Yes, absolutely it can, and we’ve known this for decades. In fact, Time Magazine’s cover for February 2004 read “The Secret Killer”. The story was all about inflammation and the global NSAIDS (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) market is projected to hit 24.35 billion in 2027 and the U.S. is projected to consume about 7.2 billion in 2021 alone.
What Is Inflammation?
The easiest way to explain it is that you have an immune response, your body sends white blood cells and the agents that they make to the affected area to stabilize, combat foreign invaders and heal the area. The extra cells along with the fluids they attract to work on the problem can cause swelling, although visible swelling is not a prerequisite for inflammation.
What Are The Different Types Of Inflammation?
There are two major types of inflammation with each having some sub-sets depending on who’s literature you read. The two main types are acute and chronic. Acute is the immediate response to an invasion, damage, large quantities of cell death and other immediate need items. Chronic is where you have long term inflammation due to an ongoing malady or an auto-immune error.
Both types cause oxidative stress, but, below it is the chronic inflammation that we will be discussing in greatest detail.
What Causes Chronic Inflammation?
There are several known causes, however, one of the mechanisms that link disease and inflammation may just shock you. The basic causes are disease, an auto-immune error and diet. Of the 3, diet is by far the most prevalent. But did you know that inflammation itself can also CAUSE disease, yes, it can and below we will detail how that happens. It’s quite fascinating really.
Let’s take a look at the 3 main causes of chronic inflammation and just how bad each is on your body systems.
Chronic Inflammation From Disease – This type of inflammation is welcome and necessary.
Yes, you heard that right. Your body has to have an immune response to long term illness or a lasting injury or infection or you could literally die from it.
You need those white blood cells and all their sub chemicals swarming the area removing any bad materials, bacteria, aberrant cells and facilitating healing.
This is a very normal response and should be allowed to happen.
In this case, it’s not the inflammation that’s the enemy, but the cause of the inflammation that is the real issue.
As an example, if you have an infection that lasts more than just a few days, you don’t really want to quell inflammation, you want to get rid of the infection.
In this case the inflammation is your friend, it’s helping to fight off the infection.
The same would be true if you had cancer, a broken bone, a deep cut or other things that might take more than just a short time to overcome.
In the case of the cancer as an example, you want it there fighting the cancer, that’s a proper immune response.
Below we will cover improper immune responses.
Chronic Inflammation From An Auto-immune Error – In this case the body is over responding to one thing or several things and needs to be corrected or you could suffer for years or even the rest of your life.
Let’s take a look at one that’s pretty easy to see because you’ve likely seen people with it or possibly experienced it yourself.
Allergies. There is a pollen, a mold or what have you in your space and it comes into contact with the first line of defense, your skin, mucosal and membrane systems.
It could also be bacteria as the responses can be virtually identical. Science will generally term them all together calling them antigens, but that’s now quite right. However, that’s a whole other subject to unpack and is without the scope of this article.
They react by over producing histamines. This might actually be fine, if your body was properly producing DAO (Diamine Oxidase) enzymes that are the natural inhibitors of histamines. The DAO enzymes are there to keep overproduction in check.
So, it’s really when you have an overreaction and the lack of DAO enzymes to inhibit (neutralize) the overrun of histamines that you run into a real problem.
The challenge then becomes, what can you do to stop the overrun and ensure proper production of DAO enzymes to inhibit the excess?
It’s possible that you might actually have a condition that causes a blocking in the production of these enzymes, but that would likely be very rare because they aren’t just made in one area of the body. They are made in your kidneys, thymus, and the intestinal lining of your entire digestive tract.
This would mean that, each of these areas would have to be compromised all at once. It could happen, but the odds are pretty slim.
According to multiple studies that we have linked below, the primary driver of all this is your diet and your toxicity levels.
This is exactly what we will be discussing in the next section below.
Chronic Inflammation From Diet –
Other than your body responding to a disease or other malady there is no doubt that your diet plays the biggest role in your long term ‘chronic’ inflammation levels.
In fact, diet is so prevalent that it’s by far and away the number one cause of both the inflammation itself and the diseases that also cause it.
Knowing that, what would you do to make the biggest impact on your disease and inflammation levels overall?
Well, you’d work on your diet, wouldn’t you?
And that is exactly the subject of the next section of our conversation.
How Can I Change My Diet To Lower My Inflammation Levels?
It’s pretty simple really, however, you’ll have to make some changes in the way you think about your relationship to food.
You need to understand how your body views food and not how corporate advertising wants you to view it.
The big corporations that produce highly processed foods also typically or at least their share holders and CEO’s all own major stock in drug companies.
Do you really even have to ask why?
They know that the vast majority of the people are addicted to the poison they sell and then they will of coursed become sick.
So, it makes good business sense to own stocks in companies that give you more poisons (pharmaceuticals) when you become sick, which you eventually will.
They are not uber wealthy because they’re stupid, they know exactly what they’re doing.
In order for you to get your head around it as simply as possible you really need to know 2 things.
#1. FIBER IS FOOD!
What does this mean?
We are going to give you a few concepts that we won’t really break down into detail because many of you may already have a good understanding of them. If not, you can easily do a little research and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that what we are saying is backed up by thousands of years of human diet and of course modern studies.
A). The microbiome in your gut represents the largest portion of your sympathetic immune system. It must have fiber to function.
