Breathing Difficulties
No standard definition exists for breathing difficulty. However, breathing difficulties generally involve a sensation of uncomfortable breathing, or a feeling that you're not getting enough air. Diet can affect breathing difficulties in two ways.
Food Allergy Triggers
Firstly, some foods can cause breathing difficulty through an allergic reaction. Some of the most common food-allergy triggers are:
- Eggs
- Nuts
- Milk
- Sulfites
- Chocolate
Diet, however, can also affect your breathing by helping to control the difficulties.
Bronchodilators
Some foods will actually help to dilate your air passages, opening them up and helping you to breathe more easily. Coffee will do this, although caffeine has other, unwanted side effects. You might not, for example, want to give small children coffee if they were having difficulty breathing.
Thinning the Mucus
Food can also help with breathing difficulties by thinning the mucus so that it is removed from your airways. This will almost certainly ease breathing. For example onion, garlic and liquorice can eases congestion and coughing by helping to loosen and thin mucus in the airways; this makes a cough more "productive", bringing up phlegm and other mucus bits. These bronchodilators relax bronchial spasms; asthmatics may find they can breathe more comfortably after taking liquorice. The herb also soothes soreness in the throat and fights viruses that cause respiratory illnesses and an overproduction of mucus.
Anti-Inflammatory Properties
Some foods can affect breathing by controlling the inflammation of the airways that can cause breathing difficulties. This is because they contain components that have anti-inflammatory properties. Foods with anti-inflammatory properties include:
- onions
- vitamin-C rich foods
- fatty fish
In the case of fatty fish, the anti-inflammatory properties arise from high Omega-3 fatty acid content.
Studies have shown that diets high in dairy products and meat cause more breathing difficulties than diets containing vegetables and fish. So it may be that there are more allergenic compounds in dairy and meat. Certainly, vegetable oils are high in Omega-6 fatty acids. These are known to promote inflammation of the airways and may therefore cause breathing difficulties.
Oils high in Omega-6 fatty acids include:
- sunflower oil
- corn oil
- safflower oil
The Western Diet: Deficient in Omega-3 Fatty Acids
Generally speaking, today's human diet is very different from that of our ancestors. For early man, hunting, fishing and food gathering was essential for survival. As a result, humans supplied themselves with a diet low in total fat and saturated fat, but contained a good balance of Omega-6 and Omega-3 essential fatty acids.
For most of the time man has been on the earth, the dietary ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 fatty acids has been roughly 2:1.
In the last few centuries, however, the emphasis gradually moved away from hunting and gathering to cultivating the land.
The greatest dietary changes of all have occurred in the last 50 years.
During this time we have increasingly relied on:
- cereals
- processed foods
- vegetable oils
- vegetable spreads
This has been compounded by decreased consumption of:
This increased reliance on cereals and processed foods, especially vegetable oils and spreads, combined with a decreased consumption of oily fish and grass-fed meat, means that the ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 fatty acids in our diet today is 10:1 or more.
This is what is commonly known as the "Modern Western Diet" and is deficient in Omega-3 fatty acids.
Here, we deal with Omega-3 fatty acids' role in blocking our bodies' inflammatory pathways and their beneficial effect on breathing. Omega-3 fatty acids are needed by every cell in the body, however, and low levels of Omega-3s affect every part of the body, including the brain.
In fact low levels of Omega-3 fatty acids are associated with:
- heart diseases
- some cancers
- inflammatory conditions such as arthritis, psoriasis, eczema and Crohn's disease
- Depression, aggression, dementia and schizophrenia
- Dyslexia, dyspraxia and attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder (ADHD)
It's easy to see, then, that we need an Omega-3 fatty acid source. Omega-3 fatty acids are called 'essential' because we need them, but as our body doesn't produce them itself we need to get them from our diet. Omega-3 fatty acids are present in fish, however, studies have shown that you need to eat an awful lot of fish to see positive clinical effects when it comes to helping with breathing difficulties. Lyprinol is a natural, potent and safe source of Omega-3 fatty acids.
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