Inflammation

Inflammation is the body's response to injury which can be due to trauma, pathogens (bacteria, viruses, fungi), irritants like chemicals. With inflammation blood flow is increased, blood vessels might leak fluid and white blood cells can accumulate. Signs of this response are redness from increased blood flow; swelling from fluid leakage; pus if enough white blood cells are recruited.

Without the inflammatory response we would not survive long, but excess or inappropriate inflammation causes many serious chronic diseases. Atherosclerosis and acute heart attacks result from an inflammatory response to cholesterol in an artery lining. Many cancers are triggered by cell damage from the inflammatory response. An example is the response to the chemicals in cigarette smoke. Auto immune diseases like rheumatoid, lupus, Crohn's, multiple sclerosis are inflammatory attacks against the body's own cells. With these diseases a specific trigger for the damaging inflammation is rarely apparent.

Inflammation is looked for with common medical tests: temperature, white blood cell count, sedimentation (sed) rate, CRP (C reactive protein.) Most visits to your physician will include one or all of these tests as your doctor determines if you are sick or likely to become sick. Abnormality in any of these tests is a sign of a problem, one that may not have surfaced with any symptoms so far. For example, people with occult atherosclerosis often have a high CRP.

The most common cause of inflammation is not pathogens or chemicals but the food we eat. This is a major reason why a healthy diet works- it decreases general body inflammation-- less atherosclerosis, cancer, auto immune disease. How powerful this can be is illustrated by a tribe in the jungles of New Guinea where the men are all heavy smokers but eat a diet of almost entirely unprocessed plant foods. There is no lung cancer in these men! Their diet has reduced inflammation so much that they don't respond to the carcinogenic smoke by developing cancer. No surprise that foods most likely to cause inflammation are meats, dairy, fried foods, sugars, refined grains. Vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts and seeds reduce inflammation, but medical science keeps searching for pills to accomplish the same thing. Nobel prizes are not awarded for diet; no promotions are offered at the university; no patents or other sources of income are available.