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Inflammation: The Fire That May Be Burning Down Your Health!

AgeForce® Research Paper

Inflammation is like a bush fire. It burns, it spreads, and it claims its victims – 1,532,421 victims every year, and that’s in the US alone. This is not just an impressive number. It is also a number that could be significantly reduced if people didn’t surrender to “the fire within”. Diet, exercise and supplementation, next to potent, but side-effect ridden anti-inflammatory drugs, are powerful weapons to be used in the battle against the unwanted oxidative processes in our bodies which are fueling a fire that makes our joints ache (arthritis), our pancreas fail (diabetes), our cells go mad (cancer) and our blood circulation falter (CVD). Against that background the inflammatory diseases in the “TOP 10 leading cause of death” list the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updates yearly, are only the tip of an iceberg that’s about to sink the health of whole nations all around the world (Choy. 2001; Coussens. 2002; Sattar. 2003; Xu. 2003; Handschin. 2008).

So what’s the reason this is happening to us? We all know the answer, and still many happily ignore it: Being overweight, consuming an unhealthy junk-food diet and avoiding physical activity and exercise – that’s the tinder on which the fire feeds. If any of them is removed, the flames are going to stifle:

Weight loss works like a powerful fire-extinguisher

Irrespective of whether you’re only slightly overweight or morbidly obese, every pound you lose will have a significant beneficial effect on your personal levels of systemic inflammation. That’s a simple fact that has been proven by a plethora of studies over the last 50+ years.

Figure 1: Relative reductions of inflammatory cytokines and proteins
after 14kg weight loss in obese subjects. Correlations w/ weight loss
exist for all of them (Esposito. 2003)

These studies confirm that both, the markers (cytokines like IL-6, TNF-alpha etc.) and motors of inflammation (proteins and gene), are reduced drastically at the very moment that people who suffer from chronic inflammation finally start to lose weight (Clement. 2004; Esposito. 2003; Koop. 2003).

Dietary changes are like a fire blanket

In a real world scenario, it doesn’t make real sense to talk about diet, exercise and weight loss separately, because dietary improvements, increased physical activity and the subsequent weight loss are so closely inter-twined. In laboratory conditions, though, scientists can isolate the individual influence of each and were able to identify the following (unfortunately common) components of the standard Western diet as one of the primary motors of chronic inflammation:

Now, it is not just what the foods you eat, but also and for some even more so the foods you don’t eat that will increase your risk of becoming chronically inflamed. If you increase your intake of foods like…

• (green leafy) vegetables,

• onions or garlic,

• whole fruits and even more so berries

• olive oil and high mono-saturated fatty acid oils, in general, instead of saturated fats

• more (fatty) fish, white instead of red meat,

• whole instead of processed grains,

• spices like turmeric, oregano, etc.

… this can help you to reduce the levels of inflammatory cytokines in your blood and will eventually switch important genes from a pro- to an anti-inflammatory state (scientists call these diet-/lifestyle-induced changes of genes epigenetic changes – effects which are the long-thought hard evidence that the saying “you are what you eat” is true | Feinberg. 2008).

Other than our Anti Inflammatory Patch, exercise and physical activity can act as a fireproof suit for you

As far as the diet is concerned, “less is more” for most of us (specifically less of the previously listed pro-inflammatory foods). When it comes to exercise and, even more so, everyday physical activity, actually doing much more would probably hurt less than 1% of the population.

We rise, we sit at the breakfast table, walk a few meters to our cars, drive to work, walk into an office building and … we sit again – often for 4h without interruption piling up at least 8-10h without any form of significant physical activity per day (not including the time we sleep). In view of the fact that many of us do this on at least 300 of 365 days of the year, it is hardly surprising that our anti-inflammatory defenses, which would otherwise be promoted by exercise, are sluggish and our bored immune system starts to act out against ourselves (allergies and immune diseases).

Figure 2: Our lifestyle, i.e. the combination of an unhealthy diet and a lack of physical activities are motors of weight gain
and chronic inflammation. A dangerous duo that will almost inevitable lead to the development of chronic and potentially fatal disease.

The consequences of this life-style, a life-style we also hand down, voluntarily or not, to our children, are ubiquitous: Exploding obesity rates, overcrowded doctors’ offices and hospitals, young men and women with type II diabetes and / or cardiovascular disease. All this and many other diseases are driven at least partly by a lack of physical activity and its proven ill effects on our ability to control the “fire within” (Hjelstuen. 2006; Allison. 2012; Hanson. 2013).

Spices like curcumin, resveratrol, ginger, oregano, holy basil and many others have a proven record of both safety and efficacy that ranges from the early days of traditional Chinese and Oriental medicine far into the labs and petri dishes of modern science (Tapsell. 2006; Duke. 2007; Mueller. 2010)

References:

Allison, Matthew A., et al. “Sedentary behavior and adiposity-associated inflammation: the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis.” American journal of preventive medicine 42.1 (2012): 8-13.

Choy, Ernest HS, and Gabriel S. Panayi. “Cytokine pathways and joint inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis.” New England Journal of Medicine 344.12 (2001): 907-916.

Clement, Karine, et al. “Weight loss regulates inflammation-related genes in white adipose tissue of obese subjects.” The FASEB Journal 18.14 (2004): 1657-1669.

Coussens, Lisa M., and Zena Werb. “Inflammation and cancer.” Nature 420.6917 (2002): 860-867.

Duke, James A. “The garden pharmacy: turmeric, the queen of COX-2-inhibitors.” Alternative & Complementary Therapies 13.5 (2007): 229-234.

Esposito, Katherine, et al. “Effect of weight loss and lifestyle changes on vascular inflammatory markers in obese women: a randomized trial.” Jama 289.14 (2003): 1799-1804.

Feinberg, Andrew P. “Epigenetics at the epicenter of modern medicine.” Jama 299.11 (2008): 1345-1350.

Handschin, Christoph, and Bruce M. Spiegelman. “The role of exercise and PGC1α in inflammation and chronic disease.” Nature 454.7203 (2008): 463-469.

Henson, Joseph, et al. “Sedentary time and markers of chronic low-grade inflammation in a high risk population.” (2013): e78350.

Hjelstuen, Anne, et al. “Markers of inflammation are inversely related to physical activity and fitness in sedentary men with treated hypertension.” American journal of hypertension 19.7 (2006): 669-675.

Kopp, H. P., et al. “Impact of weight loss on inflammatory proteins and their association with the insulin resistance syndrome in morbidly obese patients.” Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology 23.6 (2003): 1042-1047.

Mueller, Monika, Stefanie Hobiger, and Alois Jungbauer. “Anti-inflammatory activity of extracts from fruits, herbs and spices.” Food Chemistry 122.4 (2010): 987-996.

Sattar, Naveed, et al. “Explaining how “high-grade” systemic inflammation accelerates vascular risk in rheumatoid arthritis.” Circulation 108.24 (2003): 2957-2963.

Tapsell, Linda C., et al. “Health benefits of herbs and spices: the past, the present, the future.” (2006).

Xu, Haiyan, et al. “Chronic inflammation in fat plays a crucial role in the development of obesity-related insulin resistance.” Journal of Clinical Investigation 112.12 (2003): 1821.