Inflammation: Angel or Devil? Transcript

Hi everybody! Welcome to today’s show from Namaste Nutritionist, where we explore nutrition, food, yoga, love, and a lot in between. This is Frances Arnold, and I can be found at namastenutritionist.com. So please visit me there, and subscribe to receive expert tips that will help you thrive, by creating an energetic, blissful, and rejuvenating life through your body, mind, and food. Today’s topic is super exciting, and critical. It has taken front and center stage when talking about health, wellness, and disease. This topic is inflammation, and it has a hand in both healing our bodies, and in creating chronic disease, hence the title: “Inflammation: the Devil and the Angel to Your Health”. Inflammation has both positive and negative roles in health, aging, and disease, like I mentioned, and certain afflictions such as bronchitis, asthma, allergies, arthritis, and autoimmune disorders, those all have an obvious inflammatory component. But, not always so obvious is the chronic low-level inflammation, also known as silent inflammation, and this type is linked with disease that range from heart disease to diabetes, metabolic disease, cancer, depression, Alzheimer’s, and osteoporosis. And, it also promotes the outward signs of aging, such as wrinkles, skin spots, sagging skin, all of the stuff that none of us really want, right? This is because elevated inflammation markers in the body are a risk factor for many of the most common diseases of aging. So, let’s ask the questions, what is inflammation, and why do we get it? Well, it’s actually an important physiological process that’s part of healthy immune response. So, inflammatory responses defend you and actually protect you, for example, acute inflammation helps the body heal from injuries, it annihilates bacterial and viral invaders, it responds to allergic reactions. Mark from marksdailyapple.com calls inflammation “The first responder to injury, pain, illness, and stress” and, while its presence may promote swelling, redness, pain, and warmth around the injury, it’s actually a sign that your vascular system is working hard to deliver necessary immune cell mediators, blood, and plasma that are actually helping halt the damage quickly for any injury that you’re having, and repairing whatever damage is there. So, even though it’s kind of uncomfortable and inconvenient, that warm, red, sensitive tissue around an injury site are actually really good sign. The role in this is to aid in healing your sick or injured parts, and it also serves you by reminding you that the pain, the swelling, and the heat are there as part of the healing process to take place so that you can remember to rest and repair and not use that injured area.

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So with all of this good stuff, you’re probably wondering how it is that we actually get into trouble with inflammation, and as you’ve heard many times, too much of a good thing is not a good thing. So for starters, acute inflammation is meant to heal us from sudden and unusual occurrences, not long-term occurrences. Its response time is super fast, for example, just watch what happens the next time that you cut yourself with a kitchen knife and bleed. Your finger bleeds, then clots, then turns red, then get sore and inflamed, it scabs over, and in a few days, the cut is just a fading memory. Chronic inflammation, however, has become a bedmate in our current lifestyle So this is kind of like an acute inflammation that just keeps going, and it means that we’re not shutting off the inflammation, the mechanism switch kind of breaks in a sense. You can think of it as a good relationship that’s gone bad, and we just live with it because we don’t realize there’s a better way or, a lot of people find themselves in the category of not being motivated to look for another way and create the habits that get you out of this bad relationship. If you find yourself in that category, I want your ears to perk up and hear some more stuff I’m going to tell you about inflammation. Modern diet and lifestyle are typically blamed for the bad relationship between us and our well-intended inflammation. An it’s for good reason because there are a lot of pro-inflammatory offenders in our modern lifestyle. So we’ll dig into this a bit more here, because of our lifestyle, environment, genetics, food, etcetera, our bodies tend to over-produce inflammatory chemicals, or you can think of it as the shut-off switch doesn’t work anymore. Our primary offenders are stress, lack of exercise, genetics, exposure to toxins, and some of these toxins look like second-hand smoke, excessive alcohol, unhealthy foods like trans-fats and too many sugars. So, all of that in mind, let’s talk a little it about the unhealthy foods because your diet plays a really big role, for example, a lot of the foods in our modern life are convenient and yummy, but don’t let that seduce you because even foods that claim they are quote, unquote “natural” such as corn syrup and highly processed fasts, they’re actually akin to pouring gasoline on the flames of inflammation. If you’re overweight, you actually play a double fine. Being overweight increases inflammation, and increases your risk factors for disease that I mentioned earlier, plus, it accelerates aging, and as if that isn’t enough, being overweight actually makes it harder to lose weight, keeping you heavy and at higher risk for a kaleidoscope of disease. I think that’s a bummer deal. So if you’re overweight, though, take heart. When people adjust their diet and lifestyle appropriately, losing weight does become easier. Why? Because you’re reducing the factors that contribute to inflammation, and when the inflammation goes away, or reduces, you’re ability to lost weight reduces, and then all that those extra whammies about being overweight, and at extra risk of chronic disease, and extra, extra inflammation, all of that goes away too, so it’s kind of dramatic, but I think that’s really good news. So inflammation may be the key to a lot of the woes that we have with our modern weight epidemics.

