Inflammation — Like It Or Not, It’s Here To Stay.

It’s one of those classic situations where too much of it isn’t good, but too little of it ain’t good either.

It would suffice to say that the world “inflammation” is causing quite a stir these days. When we’re injured, for instance, the site of injury is experiencing acute inflammation, and that contributes to unpleasant sensations of pain and swelling that we can feel until the injury has been healed. Ditto, when we do catch a bout of the flu as well.

We don’t like those feelings of discomfort, and we do get prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs to quell the painful sensations somewhat.

At the same time, we do know that some of those chronic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease have some form of inflammation in them too. We’re afraid of that happening to us.

Some of us would then look at tinkering with our diets. An anti-inflammatory diet, for instance. Trying to sleep better. Doing some meditation. Reducing stress. Whatever it is that can help to “reduce inflammation” in our lives.

But what’s so important about the inflammatory response? It is creating quite a fair bit of drama in most people’s lives today, and the problem is that most methods to “reduce inflammation” don’t even provide a holistic understanding of the drama behind inflammation in the first place.

Going back to basics…

If we do go back to basics, we would find that the inflammation response is a signalling response that the immune system generates. When we’re injured, a pro-inflammatory signal in the form of various biochemicals (also known as cytokines) is raised to signal the immune cells to get to the site of injury to commence repairs.

These cytokines are biochemicals — they are proteins that are synthesised by a cell according to its DNA code. When the damage has been completely repaired, other anti-inflammatory cytokines are synthesised and released to disperse the crowd of immune cells.

In that way, we have that balance of cytokines to ensure that there is no drama in the body at all. We want to do things right. But the problem is that we may feel like we’re doing nothing at all when we do things right.

We need both pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines IN THE RIGHT AMOUNTS

We don’t function on the basis of a singular cytokine signalling everything in the body. We have various cytokines that are responsible for specific signalling processes. Some cytokines may be pro-inflammatory in one instance and anti-inflammatory in another — it’s always about achieving a balanced activity out of all these cytokines.

The cells that are responsible for expressing these specific cytokines, therefore, ought to be on their best behaviour to avoid any drama. However, as team managers will know, trying to get each member on their team to pull their fair share of weight in a project can be a demanding task indeed.

If the cells are expressing too much or too little of these cytokines, then various different drama scenarios can pop up.

For example, excessive amounts of interleukin-4 (IL-4) cytokine expression will contribute to a dramatic, exaggerated immune response to a stimulus that a healthy human body will generally regard as safe. We call that dramatic response an allergy.

For example, excessive amounts of interleukin-17 and interleukin-23 (IL-17 and IL-23) can contribute to the development of an autoimmune disorder.

When the body has dramatic over-the-top responses, we do know that there is something inherently wrong with how the immune system is functioning.

Of course, we can do things to our own body to disrupt the balance as well — for example, if we consume too much junk refined carbohydrates, or if we’re drinking too much alcohol. Or even if we’re just not getting enough sleep.

The problem is that our modern lifestyles aren’t supportive of the balance

Unfortunately, though, most of us do bumble around life with some form of pain here, some form of allergies there, or even some form of immune disorders somewhere.

These things aren’t good — they do contribute to a reduction in our body’s ability to do things. Because if the cytokine activities are operating at an imbalance — what would happen, you reckon, to the body’s ability to recover from an injury?

It would be slower than a healthy person’s.

But there are so many ways for the immune system to generate drama with imbalanced cytokine production.

Because all it takes is a mix of different cytokines to be have skewed production rates, and a whole different cascade of events can be activated.

For example, if a cytokine could signal a cell to resist the insulin signal during feeding times, the cell would take in less glucose than necessary from the blood, leading to an accumulation of glucose in the blood over time. That’s Type 2 diabetes right there — a symptom of an imbalanced cytokine activity.

If a cytokine could signal cells to dissolve bone mineral back into the blood faster than new bone mineral could be synthesised, that’s the development of osteoporosis right there — again the symptom of an imbalanced cytokine activity.

And there would be so many other examples of chronic inflammatory diseases where an excess of these pro-inflammatory cytokines would spell trouble for the balance that the cells in a specific system have to maintain.

The challenge is…

Maintain a proper balance of the cytokines in one’s body, and the risk of developing various drama issues (or health disorders) can be greatly reduced.

However, one does have to understand that the drama comes from a dysregulated inflammation response from the immune system.

When the immune system cannot properly regulate the inflammation response, it would also allow other pathways of drama (via chronic inflammatory disorders) to happen.

And that’s why someone with Type 2 diabetes doesn’t just stop there. They could easily add on heart disease and Alzheimer’s while they’re at it.

Especially when the root cause of all that is a dysregulated inflammation response.

But hey, to be fair… the doctors don’t really tell their patients that it’s an inflammation problem or an immune system problem, right?

But yet, we do see that heart disease or diabetes patients are at higher risk of death from a COVID-19 infection.

Why?

Because the inflammation response in these people has already been dysregulated! How are they going to respond or recover from an infection as efficiently as a healthy person?

The thing is, however, to not suppress the immune system’s inflammation response down to zero.

Suppressing a response to become unresponsive would kill one’s ability to defend themselves from a foreign invader, hence people on immunosuppressant drugs for any kind of medical treatment do also have to take utmost precautions when protecting themselves from any potential exposure to the COVID-19 coronavirus.

It’s also not about “reducing” inflammation. It’s about reconditioning the cells in our body to be generating a healthy inflammation response that can be used for healing and recovery purposes!

Maintaining a healthy immune response (or whatever a healthy immune system should have been doing in the first place) is the best option for eliminating a lot of health dramas in our lives.

It’s not easy to do, though — that much I will admit. A lot of immune system regulation comes from the tenets of a healthy lifestyle, which a lot of us have problems trying to maintain as we balance out other aspects of our life and our health, such as in the social, financial, and emotional aspects.

If we could balance all these aspects perfectly, we’d be almost like a god. The problem is that we’re all humans, and none of us can reach god-like perfection any time soon.

We’d end up trading our physical health for our wealth —however, if we were to subscribe to that tenet of trading our health for our wealth, it’s pretty easy to get finessed by Big Pharma later on in life, and potentially end up being both physically and financially worse off.

Do feel free to check out Nutrients That Support A Healthy Immune System to see how our diet can influence the inflammatory response from our immune system!

This article is part of the Inflammation — Making Sense Of Our Immune System ebook that I have made available on Amazon.com in Kindle format.

Joel Yong, Ph.D., is a biochemical engineer/scientist, an educator, and a writer. He has authored 5 ebooks (available on Amazon.com) and co-authored 6 journal articles in internationally peer-reviewed scientific journals. His main focus is on finding out the fundamentals of biochemical mechanisms in the body that the doctors don’t educate the lay people about, and will then proceed to deconstruct them for your understanding — as an educator should.

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