You probably don’t realize how much a healthy diet positively affects your body. And in many cases, you don’t find out unless you eat an unhealthy diet for decades and experience some of the consequences.

When you think about eating healthy, you probably think about your heart, weight, stomach, or butt.

But when you eat healthy, you do your feet a big favor too.

Take a minute to learn the difference eating healthy makes for your feet:

1. Reduce Bodily Inflammation

“Inflammation” refers to your body’s defense against the growth of abnormal cells, ability to heal injured tissue, and to fight off viral and bacterial infections.

However, eating in an unhealthy way can cause inflammation to persist when your body doesn’t really need it. And this can lead to the destruction of healthy tissue or the presence of disease.

For example, this can eventually result in intense pain in your heel that’s caused by plantar fasciitis.

And it can lead to other extremely painful conditions like psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and gout.

Refined grains, sugar, trans fats, and saturated fats are believed to be the main culprits behind the creation of an unnecessary inflammatory response.

To avoid this problem, instead eat the mega-3 fats that you find in fish. Salmon is an amazing superfoot to have in your diet. Green vegetables and other fresh foods from plants are also exceptionally beneficial as well.

2. Osteoporosis

You don’t think of osteoporosis as affecting your feet, but it can absolutely cause bone loss in every bone of your body.

Interestingly, stress fractures in feet are one of the first signs of the condition in many cases.

To keep osteoporosis at bay, simply add plenty of calcium and vitamin D to your diet.

Calcium can be found in abundance in dairy products. However, full-fat dietary products also contain plenty of saturated fats, which can lead to the inflammation problems you just learned about.

So, the simple solution lies in eating reduced-fat dairy products, and then simply limiting how much dairy food you consume.

Vitamin D can be found in fish. You can also get it from being in the sun for about 15 – 20 minutes per day.

And if you can’t make these dietary adjustments, add a multivitamin to your diet.

3. Peripheral Artery Disease/Diabetes

These two conditions are easily kept at bay with a healthy diet. And they’re not just painful to your feet as they bring along a whole list of problems for the rest of your body too.

To avoid both, eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. Avoid sugar, sodium, saturated fat, and trans fats.

Our society makes it easy to eat unhealthy. But it’s not impossible to eat a healthy diet. The whole/natural/organic food movement has been growing noticeably for some years now.

And you have plenty of options available for eating healthy.

The key may lie in eating a healthy diet that you enjoy. Remember, this does not need to be an exercise in torturing yourself and depriving yourself of any joy whatsoever when eating.

Instead, take time to design healthy snacks and meals you enjoy eating so you look forward to that time.

And maybe once per month or so, you can allow yourself to eat an unhealthy meal. Just don’t make it your main form of eating!

Don’t just protect your feet. Protect your body, mind, and emotions by eating healthy. While challenging, you’ll thank yourself for it!