 

Now, while inflammation is naturally occurring and essential as a healthy immune function, there is a lot that you can do to mitigate and reduce your chronic inflammation assaults. So like I said, research suggests that dietary manipulation and other lifestyle changes can reduce your inflammation and other risk factors for disease. And let’s take a second to just kind of explore our premodern lives, such as the times when at least one adult was able to cook our meals at home from scratch, probably, maybe even produce our food on the homestead with a garden or maybe some chickens in the yard, and we consumed a lot of goods that quelled our bodily inflammation and helped keep it all in balance. And with a few exceptions, humans were way more active, way less stressed the environment was cleaner, and most, if not all of our foods, were fresher. Fast forward to today, and it’s not hard for any of us to see the gaps between the healthy days of yesteryear and today. So, I’m not trying to over-emphasize this point and reminisce dreamily about what the past used to be, although that is always tempting. I only bring this up to illustrate what our bodies actually prefer, which is regular and moderate exercise, fresh and unprocessed foods, clean air, and water, and the things that mitigate stress, like a satisfying social life, more time to relax, more time in nature, compare those things with today’s ultra-high demands, and that makes yesteryear seem like a wet dream. The good news is this: you can balance the healthier lifestyle that our bodies need and evolved with to preserve your health, while still enjoying the high energy thrills and possibilities that come with modern life. This just requires making some small adjustments, all the time constantly adjusting the foods that you eat everyday, and adding a little extra physical movement to you daily life, and just remember that scale changes, because today your small adjustments might mean, you know, getting a small Starbuck’s mocha instead of the large, and, in a few weeks maybe it means not adding the mocha, and just going for a plain latte, so you’re getting less sugar, and in a few weeks maybe it means going for a tea and, you know, having less coffee, or fewer lattes, that’s an example, so over time, we get better at making those adjustments that improve the inflammation, and you know, maybe today you’ll start parking your car a little bit farther away to go to the grocer store so you take some extra steps on your way in and  on your way back out, and maybe tomorrow you’ll start taking the stairs when you go around your building at work, and tomorrow, or you know, in a couple of weeks, you’ll be running, you know, a mile or whatever your adjustment looks like, so you know, you get to decide what those extra adjustments are, but continuing to progress what those adjustments are and improving everyday a little bit more, and a little bit more, and these can add up to make a very big difference in your life.

 

So let’s talk a little bit more about what you can do to reduce your chronic inflammation and keep it in check so that the body only uses it when necessary. According to Monica Reinagel, who’s the founder of the Inflammation Factor rating system, many food have a combination of inflammation producing and inflammation reducing factors. So for example, a cantaloupe contains a lot of antioxidants that quell inflammation, but it also contains a lot of natural sugars that can have a mild inflammatory affect, because of its glycemic load, which means how quickly it converts sugar to your bloodstream. So, eating the cantaloupe with some protein such as cottage cheese or plain, organic yogurt can actually reduce the rate at which the sugars from the cantaloupe enter your bloodstream, and in the proteins aren’t inflammatory or are maybe negligibly so, and make the combination a really great pair. A piece, here’s another example, a piece of lean beef contains inflammatory saturated fats, but is also contains a lot of anti-inflammatory monounsaturated fats, so perhaps we could say that lean beef would kind of cancel, the stats cancel each other out. So, there’s actually a lot to study and a lot to learn about inflammation, and sometimes in popular advice, talks about anti-inflammatory foods just being based on one or two nutrients, and I know I’ve been guilty about this in the past, because I’m also still learning about what anti-inflammatory foods look like, and the big buzz, as I know you know, are about omega-3 versus omega-6 fats, but it turns out that there’s a lot to it such as, what’s the antioxidant level, and what the nutrient component, what’s the glycemic index, meaning how quickly does it turn into sugar and make your blood sugar spike in your body, so there’s a bigger picture, and it really can get confusing, which is why I’m going to recommend to you that you check our Monica Reinagel’s website, and she’s got some references to recipes, books, and other useful anti-inflammatory tools, her website is inflammationfactor.com. And I’ll be sure to include the link in the show notes, and you can actually look up your particular foods there, there’s a place where you can, you know, look up avocado, she has a link to another site where you can type in your whole recipe and get your inflammation factor from there, and like I said, you’ll be amazed at how much goes into kind of calculating what the inflammation is. What it comes down to is that there are at least two dozen factors in a food’s inflammatory potential, fsi it break dos n like what are the amount of various fatty acids, what’s the proportions of the fatty acids, so mono-unsaturated versus poly-unsaturated, versus saturated fats or hydrogenated oils, so the type of various fatty acids matters a lot. The fatty acids that I really want you to focus on staying away from, if you do nothing else with your inflammatory information, do this one thing, stay away from hydrogenated oils, esterified oils, trans-fats, and marketers lie to you, they lie, lie, lie, food marketers are so deceptive! It’s wrong and immoral because they will tell you on the package that something has zero grams of trans-fats or they’ll say it’s trans-fat free, but as soon as you turn over the label, you look at the ingredients, and you’ll see hydrogenated oils, trans-fats, or esterified oil, and what does that mean? That they actually put trans-fats in there that are very harmful to your body because they, it’s like, an inflammatory food with a vengeance, they really want to hurt you, and they, food marketers gets to say that there was none in there, because if they put in less than a half, like a half a gram or less, then they get to round it down to zero, and call it zero grams of trans-fats. And, if you look at a serving size of say, you know, two of your favorite Grandma’s cookies or whatever you’re eating, and it says zero grams of trans-fats, well maybe the serving size is just two, and how may cookies are you actually eating, and really you shouldn’t be getting more than a half of a gram of trans-fats in your diet for the day anyways, that’s kind of the recommendation, so if you’re eating two servings, you’re getting one gram of trans-fats, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly that adds up if you’re not paying attention, especially because trans-fats also occur in, you know, like beef, just naturally. So I want you to stay away form those fats. Repeat after me: trans-fats, hydrogenated fats, esterified fats, why, because they’re very manipulated and your body does not process them well.

