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Everyone has heard of inflammation. But not everyone may know that it is highly likely to be contributing to their obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, depression, skin condition, arthritis, their fathers dementia, autoimmune condition, brain fog.. The list goes on and on. In fact inflammation has been speculated to be the cause of all disease (1)…
A few things you will learn in this post will be what inflammation is, why we need it sometimes, why it can cause huge issues sometimes and what is causing it. Next weeks post will focus on how to create a lifestyle without chronic inflammation so you can focus on enjoying life without worrying about your health.
When We Need It
Inflammation is how the body repairs after damage. Most of the time we associate this process after we have an injury such as spraining an ankle or a cut, or in response to an infection. Tissue damage or identification of a foreign object in our body releases signals which stimulates an inflammatory response whereby blood flow increases to the area, immune cells are transported there to fight against any infection and clear up the damaged area before a repair process is initiated.
This is acute inflammation and demonstrates the bodies healing ability in response to damage ie a good thing! While having a swollen and painful ankle may be annoying, it is also how the body is repairing that area – so the classic old school advice of sticking an ice pack on and popping a load of anti-inflammatories straight away probably isn’t the best if you want that damaged tissue to repair properly and return back to normal for long term proper function. Your body is extremely intelligent and is doing this on purpose so let it do its job even if it may cause you some temporary discomfort – you will survive and be in better condition for it.
When It Becomes a Problem
The acute inflammatory response will cease and the repair phase begins when the damaging cause is removed e.g. taking the stone out your shoe. However the main reason inflammation can cause disease/chronic conditions is that people do things or there are things in someones environment which are consistently damaging their body and causes a constant inflammatory response to occur ie chronic inflammation. Until you remove the stone from your shoe, no amount of pain killers and creams will help. This means that the repair stage is never fully initiated which causes two problems:
1. Scar tissue is laid down instead of regenerating cells.
The problem with this is that our tissue cells are specifically designed to function a certain way to contribute to the function of the organ they are located in. However scar tissue is a different type of tissue that lacks these specialised functions so when it replaces specialised cells within organs or tissue, they cannot perform their job as effectively. For example scar tissue is often found in muscle tissue and cannot contract properly due to excessive exercise/use without proper rest. Scar tissue can be found in the gut lining due to eating things which repetitively damage it and is a common finding in inflammatory bowel disease so nutrients cannot be absorbed well. Scar tissue is often seen in the lungs on chest x rays due to repetitive infections.
2. Being chronically inflamed activates a consistent fight/fight response.
The body responds to any type of stress the same way whether it is a physical, mental or chemical type of stress. If we eat food that is bad for us, or are stressed out, our body responds the same way as it would to a physical danger like a tiger being in the room: fight or flight. Our body is intelligent so if it thinks there is a tiger in the room, it will prepare an inflammatory process for a potential injury which is why mental stress and emotion can cause increased inflammation (2). However being inflamed all the time is also unsurprisingly another big stress for our body so this fight and flight response is consistently activated while we are in that state.
This consistent ‘fight and flight’ state is perhaps the biggest problem with chronic inflammation due to the release of hormones cortisol and adrenaline and the systemic effects that come with it. Some of these changes include:
Increased blood pressure as we need more oxygen delivered to muscles to run or fight which causes blood flow to be more turbulant and likely to damage artery walls which can lead to the formation of atherosclerosis and heart disease.
Increased blood glucose as we need more energy to run or fight so sugar is dumped from stores in our liver into the blood. High levels of blood sugar are toxic and can damage things like the brain, thyroid and blood vessels. One of the key things contributing to dementia and alzeihmers is inflammatory damage in the brain (3).
Decreased sensitivity to insulin as the body wants to keep sugar in the blood to be used for energy, which over time can lead to insulin resistance and diabetes type 2.
Decreased immune system function. A lowered immune system reduces our ability to fight against infections.
Decreased digestion as you do not need to digest food when you are fighting or running from danger so digestion becomes less efficient and key nutrients are not absorbed as they should be. Another huge stress for the body and the cells which need those nutrients to function normally.
High cholesterol as cortisol and adrenaline are steroid hormones produced by cholesterol. If the body is continually under stress it needs to continually produce more cortisol and adrenaline to make those intelligent responses happen.
When we see all these effects and why they happen it is easy to see how inflammation can contribute to the epidemics of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and dementia. It is these processes which happen continually over time which are causing the vast majority deaths from lifestyle caused disease today.
The key take home here is that chronic inflammation is a lifestyle caused condition. It’s caused by which foods you eat, how much exercise you do and how you think on a daily basis. There is no silver bullet. Make eating well, exercising and thinking well a lifestyle choice. Check out the next post to learn how to make this lifestyle in more detail.
(2) Liu YZ, Wang YX, Jiang CL. Inflammation: The Common Pathway of Stress-Related Diseases. Front Hum Neurosci. 2017;11:316. Published 2017 Jun 20. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2017.00316.
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