Inflammation: What You Need To Know About It -[Video]

Inflammation: what you really need to know about it

Summary

You’ve probably heard the word inflammation.

I was talking to a new patient the other day and he was like, “What is inflammation anyway?”

It’s just one of those moments where you go, “that’s right. We throw this word around a lot and, and what is it and why is it so important?”

Two types of inflammation

If you want to live a long, healthy life, you want to be energized, you want good mental clarity, and you don’t want chronic disease. You really need to understand inflammation. There are two sides to it. The good side of inflammation is this: you get a cut and your immune cells rush to that area because bacteria has entered and they’re just all over that bacteria, killing it. If you think of the word inflammation, like a flame, it gets hot, right? You get a cut, it’s a little red, it’s a little hot… like a flame.

That is your immune cells doing exactly and precisely what you want them to do, which is rush in and kill the bad guy and be very quick about it. That’s the good side of inflammation.

It’s acute, i.e. it’s fast, it’s rushing to the site of some sort of injury or trauma and, and handling these foreign invaders. So something that’s coming from the outside in. That’s healthy. We love that, that keeps us very robust.

What we don’t like is chronic inflammation. This is when your body is secreting inflammatory chemicals for something that’s not there.

There is no foreign invader, it’s just chronically doing this. Unfortunately what happens is, again, your immune system is rushing in to handle something that’s not there, day after day after day. You didn’t get a cut, you didn’t get a trauma.

Symptoms of inflammation and chronic diseases

What stimulates your immune system to do this chronically? That’s very important because what the result of chronic inflammation is all those chronic diseases we don’t want: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune diseases. That’s a good list.

These are all these chronic diseases we don’t want, and they come from this chronic flame, this chronic fire that’s occurring inside your body and why. That’s what’s so important: to get to the why.

Before we do that, what are some of the symptoms of chronic inflammation? You can have abdominal pain, fatigue, joint pain, skin rashes, chest pain. There, it’s a longer list, but it’s not like when you get a cut or a cut isn’t healing and it’s starting to look, puss and infected, and you go, “wow, I might need some more help. Like my immune system didn’t handle this”.

Chronic deep-seated inflammation is more the symptoms I just mentioned.

Inflammation and its various causes

Diet

Again, why do we have chronic inflammation and why is it really killing us in this country?

Our diet… You hear me if you follow this channel, but it’s not something that can not be reviewed over and over and over again because you can’t eat highly processed foods, loaded with sugar, loaded with chemicals, and just full of things that make it a non-food.
You can’t eat that way and not expect your immune system to say, what is this?

And that’s what’s happening with the terrible food, the processed food that we eat with all these chemicals in it. What the immune system is attacking is your very food: [the food you eat] becomes part of your body and therefore your immune system is attacking you.

Lifestyle

The other thing that happens is just poor lifestyle habits. You are sedentary, you don’t do any exercise. Exercise is very empowering for the immune system. You don’t sleep well. And I very much understand the desire to sleep well and leaving enough time for sleep, but still not having good sleep quality.

That’s where we [at Root Cause Medical Clinic] come in handy as far as getting to the real root cause of why.

But some people just abbreviate their sleep, down and down and down… and just go, “I can get by with four or five hours and yeah, I think I’m fine.”

But you’re not, because that [sleep] is when your immune system comes out and cleans house, handles chronic inflammation. At night, when you’re in a deep sleep.

Alcohol consumption

Alcohol use is another toxin. It’s just adding up on the toxic burden of things.

Obesity

Obesity — I know that’s a big one and people struggle, but the bottom line is when what we find here at the clinic (and we’ve been doing this for 40 years) is that as you restore balance and function to the organs of the body, the body will start to find its normal weight.

I’m not saying you need to look like a supermodel, but the belly weight… If you have a big butt, whether you like it or not, that’s not the deleterious weight (weight carrying fat and excess weight in the butt in the thighs, that’s fat, it’s not gonna go anywhere). It’s in the torso, between your shoulder blades and your hip, that middle area, that’s the dangerous fat because it infiltrates into the organs.

So not that we want to be overweight, but it’s also the distribution of where the fat is and if it’s in that torso area, that’s the dangerous type of fat…

It takes help

So, cleaning up your diet, drinking more water, getting more active… I know these are things that I’m throwing out that you go “oh I wish… This is the bane of my existence”…

That’s really actually why we have the team that we have for over 40 years. That’s why we’ve developed a physical medicine side at the clinic. We have registered dieticians who work with all our patients because changing your life because it takes a lot; and you need to have your hand held through that process in those early few months… And then you get to your momentum and you’re feeling better and it’s much easier to sustain those good habits. But developing good habits takes an estimated six weeks to 90 days. It takes time.

And we also have to find out what’s really at the root of it for you.

Going to the root cause

One part of chronic inflammation is chronic infections.

We talked about acute infections like getting a cut, but deep-seated infections very often in the gut that haven’t been identified that need to be handled so you can take that stress off the immune system.

Also, toxins. Whether you’ve been exposed to mold or heavy metals or some other toxin that is in your system, keeping your immune system in this revved-up, inflammed state.

So there’s a lot of nuances to this as well. When I do these videos, I try to give you ideas that you can take away and start doing something with — like right now.

But if you’ve tried some things and it’s just really not working for you, then that’s where we can help you and personalize a program to you because there are plenty of people say, “Oh, I tried this, I tried that. It was great for me”.

A woman came in yesterday with her 80 year-old mom, and mom was the patient and the daughter was like, “You know, I was, I could tell I was kind of going down the path of my mom and I didn’t want to”. And she said, “I just started eating fruits and vegetables and, and real food and I got off all the junk food. All my symptoms went away”. You love stories like that.

That’s when you say it doesn’t have to be difficult. It it can be easy. But what if you’ve tried some basic lifestyle and diet changes and it wasn’t enough? Don’t give up. It doesn’t mean you’re stuck. It just means you need a little more help.

So we’d be delighted to help. Please send feedback on topics, and what you want to hear about.

Additional resources

Inflammation Causes Disease: How to Reverse It (Part 1)
Inflammation Causes Disease: How to Reverse It (Part 2)
Inflammation, Stress, and Diabetes
Inflammation and Cancer

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