 

So, what else makes, you know, what are the other two dozen factors that effect a food’s inflammatory potential, like I mentioned the amount of antioxidants and other nutrients, and the food’s effect on blood sugar levels. So, a candy bar, or even just a piece of fruit on an empty stomach is going to raise your blood sugar much, much quicker than say, you know, a green salad, or a piece of fish. or some cheese. So, blood sugar is a big factor. Something that you may not realize is that if you have food allergies, food intolerances, or if you’re sensitive to certain foods, these will, there are sort of the individual markers that will make a huge impact on whether a food is medicine or poison to you. And so, this is very, very individual, it’s based on genetics, it’s based on your lifestyle, based on your environmental factors, and if you’re, if you have a food allergy, you probably know it, because food allergies tend to be very severe, and it’s hard to not know, you know, if you’re having and allergic response and you’re breaking out in hives, or you have to carry an Epipen because your throat closes up or whatever, and if you’re not sure, you need to go and see a doctor if you suspect that you may have a food allergy, because that’s really nothing to ignore.

 

Now, a lot of people how have food intolerances also are usually aware, such as if you have lactose intolerance, etcetera, but not everybody is, so do pay attention, if you get, you know, certain reactions are after eating foods, or if something tends to run in you family, like lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance, you know, pay attention you can go to a doctor again to get tested, because those foods are, if you eat them and you’re intolerant, you’re creating a ton of inflammation in your body, so again that would be like poison to you. Knowing if you’re sensitive to specific foods, that can be one of the hardest things to track down, and because we can be sensitive to a ton of foods for a lot of different reasons, and I did create a podcast about this, so I recommend that you check this podcast out where I did an interview with an expert on food sensitivities, it’s called “Food Sensitivities: What Are They”, and I’ll include a link in the show notes so you can learn a little more. Now, for example let’s take gluten intolerance. People who eat gluten who have an intolerance may not know that they have that intolerance until they remove gluten from their diet and notice a lot of symptoms are starting to go away. Well, if you are sensitive or have an intolerance and you end up eating gluten, you will land yourself with a very inflamed gut, which can eventually lead to the inflammation migrating to other organs such as the pancreas, so it creates this assault on innocent bystander organs, and this assault, when it’s left unaddressed, will promote other diseases, so if the assault is going to the pancreas, attacking it, guess what happens, it promotes diabetes, and you know, there’s becoming a clear connection between the two that’s actually rather fascinating. So, looking at these intolerances and sensitivities is very important if you think that you’ve got them, because it doesn’t just isolate itself to one organ. Now food sensitivities can show up in a lot of seemingly unrelated symptoms that may not seem like much at first, migraines, headaches, achey joints, aching muscles, fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, constipation, diarrhea, or like maybe if those two are switching back and forth, gas, bloating, infertility, the list is really a laundry list, and it just can go on and on, and all of these issues that I listed have an underlying inflammatory component, and they’re frequently caused by food sensitivities, and what blow my mind is how common they are that you know, we just address them with over the counter medicine, and gah, I remember, I’m remembering right now, one time my brother sent me a text message saying something like “How bad life would suck if we didn’t have Tylenol”, and it’s true, life would suck if we didn’t have Tylenol, because I get headaches, and I’ve been getting migraines since I was a kid, but you know, this isn’t actually a natural state for us, and we think that it is, we think that it’s just a part of being a live and getting alder, and it’s not, it’s really, really not, but what sucks is that we’re very terrible at being able to address and understand what a symptom looks like, what the body is telling us is wrong before it turns into a full-blown disease, and that’s going to be a topic in another awesome podcast that I’m going to do with a doctor coming up and he’s going to explain P4 medicine, which is a brilliant system where they’re really trying to get to know that symptoms are telling us before it because a full blown disease, because that’s not where we want to go.

 

So in the next podcast, I will walk you through some more tips for choosing anti-inflammatory foods and ingredients to avoid in order to put out your inflammatory fire. So, anti-inflammatory foods and inflammatory foods. I give you some heaps of yummy tips for you anti-inflammatory diet, and if you have comments, if you have questions, please put them in the comment box on my website, and you know, if you like this, please share it with others, I’ll really appreciate your support, and thank you for letting me help you preserve your health and your beauty. See you guys next time!

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