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There are many other sources for phytonutrients than chocolate and cocoa. You can get many anti-inflammatory phytonutrients by eating plant foods that have a high phytonutrient index (remember, this is the measure of the overall amount of healing plant chemicals in plant foods). If you don’t eat enough plant food, you will never get enough of these healing nutrients. Eating whole, unprocessed real foods that have a low GL and high PI is another important way to reduce inflammation in your body. If you don’t eat high-quality food, you are going to become inflamed and fat.

For instance, studies have shown that the same amount of calories from fast-food meals creates more inflammation and oxidative stress than those from meals containing fruits and vegetables, which contain those important phytonutrients. So once again, it is not just the calories you eat but where they come from that is important in losing or maintaining weight, creating a healthy metabolism, and reducing inflammation.A diet high in phytonutrients is critical if you want to lose weight.The UltraMetabolism Prescription is just such a diet.

Exercise is something our ancestors never did. When I traveled to rural China in 1984, no one was jogging. They were too tired from carrying buckets of water and sewage, from working in the fields all day and sawing boards from logs by hand. Sitting next to Paul Ridker, M.D., the pioneer from Harvard who has proven the link between inflammation and heart disease, at a conference on nutrition, genetics, and inflammation, I asked him why we were all inflamed in the twentieth century. He replied that we are all doing a lot less in terms of moving around and using our bodies (currently known as exercise) than our ancestors were adapted to doing. In fact, reducing inflammation is probably the main way that exercise helps to prevent heart disease. Before you panic, just remember that any moving around counts.



You are now an expert in stress from reading the previous chapter. You know where it comes from and how to manage it. What you may not realize is how much stress can increase inflammation, nor how much relaxing and reducing stress can reduce inflammation. Study after study has shown that even in diseases such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis, not to mention obesity, stress reduction has real, powerful anti-inflammatory benefits.

* Substances found in many plants that give some flowers, fruits and vegetables their color. Polyphenols have powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity. They are abundant in berries, green tea and cocoa.

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Hyman, M.D. From the book ULTRAMETABOLISM by Mark Hyman. Published by Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., N.Y. Reproduced by permission.