Can Sugar Impact Recovery?
Nutrition is a major component to a successful rehabilitation program. Providing your body with the right fuel will improve healing time, decrease pain, and reduce risk of re-injury.
So if good nutrition can aid in your rehabilitation program, can poor nutrition derail it? The overarching theme to that question is: yes, poor nutrition can impact recovery, delaying your healing process or even causing additional problems.
But let’s dive deeper and look specifically at sugar. Unfortunately, more than ever, sugar is more prevalent in our food choices. From preservatives to that sweeter taste most of us love, sugar is practically everywhere. While going on a non-sugar diet is possible and definitely healthier, what if we don’t want to give up on the sweet stuff?
Dietary sugar is a key factor in inducing low-grade chronic inflammation, autoimmune diseases, and even neuro-inflammation. Excessive intake can cause a host of metabolic disorders and increase the inflammatory mediators and pro-inflammatory cytokines throughout the body (essentially the bad guys of our endocrine system). This increase can lead to low-grade chronic inflammation which translates into pain.
[For those interested these inflammatory mediators include: Toll-like receptor 4(TLR-4), plasma C-reactive protein (CRP), interleukin-6 (IL-6), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and monocyte chemotactic protein 1 (McP-1), E-selectin (E-selectin), plasminogen activator inhibitor 1 (PAI-1) as well as others.]
So if you’re training for a big event, working on a PR, or just trying to increase overall activity levels, evidence suggests that limiting sugar intake will decrease overproduction of pro-inflammatory markers and therefore decreasing pain.
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