The Best Reason Not To Skip Taking Ginger
Ginger, like turmeric, is one of the few foods/spices that alternative health practitioners would classify as a “superfood.”
There’s very little doubt ginger is as close to a drug as anything in the natural world.
This is why people like Dr. Axe and Dr. Mercola talk about it over and over again on their social media channels.
And it’s why medical researchers are always running studies on it.
For the purposes of this article I want to talk about ginger and inflammation.
I want to show you why if you want to maintain the best health possible you’d be smart to include a daily dose of ginger in your life.
And, I’ll give you ample research to support any claim I make about ginger and its role in helping support a healthy immune response.
Before I do any of that, I want to make it abundantly clear, ginger is a food. And so while I definitely have a supplement in mind for ginger intake, if you can build a diet around ginger then I’d prefer you do that as opposed to relying on a supplement to get the most out of ginger.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, is better than dietary intake of superfoods like ginger for positively modulating health.
Which is why even though I create supplements to help cushion dietary deficits, supplements are no substitute for a diet built on healthy foods.
Studies Support Ginger Use For A Healthy Inflammatory Response
If you’ve been paying attention to alternative health publications there’s a possibility you believe inflammation is bad.
Whenever I write about inflammation I think it’s important to mention that inflammation in and of itself isn’t a bad thing.
Inflammation is a completely natural process wherein your body mobilizes the immune system to heal itself from injury or pathogenic attack.
When inflammation begins an issue is when elevated levels of inflammatory cytokines persist.
There are a myriad of reasons for inflammation to remain longer than what is considered normal. And, there are a number of practices you can practice to help maintain a normal state of inflammation and maintain a normal state of health.
Intake of ginger is one of these practices.
Ginger delivers two compounds shown to positively affect inflammation. They are gingerol and shogoal.
These compounds help moderate inflammation in the body.
Here’s an example of how this works, supported by research demonstrating the power of ginger.
Certain forms of exercise cause inflammation to develop in the body. While this inflammation isn’t unhealthy, if it persists it may lead to pain and discomfort. To see if ginger is able to reduce the temporary inflammation, researchers published the results of ginger therapy on the inflammation that developed after exercise.
Their findings, published in Journal Pain, indicated powerful pain relief from ginger. The pain relief the subjects experienced wasn’t like that derived from analgesics or NSAIDs, instead, the pain lessened over time as ginger helped calm inflammatory pathways.
In their conclusions they wrote “This study demonstrates that daily consumption of raw and heat-treated ginger resulted in moderate-to-large reductions in muscle pain following exercise-induced muscle injury.”
There have been other studies supporting that same conclusion, and a few of those studies teamed ginger up with turmeric and recommended the combination as one of the best forms of natural pain relief around.
And yet, that’s not the only way ginger helps regulate inflammation response.
In another study, researchers analyzed how ginger affected inflammation levels in people who had inflammation around their joints.
These kinds of issues flare up and lead to tremendous pain.
In this 6-week study, researchers asked 247 people who reported episodes of intense joint pain to try ginger and see how it affected their pain levels.
In this study, (which was a rigorous, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicenter, parallel-group) some participants received ginger for pain relief and others got a placebo. All were allowed to take acetaminophen in the event neither worked.
At the end of the study the ginger was shown to outperform the placebo by a large margin. Over the course of the study they reported less pain overall and had to turn to their pain killers far less frequently.
But how does gingerol actually work?
Here’s How Ginger Helps Improve Inflammatory Response
I’m happy studies show ginger is helpful for inflammation.
The question (and the answer) is how does ginger help with inflammation.
Well, as Life Sciences magazine observed, part of the way ginger does this is by helping to protect cells from inflammation causing free radicals. 6-gingerol (which is the most powerful form of gingerol found in ginger) helped to impede nitric oxide from a highly reactive nitrogen forming into a free radical called peroxynitrite.
You need nitric oxide, as it’s important for circulatory health, but if it’s allowed to make peroxynitrite then it can lead to unregulated inflammatory response.
And in Radiation Research, researchers saw that when mice were treated with ginger for five days, at 10 mg per kilogram of body weight, the ginger seemed to help keep cells protected from free radical damage before they were exposed to harmful radiation.
In addition to that, ginger helped to preserve one of the most important antioxidants in the body, glutathione. Which allowed for more cellular protection after radiation exposure.
There’s also what the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine discovered.
In a study cited in the journal dating back to 2005 suggested, “ginger was shown to suppress the pro-inflammatory compounds (cytokines and chemokines) produced by synoviocytes (cells comprising the synovial lining of the joints), chrondrocytes (cells comprising joint cartilage) and leukocytes (immune cells).”
What I’ve written here is just a small sample of what this root will do for you.
Here’s How to Get More Ginger In Your Life
This is an easy recommendation to make.
The #1 way to increase ginger intake is to build a diet high in ginger.
Makes sense, right?
It’s readily available, affordable, and can be prepared in thousands of different dishes.
While I recommend ginger in your diet, if you’re looking for some really targeted inflammation support I recommend our new Inflammation Syn3rgy product.
It contains a potent ginger extract and also is supported with 2 other ingredients which help boost your body’s ability to deal with inflammation.
So if you’re struggling to get ginger in your diet daily, or you want to take a supplement with a blend of herbs known for powerful inflammation support then I recommend Inflammation Syn3rgy.
All three of the ingredients in Inflammation Syn3rgy support your body’s inflammatory responses in three different ways. Each ingredient supports the other for a holistic path for inflammation support.
The ingredients are turmeric, pine bark extract, and ginger. Learn more about Inflammation Syn3rgy and get your own by clicking here.