By Dr. Linda J. Dobberstein, DC, Board Certified in Clinical Nutrition
Your body has an amazing ability to heal itself. A nutritionally healthy body can recover quickly from scrapes, bruises, aches and pains caused by a day of overdoing it or unexpected mishaps. Healing is an energy intensive process. If your recovery feels sluggish—whether from scrapes, surgery, or other injuries—you may need extra support to meet the demands. Adding important nutrients can enhance your body’s natural healing ability.
Time to Heal
A scrape, cut, surgical incision, injury, etc. go through 3 stages of healing after the initial event– the inflammatory phase (0-6 days), proliferative phase (3-14 days), and remodeling phase (two weeks to two years). Each stage of healing has different functions involving numerous structural compounds and needs.
More Than Surface Healing
Healing is a complex process with the surface healing of the skin and tissues below. Layers of skin cells, blood vessels, nerves, immune cells, muscles, collagen, and other connective tissues are impacted, depending on the type of healing needed. From the immediate response to the final stages of remodeling scar tissues weeks or months later, your body faces complex tasks that can be complicated by other factors.
Factors that Affect Healing Times
Several factors affect your natural healing ability. These include thinning of your skin making it more apt to tear or changes in skin sensation from neuropathy. High blood sugar levels, poor circulation from varicose veins or cardiovascular concerns, fluid retention, or lymph congestion also affect your ability to heal.
Diet and nutritional habits deeply affect your healing capacity. The Western Diet with high calorie, nutrient poor foods leaves individuals malnourished, compromising healing ability. Restrictive diets, inadequate or excessive food intake, poor food choices, or even a loss of taste or sense of smell affects your nutritional intake, compromising your health and healing capacity. Chronic alcohol intake, medications that rob your body of nutrients, and other issues can further diminish healing responses.
Nutrients Required for Repair
Your healing response needs the fundamentals in place with quality proteins, complex carbohydrates, and healthy fats. A wide range of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants are required to fuel and enhance your recovery time.
Proteins and Collagen
Protein intake must be increased to optimize skin and tissue healing and recovery. Protein requirements may increase by as much as 250% depending on the size of the wound and other factors. If your diet doesn’t provide enough protein, muscle tissues will break down to supply this need causing weakness and fatigue.
Healing and recovery pose an increased need for the amino acids arginine, glutamine, proline, lysine, and branch chain amino acids. These are found in collagen peptide rich foods like bone broth, animal meats, and supplements like Collagen Peptides, Daily Protein/Daily Protein Plus, and Performa Plus.
The supplemental addition of hyaluronic acid with collagen and protein creates a powerful synergistic healing response for your skin, muscles, and other connective tissues.
Omega-3 Oils
The balance of omega-3 oils versus omega-6 oils in your body either enhances healing or worsens inflammation. The Western Diet contains excessive pro-inflammatory omega-6 vegetable oils that can delay healing. Strive for a 1:1 ratio of omega-6: omega-3 oils to manage prostaglandin inflammatory compounds during all healing phases.
Plant sources such as walnuts, chia seeds, or flaxseeds contain omega-3 ALA which must be converted into EPA/DHA. This process requires nutrients that are commonly lacking in the Western Diet. Furthermore, many individuals also have difficulty converting plant-based omega-3 oils due to gene mutations.
Omega-3 ALA amounts in olive oil are quite low and do not replace omega-3 EPA/DHA. Coconut and palm oil do not provide these types of oils. The best sources of omega-3 fish oil EPA/DHA are found in salmon, tuna, herring, mackerel, or supplemental sources like Daily DHA, Leptinal, or DHA Kids.
Carbohydrates
Blood sugar excess and imbalances make it more difficult to heal from increased inflammatory reactions, advanced glycation end products (AGEs) with stiffening of proteins, and microbial stress to the immune system. Keep your blood sugar in a healthy range to enhance your healing potential.
Complex carbohydrates with beans, legumes, and whole grains like oats, quinoa, and spelt, with a rainbow of fruits and vegetables provide fiber and antioxidants to support and stabilize blood sugar levels.
Avoid refined, ultra-processed foods as much as possible as they are pro-inflammatory foods and destroy your health.
Vitamins and Minerals
An optimized healing response also requires vitamins and minerals. Vitamins A, C, D, E, and K are especially important for skin health, collagen, and immune system function that work in harmony to heal tissues.
The trace minerals iron, selenium, zinc, copper, and MSM sulfur provide many diverse benefits for healing skin and surrounding tissues. These nutrients are required to help rebuild tissues, support cellular hydration, elasticity, tensile strength, comfort, appropriate immune activity, and more.
Additional Antioxidants and Resolving Compounds
Healing a sore, scrape, or other injury increases your body’s demands for antioxidants too. Injured tissues release significant amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and other free radicals. An influx of antioxidants is necessary to counteract the infiltration of white blood cells, cytokines, and clean up the damage throughout all phases of healing. Underlying health challenges can rapidly increase your nutritional requirements far beyond what even a healthy whole foods diet can provide.
A wide variety of nutrients are needed for the healing response. These nutritional repair demands are in addition to the needs for your daily life functions.
Antioxidants such as glutathione, NAC, B vitamins, r-alpha lipoic acid, coenzyme Q10, turmeric, and vitamins, A, C, E, D, and K work synergistically to provide needs to skin cells, capillaries and circulatory system, connective tissues, mitochondria, and other tissues.
Resolving compounds like PEA are highly specialized compounds that deeply influence healing mechanisms throughout your body.
Optimized Nutrition Enhances Your Healing Response
We often take the healing of a cut or injury for granted until it doesn’t heal as fast as it should. Delayed healing is your body telling you it needs more help. You can also prepare your body in anticipation of events like a sports event or season, a joint replacement, or dental implant, etc.
A nutritionally optimized body pays off in the long run. Over the years, numerous individuals have shared story after story that their health care practitioners are amazed at how well they have healed after an incident when they optimize their nutrition. Nutritional fortification is indeed a must for healing and positive outcomes.
Are you a fast healer or one that needs some extra help? Let us help you nutritionally empower your body’s healing reserves with our great resources!
