Chronic Inflammation: What it is and what to do about it
Let’s start at the beginning. What is inflammation? Inflammation is a your body’s normal immune response to an injury or insult on/in the body. Many things can trigger an inflammatory immune response such as pathogens, cellular damage, injury, toxic chemicals, stress…The list goes on. The purpose for the initial inflammatory response is to bring healing immune cells to the area for repair. This process is fairly simple for acute injuries such as a broken bone, a sprained ankle, acute illness, or a cut to the skin. However, if there is a continuous acute injury (happens over and over and over) or the acute inflammation is uncontrolled/does not resolve it will create more inflammation and lead to chronic disease. Most diseases we think of today are or have a component of chronic inflammation. Furthermore, most younger adults in this country have “hidden inflammation” from our stressful, hardworking, poor eating habits. Which puts us at risk for chronic diseases later in life.
The basic science. Here’s how the basic response pattern goes: 1) Pattern receptors on the cell surface recognize there has been a detrimental stimuli to the cell 2) Inflammatory response activated 3) Inflammatory markers released 4) inflammatory cells recruited to the area which release cytokines to modulate the response and regulate the inflammation.
In a perfect Goldilocks world the body creates this response, manages the insult and then repairs the system back to new. However, with chronically acute/uncontrolled acute infections the resolution either doesn’t happen or isn’t fast enough to keep up with the continuous injury causing more severe disease. This chronic inflammation further damages your cells and organs leading to chronic illnesses such as (not limited to) asthma, heart disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes type 2, obesity, joint pain, some cancers, arthritis, metabolic diseases, ulcerative colitis, IBD, Alzheimers….You get the idea.
Bottom line, chronic inflammation is not great. This is why inflammation has become a hot topic in the health community and people are always saying “you need to lower your inflammation”. Truth is, we all need to lower our systemic inflammation so that we can better respond to injurious insults when they happen. We need to be more resilient.
The good news: you have the tools to positively change your physiology, reduce your risk of disease, reverse some diseases, AND increase energy, get better sleep, have a clearer mind and overall feel more awesome. Here’s a short list of ways to lower inflammation: (As always, consult your doctor before adding anything to your regime)
Eat a whole food, plant heavy diet (Get my free guide to Eating for your Health HERE) This one is huge because when there is a dysregulation in the gut and the microbes are out of balance, there is an increase of the endotoxin (toxin made inside the body), LPS. The presence of LPS in the system creates an inflammatory response and increases your ACE2 receptors to stop the damage.
Regular exercise that incorporates strength building with cardiovascular bursts to increase your heart rate.
Regular and consistent sleep of 8ish hours a night.
Meditation, yes, it actually reduces real inflammation here’s a great report about gene expression and meditation or you can read the last blog post here
Supplements: You will need to check in with your doctor on these but here are some that can help. All of them do other important and helpful things in the body as well.
Turmeric
Fish oil
Ginger
Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA)
Resveratrol
Spirulina
Green tea
There are many more that can be tailored to you specific needs so connect with your doctor about your options.
Summery: Generally, inflammation is a normal physiological response to help repair injury. It becomes an issue when it is chronic or acutely chronic. You have the power to manage and lower your inflammation starting today with what you have at home. You got this.
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