a tangible idea about the role of inflammation in our health as well as how to tackle the problems related to an imbalance of this essential system.
Inflammation is your body’s normal response to events that cause damage to cells, like an injury or infection. The process involves proteins being released in response to the damage and these proteins send signals to the cells of the immune system to come and help. This is usually a short-lived, adaptive response that involves coordination of many complex signals and organs.74
The inflammation process is very important: without it our cells would not be aware of bacteria causing something like a simple skin infection, and leaving the bacteria undetected in our body could lead to an uncontrolled severe infection with significant consequences. Inflammation is critical for infection prevention and to keep the body alert. We have, in essence, evolved to be able to fight infections, and a host of other stressors to the human body, effectively and swiftly using inflammation as an important tool.76
However, inflammation is meant to be a temporary, protective response. Whether that’s a reaction to a knee injury or an infection in your digestive tract, inflammation is essentially a big nudge to your body, letting it know something is not quite right and needs to be addressed swiftly. Inflammation is meant to be a short-lived process that resolves over hours, days or, at worst, weeks. However, what we are witnessing in modern society is persistent, low-grade inflammation over longer periods of time, also referred to as ‘meta-inflammation’.77 Today we have a number of seemingly small and insignificant stressors that create subtle inflammation over long periods of time and can manifest in a multitude of symptoms. These range from the subtle and vague, such as fatigue, lack of mental clarity and skin irritation, to the more pronounced, including pain, mood disorders and heart disease.78, 79 These symptoms will obviously overlap with other causes, but we are becoming more aware of the damaging effects of inflammation imbalance that is at least in part to be related to these and many other conditions.
Examples of stressors potentially causing low-grade inflammation include excess sugar consumption, psychological stress, sedentary behaviour, accumulation of fat tissue and nutrient deficiencies (including vitamin D, Omega-3 and different micronutrients). Depending on our ability to tolerate these factors, the result can be low-grade meta-inflammation. This culmination of seemingly insignificant stressors can potentially tip us into a pro-inflammatory state, putting us at risk of the wide spectrum of conditions that inflammation is related to. This pro-inflammatory imbalance is what I will refer to as ‘inflammation’ for the rest of this chapter and what can be rebalanced with delicious foods and an enjoyable, healthy lifestyle.
While I want you to appreciate the importance of inflammation as a necessary mechanism in our body, when we examine the triggers of inflammation in modern life using this diagram, it becomes obvious why the balance of inflammation has become skewed towards the pro-inflammatory side of things. This meta-inflammation, as I’ve alluded to, has a role in many conditions including mental health disorders such as depression,78 high blood pressure80 and insulin resistance which is linked to the development of poor sugar control and ultimately Type 2 diabetes.81, 82 With this in mind, it’s important to try and find effective ways to prevent this imbalance from occurring and the diagram gives us an idea of what we can do to restore the equilibrium.
STOP THE TRIGGERS
The reassuring fact is that we can manage inflammation effectively and simply with changes to what we eat and how we live. It’s not expensive, it doesn’t require excessive interventions or huge modifications and I’m here to guide you through this process. We have many solutions within our control that we can broadly categorise into two steps. The first is to stop the pro-inflammation triggers in the first place. The second is to introduce diet and lifestyle changes to actively reduce inflammation; we possess the ability and mechanisms to purposely reduce the inflammatory response as well.83
The most effective way to STOP inflammation in its tracks is by assessing our diet, which in many cases is the most obvious and clear trigger. Looking at a number of large population studies, the benefits of eating a largely vegetarian diet, from the perspective of reducing inflammation, is undeniable. A number of researchers have demonstrated that eating a western diet made up of refined sugars and carbohydrates, large amounts of animal protein, processed foods and poor-quality fats is related to higher amounts of inflammation signals when measured in the blood.84
Conversely, putting more plant foods and fibre in your diet, including good-quality fats that we obtain from nuts and seeds, and eating less animal protein, is linked to significantly lower measures of inflammation.85, 86 Essentially, it is a fairly Mediterranean-style of eating and we can reasonably infer from these studies that reduced inflammation is related to less disease and general health protection.85
EXCESS BODY FAT
Fat, also known as adipose tissue, is a very useful part of our bodies that we have required during our evolution. Without fat, we wouldn’t have survived long periods where food was scarce. This explains why those who have a genetic predisposition to putting on fat, particularly around their organs and waists, may have actually been at an evolutionary advantage when it came to harsh winters, famine and lack of nutrition for energy.87 Essentially, it would have acted as a storage form of energy that was readily accessible when food was not available.
Today, however, the ability to put on and retain fat is a clear disadvantage considering our current food environment full of ‘convenient’, energy dense and nutritionally poor options. With no famine around the corner there isn’t any use to carry fat on our body and we do not end up burning it for energy. To add insult to the situation, if we do accumulate fat predominately around our organs and waistline, it is ‘metabolically active’. That is to say, it promotes inflammatory signals that can contribute to the burden of diseases we’ve mentioned.88 This is why the scientific community promote ‘weight loss’ and reducing ones’ body mass index (BMI) as a strategy to counter the effects of excess fatty tissue.
While I agree that fat tissue is pro-inflammatory and people who lose fat can reduce their inflammatory burden,89 a narrow focus on weight alone is sometimes a negative goal for a lot of people who struggle to understand the wider context. I believe health can be independent of weight. It is your lifestyle, mindset and diet that are the biggest determinants of a happy, healthy life. I’d rather you focus on building healthy habits with wellbeing as your main goal, rather than a number on a set of scales. When you adopt a diet that reduces refined sugars and carbohydrates and replaces them with fibre, largely plants and colourful vegetables, coupled with the lifestyle changes I discuss throughout this book, you are lowering inflammation.90 These are also the habits that can protect against the dangerous type of fat accumulating around our body’s organs (known as visceral fat) that promotes inflammation and leads to health problems. Before we naively use our scales as a measure of success, I implore you to embrace healthy habits and the subjective measurement of how you feel as a better marker of health.
‘A diverse, plant-focused diet with plenty of fibre and a variety of colours is the easiest and most effective way to support your microbes anti-inflammatory ability.’
SUPPORT YOUR GUT
We are in constant communication with our environment via our digestive tract and so it should come as no surprise that inflammation is heavily influenced by the microbes living in our gut.91 Our microbiota, the different types
