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[Buddhahead]

"Chronic Inflammation--An American Epidemic" article in: International Wellness Directory.

More and more information points to the same answers---it's the chronic inflammation!!!

"Inflammation is a part of the body’s natural defense system against injury and disease.

Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, is a disease. The system has gotten hung up, and instead of protecting the organism (our bodies) it starts to kill the organism, slowly but surely.

Today modern medicine is starting to admit that chronic inflammation is the main contributing factor to all chronic degenerative diseases, and the root cause of the two greatest killers in America: Cancer and Heart Disease. Indeed, chronic inflammation might just be the root cause of all degenerative disease.

Chronic inflammation may be the root of all degenerative disease. [Andrew Weil — www.drweil.com]

Accepting this would certainly simplify preventive medical practices (even as non existent as they presently are), but I find it interesting that once in our early history medicine tried to create a theory that reduced all disease into one or two categories. History does, it seems, repeat itself.

The Damage

Pro-inflammatory cytokines are the part of our immune systems that attack and kill cells with oxidative chemicals. If they don’t stop their attacks, they will start killing cells our bodies need. The inflammation in a joint can eat away at our cartilage and you’ve got a serious case of arthritis. Unchecked inflammation in an organ, say the pancreas, can cause diabetes. Unchecked inflammation is now thought to be responsible for cardiovascular disease and cancers. The elderly are especially vulnerable to this sort of unchecked inflammation since the body looses the ability to “down-regulate” inflammation with age.

You do not have to be old to have chronic inflammation. You can have it and not know it, until it is too late. Thus we are going to spotlight those tests for having chronic inflammation or being at risk for chronic inflammation.

After that, we will outline the therapies to bring down chronic inflammation and how to avoid it in the first place, for you will soon find that inflammation begins on the end of your fork.

Does anyone recall the headlines in the New York Times about blood vessels bursting like popcorn? The article told us that the latest theory on the cause of heart disease is inflammation. One of the doctors who made this discovery was Dr Paul Ridker. The results of his studies in the early 1990s landed on the front pages of the New York Times right around the turn of the century. We’ve covered this in our book, Bypassing Bypass (and in our Cardiovascular Articles section), but we must tell you a little about it right now.

Microorganisms cause inflammation within our blood vessels, and the inflammation attacks the inside of the arteries. Besides immune cells being sent to the site to fight the inflammation, lipoprotein(a) is sent to form a sticky patch over the damaged area; a patch that that can grab onto cholesterol (supposedly bad cholesterol) and a cholesterol bandage is created over the site. However, the inflammation is inside now. The patch grows and bulges. The inflammation grows and bulges. Eventually, “blood vessels explode like popcorn.”

The reason I called the cholesterol “supposedly bad” is that it tried to save your life. If the inflammation continued without being patched by cholesterol, the artery would eventually open and you’d bleed out.

However, because the inflammation was not halted, the bandaged area has burst and the body must quickly respond because your artery is about to open wide. How is this patch formed? By a blood clot.

A clot is formed at the site to patch up the damage. Eventually, lipoprotein(a) will come along and form a sticky patch and attract cholesterol to form a better bandage, but there is a problem, and it has to do with our diet and lifestyle, our hypercoagulable lifestyles. Our blood tends to clot “too” much. The clot formed is usually bigger than it need be, and being such, the chances of it breaking loose increase. If it does break loose and it goes to your brain, you suffer a stroke. If it goes to your heart, you suffer a heart attack.

This sums up a good deal of what we have to say in Bypassing Bypass (which we are rewriting) but there is a lot more to learn (so if you want a copy, go get it here: Bypassing Bypass, and keep in mind that you are eligible to get the updated online version free when it is released).

One final cause of inflammation is insulin resistance and high blood sugar, along with the associated weight gain.

First off, high blood sugar raises your inflammation markers, IL-6 and CRP (C Reactive Protein). Then high insulin levels in your blood activate enzymes that raise the amount of arachidonic acid in your blood. Arachidonic acid is a polyunsaturated non essential omega-6 fatty acid. The problem with omega-6 fatty acids are when they exist in large quantities in the blood without a proper ratio of omega-9s to balance them out and inflammation results.

Diets high in omega-6 fatty acids are very inflammatory; and considering that many of our foods come from corn (including our beef), the average American eats over 4 pounds of corn each day, resulting in an over abundance of omega-6s in our blood stream and consequentially, inflammation.

And we still have one more route for inflammation to set in: when our bodies are insulin resistant, our brains are leptin resistant. The more body fat we have, the more leptin we have in our blood which triggers the immune cells in our body fat to release Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha, which is usually a good thing in that it helps consume nascent tumors, but in this case it's highly inflammatory, and it can set off a cascade of events ending in chronic degenerative illness such as MS, arthritis, cancer, and heart disease.

And if you have food sensitivities, your immune system is already overworked creating more chemicals that raise your immune markers. The problem is, most people with food sensitivities don't even know it."

Article at:
http://www.mnwelldir.org/docs/terrain/chronic_inflammation.htm