The Winter Olympics are in full swing, and inevitably, you’ll hear tales of athletes’ eating habits. Either they indulge in junk foods to relieve some of the stress of training or they adhere to strict diets to gain a competitive edge.

Those who compete in sports that put a lot of strain on their bodies know that food has many advantages in managing pain. While pills reduce suffering, they can be addictive and produce side effects. Worse, they often fail to eliminate the true cause of the discomfort. However, certain foods ease aches by blocking pain signals.

A common cause of pain is inflammation or the body’s immune response to toxins as it works to “purify” itself. Left unchecked, inflammation will run rampant through your body and trigger chronic diseases. While medications may cause fogginess, memory loss and sleepiness, a carefully managed diet is a natural form of pain management with no side effects. A good amount of research also shows that an anti-inflammatory diet can ease fibromyalgia and chronic pain symptoms.

The first step toward fighting pain with food is to clean up your act. The typical Western-style diet is heavy on meals that cause inflammation, including highly processed foods and refined carbs. No fruit, vegetable, or herb by itself can alleviate your pain if you don’t cut out junk food. A strict vegan or Mediterranean diet can control insulin and cholesterol levels and reduce inflammation.

Studies show that specific foods have more benefits than others, but these basic guidelines should get you started:

• Eat more fruits and veggies. Eight to nine servings a day of cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and cauliflower are best.
• Restrict dairy and grains. Eat dairy products in limited quantities. When choosing grains, stay away from simple carbohydrates with refined sugar. Opt for whole grains such as barley, buckwheat, oats, quinoa, brown rice, rye, spelt, and wheat.
• Control your calcium. As you age, you’re prone to conditions that weaken the vertebrae in your spine. Calcium contributes to bone mass, which helps you avoid those conditions. Natural food sources include yogurt, milk, and cheese as well as leafy green vegetables.
• Avoid red meat. Replace red meat with fish or vegetarian dishes. Chicken is neutral—not harmful but not beneficial in the anti-inflammatory sense.

For best results, a diet cannot work alone. As any athlete will tell you, the best way to capitalize on a nutrition plan is to take an integrative approach that includes exercise and stress management. And if you stay committed to an integrative lifestyle, you may not only reduce pain but eventually eliminate it.

There’s no other way to put it. We’re facing an opioid addiction crisis in the United States.

Opiates are narcotics that change the way the brain responds to pain stimuli and can also produce a “high” feeling by disrupting the reward and pleasure centers in the brain. Repeated use or abuse of an opioid drug can change the way an individual’s brain chemistry works and lead to physical and psychological dependence. The body may not feel normal anymore without the drug.

When taken as directed, opioids can manage severe pain effectively over a short amount of time. With long-term use, patients need screening and monitoring to prevent them from developing an addiction or physical dependence on the medications. Recent research shows that opioid abuse has a direct link to heroin.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports a staggering set of numbers:

• Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids were five times higher in 2016 than 1999, and sales of these prescription drugs have quadrupled during that same time.
• In 2014, almost 2 million Americans abused or depended on prescription opioids
• From 1999 to 2016, more than 200,000 people have died in the U.S. from overdoses related to prescription opioids.
• Every day, more than 1,000 people receive treatment in emergency departments for misusing prescription opioids.
• More than 46 people die every day from overdoses involving prescription opioids.

This epidemic is why physicians and pharmacists are increasingly raising the bar on who can receive opioid medications, how much, and for how long. The risk of addiction is not their only concern. Long-term use of opioids can also make pain worse by decreasing your ability to tolerate pain and increasing sensitivity to pain. In fact, people taking opioids over long periods may keep having pain—or may see their discomfort increase—long after the original cause has healed.

Withdrawal symptoms can be severe depending on the level of addiction. Signs appear within a few hours of the last dose, and the symptoms can last for a week or more. Some psychological symptoms and cravings may continue for much longer. Unassisted withdrawal may not be life-threatening, but it can lead to relapse. Medications and therapy through medical detox may make relapse less likely.

One solution to prevent the crisis is to improve the way medical professionals prescribe opioids. Proper guidelines can ensure patients have access to safer, more effective chronic pain treatment while reducing the number of people who abuse these drugs. In 2016, the amended CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain recommended lower doses and stricter monitoring efforts. And while previous guidelines focused on “high risk patients,” the new recommendations address the risk to all patients.

There is also a wide range of safer options for managing pain. A Fellowship Trained Interventional Pain Doctor would start with a thorough examination to tailor treatment to you. Most patients start with physical therapy and a prescription of non-narcotic pain killers to address stiffness and inflammation. From there, options include localized steroid injections or nerve blocks and a Radiofrequency Ablation, which uses heat and radio signals to destroy small nerves that supply the source of your pain.

The crisis won’t go away overnight. However, if everyone takes a moment to educate themselves about the problem, we can work together to solve it.