Testing for Inflammation at Home

by Dr. Nick Zyrowski October 20, 2022

In many of our articles, we mention inflammation and how dangerous it can be to your health. Some healthcare professionals don’t talk about inflammation, and many patients may not understand what it is or why it’s important to know.

Inflammation has a lot to do with your immune function and how it responds to a perceived threat. Inflammation can be good or bad, depending on the situation. You need to know how this affects your body to live a healthier lifestyle.

Many things affect inflammation and how your body reacts on a cellular level. Let’s look at how cellular health testing kits work and how easy it can be to learn more about your inflammation levels at home.

What is inflammation?

When we mentioned that inflammation can be good or bad, what we mean is that if you’re hurt, inflammation is beneficial. When you have an injury, the area becomes swollen and red as a result of white blood cells flowing to fight off infection and help you recover from the injury. The same thing happens when you get sick. Your body launches an attack against the invader to help you get well.

It’s not a good thing when your immune system gets triggered in other situations. If you are exposed to chronic stress and toxins, or have autoimmune issues, your immune response may not be helpful. In these cases, rather than healing the issues and going back to normal, the inflammation continues. When you are chronically inflamed, it can lead to all sorts of health problems, like arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and depression. (1)

Symptoms of chronic inflammation

When you have chronic inflammation, your body may give you warning signs. Some of the symptoms of chronic inflammation are:

  • Fatigue
  • Fever not related to a virus
  • Chest tightness
  • Joint pain
  • Skin rash
  • Abdominal discomfort
  • Brain Fog
  • Depression
  • Diabetes
  • Weight loss resistance
  • Hormone imbalances
  • Autoimmune disorders

If you’ve had any of these symptoms for a while, you may have chronic inflammation. (2) Many people could have this underlying issue and not know it.

The silent killer

Inflammation is often referred to as “the silent killer” because many of us may be inflamed and not know it. We live in a society where staying busy and working crazy hours is a badge of honor. Many of us don’t take care of our health, and sooner or later, our bodies pay the price.

When we have chronic inflammation, we don’t feel the changes happening in our bodies over time. We may feel the results, like having heart issues and extreme joint pain. In autoimmune cases, the body attacks its tissues causing pain and swelling in our joints. (3)

Knowing your cellular inflammation

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to test your inflammation in the comfort of your home. You don’t have to go to a hospital and wait for hours to go through a lengthy process. It’s also much more accurate than a blood test.

With the Meta-Oxy test, you can get your cellular inflammation results within minutes. The test is easy to use and is done with a urine sample, so no needles are involved with this test. You’ll know your oxidative damage levels and can take steps to correct the inflammation issues. This is a preventative measure aimed to help you identify issues before you get sick. Functional medicine is about getting to the root cause of your health issues to get you well.

How it works

This simple test measures oxidative stress. That is the stress that occurs when the amount of free radical formation exceeds the capacity of our antioxidant defense system. That’s when those problems pop up, like heart disease, cancer, aging, and inflammation.

To complete the test, you take a urine sample and then pour some of that urine into the provided vial. The vial will have a reagent inside of it. The chemical reacts with the urine and shows results in color, from clear to dark red. You’ll take the vial and compare it to a sample range which will show your levels with numbers from 0-7. 0-2 is good, and 3-7 shows oxidative damage.

What to do once you know inflammation levels

If you take the Meta-Oxy test and it shows signs of oxidative damage, it doesn’t mean that you have a specific disease. It could mean that you need to make some changes to decrease the inflammation in your body.

Testing is good to do after making changes so that you can see if the changes are making improvements. You may want to retest after a few weeks or a month to see how it compares with the last time you tested.

Decreasing inflammation

There are steps you can take to decrease your inflammation levels. When you implement these changes, your health can improve in dramatic ways. It’ll help you maintain a healthy weight and reduce overall pain. Since inflammation is the root cause of so many health problems, reducing it even a little, will make a positive impact. (4)

Eat anti-inflammatory foods

If you think you have to get on a strict, boring diet to get your inflammation under control, you’d be wrong. Lots of delicious foods, like berries, fatty fish, and ginger, are great for driving down inflammation. You can also eat some dark chocolate, which is delicious. Make sure you get the 80% dark chocolate sweetened with stevia, not sugar. You can eat healthy fats like avocados and olives. The Heal Yourself Diet is designed to help decrease inflammation in your body.

Getting active

We talk about exercise a lot, and that’s because it’s a crucial part of health. So many people don’t take advantage of exercise, but it can be fun and challenging to get out there and enjoy something you like to do. Try something new and see what interests you. If you have trouble, start small. You can take steps to get more active each day, and the dividends will pay off over time. Research shows that even 20 minutes a day can have anti-inflammatory benefits for your body. (5)

Anti-Inflammatory supplements

Many people hear about the health benefits of certain foods or spices and think they’re getting the results by adding them to their meals. The problem is with some of these items, like Turmeric, you’d have to eat tons of it every day to get the benefits you want.

When you take the right supplements with the correct amounts of each herb or vitamin, you’ll get help decreasing your inflammation naturally. These are also much safer than taking many of the OTC products on the market for inflammation. HerbalFlam is a supplement containing the most effective anti-inflammatory ingredients to support your wellness.

Healing Your Cells

When you’re serious about getting rid of inflammation in your body, a 90 Day Detox Kit will help you increase your cellular and systemic function. You will get a true cellular detox, not the kind you see on TV claiming to be a magic potion that erases all your pain in one foot bath.

A 90 Day Detox Kit takes you through three phases to improve your body’s natural ability to heal and produce healthy energy. When you use the 90 Day Detox Kit, you’ll get a prep phase, body phase, and brain phase that combine to take you through each step of proper detoxing to support your cells and decrease cellular inflammation.

Reversing inflammation

When you take control of your health and clean up the things that cause inflammation, it’ll help you feel so much better. If you’re living in chronic pain, you should know it’s not something you’re doomed to live with forever. Many people think pain is a way of life, and we want you to know that isn’t the case.

Getting to the root causes of your inflammation is the only way to heal your body. When you start healing at the cellular level, you take care of the real issues that cause the problems. We have lots of resources on our website that you can review to help you no matter where you are on your health journey. We would love to talk to you if you have questions or if we can help you understand more about how you can get healthy and enjoy a fun, active lifestyle.

References :

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/what-is-inflammation-and-why-is-it-dangerous#:~:text=Science%20has%20proven%20that%20chronic,from%20Harvard%20Medical%20School%20experts.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/21660-inflammation

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5805548/

https://www.advancedcenterforpain.com/single-post/2017/10/18/exposing-americas-silent-killer-chronic-inflammation#:~:text=This%20is%20why%20chronic%20inflammation,our%20joint%20and%20muscle%20cells.

https://www.henryford.com/blog/2020/07/health-benefits-antiinflammatory-diet

https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/pages/2017-01-12-exercise-can-act-as-anti-inflammatory.aspx#:~:text=Recently%2C%20researchers%20at%20University%20of,pervasive%20conditions%2C%20such%20as%20obesity.

https://www.healthline.com/health/chronic-inflammation

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493173/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35258243/

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2018.00316/full

https://jneuroinflammation.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-2094-7-37

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/cells/special_issues/inflammatory_bowel

Dr. Nick Zyrowski
Dr. Nick Zyrowski