It breaks down the fiber in foods and creates all sorts of needed agents such as essential fatty acids, biotics, food for friendly bacteria and more.
Plant foods have copious amounts of fiber and animal products have none.
Your ancestors consumed around 80 to 110 grams of fiber per day and today the average American man consumes 7 to 15 grams of fiber per day.
This is one of the biggest reasons people are sick.
If you took in enough plant foods to get an average of 100 grams of fiber per day, you’d naturally have tons of phytonutrients, antioxidants, biophotons (biophotons from the raw foods you ate) and more.
B). Breast cancer is the number one cancer in women and prostate is number one in men. However, colon cancer is number 2 in BOTH men and women.
One of the main reasons that it’s number two in both is that we eat far too many animal products that don’t digest well as you’ll see later, and we don’t eat enough fiber to push it through.
It’s really quite simple, your body see’s fiber and associates that with food, because that’s what its foods come packaged in, fiber!
#2. IT’S EITHER INFLAMMATORY OR ANTI-INFLAMMATORY!
That’s it, there are no two ways about it, it’s either causing inflammation or it’s helping to lower or regulate inflammation, end of story, there are no gray areas.
There are two main categories that really stand out and they are.
Animal Foods VS Plant Foods
Animal Foods
Their proteins cause dramatically increased levels of inflammation, they contain cholesterol (which is debatable as being all that bad for you in moderation, but terrible in high doses), They contain virtually no antioxidants, no phytonutrients, no fiber, and they contain HCAs and PAHs.
Heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are chemicals formed when meat, including beef, pork, fish, or poultry, is cooked at high temperatures, which is basically any temperature hot enough to actually cook it.
Animals are incredibly hard to digest as we simply do not create the right acid PH in the gut to digest them. This causes huge inflammation, polyps and cancer in the digestive tract and colon. I.E. This is why colon cancer is number 2 in both men and women.
Plant Foods
They work to lower inflammation systemically and in the gut, they contain no cholesterol (which is fine because your body makes all that it needs internally), they are high in fiber, antioxidants and phytonutrients and have no HCAs or PAHs, so they don’t create poisons when you grill or cook them.
Just as an aside.
The real super simple deal on cholesterol is that, yes, our bodies make it. However, when you take it in in high amounts from animal products and you already make as much as you need, you then have too much.
This is where the problem comes in. Yes, we know that it’s simply a lipoprotein, so it’s supposed to be broken down by your cleaving enzymes in the gut so that it can’t be absorbed. However, with most people their guts don’t work right so they don’t make enough enzymes and it ends up being absorbed when it’s not supposed too.
It cannot travel in our water-based blood stream, so it uses another lipoprotein to transport it and additional fatty acids to where it can cause its problems.
Then, you guessed it, that causes to much arterial band aid (that’s one of its jobs), so, the cholesterol see’s damaged areas of the arterial walls and starts patching them up. With too much in the system it piles on the patch work too thick, and you get a blockage that is also ripe for a rupture which is what causes heart attacks in many if not most cases.
Can Inflammation Cause Cancer?
Yes, it can. Chronically inflamed tissues are ripe for the production of aberrant cells.
This is a huge cause of cancer in patients that would otherwise be seen as healthy or young.
Here’s how that works.
Imagine you’re super healthy, or at least you think you are. Or you have a child who is young, healthy and happy, or at least you think they are.
Now imagine that you have a guy rubbing a piece of sandpaper on the same spot on your body every day, 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
Your body is of course very irritated by this. It doesn’t like it to say the least.
It can’t even heal the area because the brand-new cells it sends there just get sanded away.
So, in a last stich effort to protect itself then body sends more and more cells there to cover it and repair it.
A few are successful but a few are damaged and become aberrant cells and start to form a cancerous growth.
At first the body doesn’t even see this as being bad because the growth is helping to protect against this constant irritation.
However, then you have a cancer.
Now simply picture that the sandpaper is inflammation. The inflammation keeps irritating, rubbing raw and inflaming the area.
Your body has the same response, some cells become aberrant and now you have a cancer tumor.
The challenges that inflammation cause in your body are too many to list, this is just one.
This is a person who is young, vibrant and appears healthy and is one of those cases you hear about that just ‘all of a sudden’ got cancer and no one knows why.
Now you know why.
You might even eat organic or hunted animals, and yes, they may have fewer steroids and chemicals. But that doesn’t change the fact that you don’t produce the acid PH to digest them. Or that your digestive tract is generally 6 times longer than you are tall and a carnivore’s digestive tract is typically only 3 times longer than their body length.
This means that those meat meals stay in our digestive systems over twice as long as carnivores which gives it time to putrefy.
The more than double is because our system is used to the slow digestion of fibrous foods and we don’t produce the acid to digest it so it takes several times longer in many cases to pass.
Inflammation is NOT something to fool with, it will kill you. Take care of it or it will take care of you, but not in a good way.
Sources
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1074761319302407
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168827813002134
3. https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/5/3/1163
5. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01322
6. https://journal-inflammation.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1476-9255-1-1
7. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867404008347
8. https://europepmc.org/article/med/11866137
9. https://environhealthprevmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12199-018-0740-1
10. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867410000607
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16. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1933171107000162 17. https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/non-steroidal-anti-inflammatory-drugs-nsaids-market-102823