflammation support.
This is why even though I recommend it…
I think it’s best taken with two of nature’s top supplements for inflammation support. Ginger and turmeric.
Clinical trials show these two spices are adept at improving how our bodies respond to inflammation. Best of all, each of these ingredients work on different inflammation pathways so they form a comprehensive support system to help your body deal with inflammation.
Combined together in our Inflammation Syn3rgy supplement you’re getting a high-strength dose of pine bark extract along with therapeutic levels of ginger and turmeric.
My professional experience and my research on more than 100 studies convinced me this is one of the best blends of natural ingredients you could ever hope to have in the fight for better inflammatory response.
To try it out for yourself click here or on the image below.