CHAPTER 7:
INFLAMMATION: NO ONE IS IMMUNE
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“The thought of resetting my system so it didn’t crave sugar or carbs was my original Whole30 motivation. I had no clue that God would use the Whole30 to bring total alleviation of my pain! I’ve been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, IBS, and other issues. At one point, I was on four or five different medications! But by my third week of the Whole30, all of my joint pain, bone pain, and muscle pain was gone. My mind was clear. I was focused. I also happened to lose fourteen pounds and kicked my cravings, but those were minor compared to having complete relief from all of the other issues.”
—Bethann M., Pleasant Lake, Indiana
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Our final Good Food standard, clearly linked to the third standard, states that your food choices should support immune function and minimize inflammation.
When we say “support immune function,” we mean that your food choices should result in a well-rested, highly-effective defense system. In other words, food should not cause excessive ongoing immune activity, also known as systemic inflammation. (More specifically, we’re concerned with chronic systemic inflammation—the stuff that goes on for weeks, months, or even years.)
You might have heard of systemic inflammation before, in a headline or a media sound bite, but you probably don’t have a very clear picture of what it actually is, or why it matters.
Let’s tackle the first part.
INFLAMMATION—HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE?
Inflammation, put simply, is the immune system doing its job—it is your body’s protective attempt to stop injury in its tracks and initiate recovery. Inflammation indicates a mobilization of your immune system; it’s a call to arms. Whether the damaged tissue is a result of infection from bacterial invaders, overuse, or physical trauma, the purpose of the inflammation that ensues is to prevent additional damage and repair the damage already done.
But what starts out as a healthy response can have adverse effects if it persists for too long or spreads too far. Since there are a few different subsets of inflammation (some healthy, some not so healthy), we’ll give you the rundown here:
Related to duration
Acute Chronic
Your body’s initial, short-term response to damage. Think of acute inflammation as the cleanup before the rebuilding. It decreases quickly as your body begins the healing process. Acute inflammation is a good thing, and you wouldn’t want to lose that function. Chronic inflammation stretches the inflammatory response out over months or even years, which impairs the rebuilding of normal tissues and creates all sorts of health problems.
Related to location
Localized Systemic
Mostly confined to a specific area of the body. “Full body,” characterized by a highly activated immune system circulating in your bloodstream and going everywhere.
So from here on out, when we say “inflammation,” we’re not talking about the kind of inflammation you get when you sprain your ankle (acute localized inflammation) or the kind you get when you have the flu (acute systemic inflammation). We’re talking about the most damaging kind of inflammation—the unhealthy kind—chronic (long-term) systemic (full-body) inflammation.
GOT IMMUNITY?
Before we discuss how chronic systemic inflammation can be devastating to your health, let’s go back to how the immune system controls inflammation, both good and bad. Your immune system is actually a highly interconnected complex of tissues and circulating cells that protect you from all the mean, ugly stuff out in the big, bad world: bacteria, parasites, fungi, viruses, and more. The world is chock-full of nasty little buggers that would love to use your insides as home sweet home, and your fork is the easiest vehicle for them to hitch a ride on.
In order for your immune system to properly protect you, it must be able to accurately differentiate between “you” and “not you.” (Immunologists call it “self” and “non-self.”) When your body senses something that is “non-self” where it doesn’t belong, it will perform an immediate evaluation, which may then trigger one of two immune responses: a nonspecific suspicion of something unfamiliar or a specific, aggressive response to a known troublemaker.
Let’s use another analogy.
If you woke up and found a strange man hanging out in your kitchen, you’d feel threatened and anxious. You’d be suspicious of his motives and would probably react in an anxious, defensive manner, asking him what the heck he’s doing in your home, and then taking appropriate action—inviting him to stay if you discovered he was a family friend, or asking him to leave if he didn’t belong there.
But if this man was in the process of vandalizing your kitchen, you’d immediately know he wasn’t a good guy, and would respond strongly to his presence by calling the police or chasing him out with a golf club. And if you happened to see him in your kitchen again the next day (persistent, isn’t he?), you’d immediately remember that he was a bad guy, and would launch an even more aggressive response to get him out of your house.
Your immune system operates in a similar fashion. Anything that doesn’t belong in your body is assumed to be a threat, so it’s trapped and assessed—questioned, if you will. If it’s determined that the substance may cause you harm, it’s immediately dealt with and “logged” as a troublemaker. Your immune system will then respond to future encounters with this same substance in a more specific, targeted fashion—with antibodies and a SWAT-team level of aggression.
So, identity matters. Being able to tell “you” from “not you” matters. Keeping things in their rightful places matters. This is where the third and fourth Good Food standards come back together.
Certain foods beat up, fool, or sneak past the “bouncers,” finding a way out of your digestive tract and into your body. They create immune chaos, forcing your system to protect you from the downstream effects of what should be a normal bodily function—digesting food. They confuse your immune cells, causing them to create antibodies to fight what would normally be perfectly healthy and good. As a result of the immune system dysfunction that ensues, you can develop food sensitivities or allergies, systemic inflammation, and possibly an autoimmune condition.
Bad things happen when you confuse or overwork your immune system.
