Acute inflammation, the body’s response to injury and internal imbalance, is meant to protect you. When you experience an injury or illness, your immune system creates a specific response designed to assist the healing process and help your body fight infection. The resulting inflammation can seem painful and annoying, but it is necessary for healing. Long-term or chronic inflammation, however, is triggered by a different set of circumstances—and it can have severely negative effects on your body.

Prolonged stress, poor dietary choices, smoking, exposure to pollution, and poor dental health are some of the factors that can cause an imbalance in the body’s systems and eventually trigger chronic inflammation. Autoimmune disease is another known trigger of the continuous immune response that is behind what is known as chronic inflammation. So what can be done to calm the immune response and restore balance?