And to drive the point home, we’ll show you exactly what that looks like.
FIGHT FIRES AND FIX FLAWS
Your immune system defends you against external invaders, but it also plays a critical role in recovery from injury and the repair and maintenance of various body structures. Your immune system has its priorities and tends to rank fighting off invaders above general repair and maintenance. (Getting the guy out of your kitchen is more important than doing the dishes.) But all of these jobs are important in the body—and if something doesn’t get done, there will eventually be consequences.
Let’s use another analogy.
Think of your immune system as a team of firefighters. Their top priority is to defend against potentially damaging threats—fires. But they also have to do routine maintenance and repair jobs, like fixing damaged tools, washing fire trucks, sleeping, and eating. Your firefighters work very hard when they’re fighting a fire, but they also have periods of time when they are relatively relaxed. There is a distinct difference between infrequent responses to fires (acute conditions, like a traumatic injury or short-term infection) and having to battle them 24-7 (chronic activation of your immune system, or systemic inflammation).
In the “healthy immune balance” example, your firefighters respond to a four-alarm fire. They fight the blaze, head back to the station, and have time to clean up and do some low-level repair and maintenance before they’re expected to go all out again. In this situation, your firefighters (immune system) ramp way up for the fire (acute inflammation from traumatic injury, infection, etc.), but once the fire is out, immune activity decreases, allowing for repair, recovery and maintenance tasks to be performed.
This is normal, and represents a healthy, balanced response. Your immune system needs an “on” switch to be able to ramp up to a threat, but it also needs an “off” switch in order to allow for recovery and have the time and resources to complete important repair and maintenance chores.
In the “chronic systemic inflammation” example, however, as the firefighters are winding down from the acutely stressful and demanding fire, they’re told that while they’re still expected to fulfill their normal firehouse repair and maintenance obligations, their job parameters have expanded to include sweeping the city streets, collecting the garbage, teaching the school kids, and filling in potholes.
Whew.
As if their original job description didn’t entail enough responsibility, now they’ve got a lot more work to do. If this were a one-time event, they could manage—they’d do the extra work and eventually catch up on their repair and maintenance functions. But if this situation continues for any length of time, it causes serious trouble long-term.
An overworked, out-of-balance immune system is very unhealthy.
If certain factors (like your food choices) are overloading your immune system with too many tasks, it’s going to be less effective at doing its main jobs, and something is going to be left undone, or done ineffectively.
Like fighting off that bug that’s going around.
Or healing that stubborn tendonitis.
Or keeping your arteries clear of plaque.
All very important jobs, we think you’d agree.
WHY IT MATTERS
The reason we are so adamant about reducing chronic systemic inflammation is that it has been clearly implicated as a causative factor for most lifestyle-related diseases.
Medical researchers have long known that a cluster of symptoms (labeled “metabolic syndrome”) were highly statistically correlated, often occurring together and increasing your risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. What they didn’t know for a long time, however, was exactly how they were related. They used to think that obesity caused diabetes, that high cholesterol caused heart attack, that high blood pressure caused stroke, and that maybe diabetes caused obesity too, but there was no unified theory to put all of these pieces together.
Today, while there are still multiple theories about how to explain these associations, some significant relationships have been established. More specifically, we’ve learned that systemic inflammation contributes directly to insulin resistance and diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, chronic inflammatory diseases (like IBS and asthma), bone and joint disease (like osteoporosis and arthritis), neurological conditions (like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s), and most certainly weight gain.
This makes chronic systemic inflammation a very big deal.
Managing your inflammatory status profoundly impacts your quality of life.
Having any one of these symptoms or conditions—or more than one, which is all too common when it comes to metabolic syndrome—will seriously affect your quality of life today, tomorrow, and for years to come … even if you exercise regularly, eat “pretty healthy” and aren’t overweight. Remember, it’s called silent inflammation. And it’s why 40-year-old men drop dead of a heart attack while running marathons.
But what if you’re young, healthy, active, and lean? Surely this stuff doesn’t apply to you!
Of course it does, but you’re probably too young to realize it. It’s OK—when you’re 20, conditions like heart disease and stroke don’t even register—they’re diseases “old people” get.
We were 20 once. We understand.
So let’s bring this one home for you younger folks.
Chronic systemic inflammation plays a key role in more than just age-related diseases. Inflammation contributes to a long list of conditions that you may be dealing with right now. Like asthma, allergies, acne, eczema and other skin conditions, depression, ADHD, and mood swings.
Do we have your attention now?
EXERCISE AND RECOVERY
Chronic systemic inflammation affects your physical fitness, whether you play a sport, are a “weekend warrior,” or are just a regular gym-goer. Think of exercise as microscopic structural injury—a stressor that forces your body to adapt, making you stronger and healthier. The exercise itself isn’t the most important part—you get fitter when you are recovering from that exercise. Giving your body enough time and resources to repair damage and build new tissue is critical to becoming stronger, faster and healthier. If you have chronic systemic inflammation, your body isn’t as good at recovery and maintenance—including repairing the structural damage caused by exercise. Which makes you more likely to get injured or overtrain, and definitely means you won’t be as strong or fast as you could be. Systemic inflammation ruins everything, doesn’t it?
BUT IT’S SILENT!
At this point, you’re probably wondering, “If this stuff is silent, how do I know if I have it?” That is a very good question—and we’ve got the answer.
First, if you are eating any of the foods we’re about to discuss in the next section, there’s a pretty good chance that you have some chronic systemic inflammation. These foods elicit inflammation both directly and indirectly, and their effects are largely universal.
If you’re overweight, you are also systemically inflamed. (You don’t have to be overweight to be inflamed, but pretty much everyone who is overweight has some inflammation.) Adipose tissue (body fat) is largely regarded by the scientific community as a separate endocrine organ, producing a number of different biologically active messengers. When fat cells are damaged by being overfilled, certain immune cells are summoned to fat tissue to help repair and clean up the damaged cells. These immune cells then secrete additional immune-reactive substances that increase inflammation in the fat itself as well as elsewhere in the body.
The more body fat you have, the more of these inflammatory compounds your fat cells can secrete. So if you’re overweight, we can be pretty sure you’re also somewhat inflamed. Guess what? Belly fat is especially active in this process, contributing to inflammation more than fat stores in other areas (like your buttocks or thighs).
More specifically, however, we believe that silent inflammation isn’t so silent when you know what you’re listening for. This is a comprehensive (but not exhaustive) list of conditions and diseases linked to systemic inflammation or having an inflammatory component. If you experience any of these conditions or symptoms, there’s a pretty good chance you have some of that “silent” inflammation.
Related to Silent Inflammation
That’s a pretty long list, right?
It’s what we’ve been saying: managing the inflammatory status of your body affects your quality of life.
WHAT ABOUT GENETICS?
This entire book is devoted to the idea that food plays the most important role in your pursuit of optimal health, but it’s not the only factor. Lifestyle choices, exercise habits, your environment, and, of course, your genes also affect your health and predisposition for a variety of lifestyle-related diseases and conditions. But genes may play a different role than you think.
You hear folks saying, “Diabetes/high cholesterol/heart disease runs in my family!” as if to suggest that their destiny is predetermined. Most people believe that what is encoded in their DNA is unchangeable. The good news is that that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Your genetic makeup certainly plays a role in everything from height to eye color to health. But even more important than the genes in your DNA sequence is which of those genes get turned on. A gene that isn’t turned on doesn’t actually do anything. It’s the intersection of your environmental inputs and your genetics that is truly relevant to your health.
Epigenetics is the intersection of your genes and your environment.
Epigenetics is the study of gene expression—whether genes turn on or turn off, and how loudly their information is expressed. While we are all born with a certain code, we are also born with switches that tell that code what to do. Our environmental input (diet, exercise, air quality, etc.) activates those switches. Think about it this way:
Genetics loads the gun, but environment pulls the trigger.
Epigenetics is also influenced by physical and emotional stress. In fact, gene expression is impacted by how you respond to everything that happens in your environment, from air pollution to a move across the country to childhood trauma.
In short, you generally don’t develop diabetes, high blood pressure, or heart disease simply because of a defective gene or a familial predisposition. It takes the intersection of your genes and your environment to turn on those sequences of events.
This is good news.
It means we are not doomed by our genetics.
In the case of diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease (among others), it means that those conditions are largely preventable.
Our gun may be loaded, but if we don’t pull the trigger with a poor diet, lack of exercise, inadequate sleep, excessive stress, and other unhealthy lifestyle factors, the chance of us developing one of those diseases is dramatically reduced.
So keep reading, because this book is devoted to keeping the safety on one of the biggest potential triggers in your environment—the food you put on your plate.
THE GOOD NEWS
The good news is that, much like with your hormones and leaky gut, even after decades of poor eating habits and years of systemic inflammation, most of the health consequences are highly reversible. You can reduce systemic inflammation, heal from most inflammatory conditions and catch up on those repair and recovery functions your body has fallen behind on.
However, some things may not always be totally reversible.
Eventually, if systemic inflammation is left unchecked, the immune system becomes so overworked and paranoid that it creates illnesses that may, unfortunately, be irreversible. But we’ve found that by doing just one thing, you can drastically reduce or eliminate the symptoms of most of these inflammation-related diseases and conditions—and therefore significantly improve the quality of your life.
You know what we’re going to tell you to do.
Change the food you put on your plate.
THE SCIENCE-Y SUMMARY
The food you eat should promote a balanced immune system, and minimize chronic systemic inflammation.
Chronic systemic inflammation is full-body (systemic), long-term (chronic) up-regulation of your immune system activity.
Your immune system has two major functions—defense against threats and low-level repair and maintenance.
Certain foods sneak past your gut’s defense system, and create immune chaos.
If certain factors, like your food choices, are overloading your immune system, it’s going to be less effective at doing its main jobs, and something is going to be left undone or done poorly.
Chronic systemic inflammation is a central risk factor for a number of lifestyle-related diseases and conditions and is at the heart of metabolic syndrome.
Silent inflammation isn’t so silent if you know what to listen for.
Managing the inflammatory status of your body profoundly impacts your quality of life.