So here’s the take away – inflammation plays a major role in your health. More important than this is to know that the type of inflammation we’re talking about here is essentially silent, in other words, without symptoms.
Most of us associate inflammation with pain, and while these two are often found together, researchers over the past several years have documented time and again that chronic, silent inflammation plays a major role in the development or progression of just about every disease you can think of.
This was the topic of last week’s seminar on inflammation by Brian Hall, VP of sales for New Chapter. I hope to have the seminar up on the podcast page soon, as well as a video stream in the near future (fingers crossed!)
However as fortune would have it, while I was preparing for the event last Wednesday, a friend emailed over a link to a great article Putting Out the Fire: Gut Flora and the Inflammatory Cycle from the blog Mark’s Daily Apple. Mark Sisson is a proponent of the Primal nutrition and living, essentially a raw foods diet.
With respect to the Inflammatory Cycle, Mark sums it up very succinctly:
We do know that inflammation, especially chronic, systemic inflammation seems to be involved in nearly every disease under the sun. Obesity, cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disease – if it’s killing people, increasing health care costs, and reducing quality of life, inflammation is bound to be involved at some level. That makes things easier, in my opinion, because we have a good idea how to avoid chronic inflammation, and that should take care of half the battle.
What I really like about this article is it’s discussion of the inflammatory process as it relates to the bacteria, or probiotics, in the gut. We hear much about inflammation and probiotics, but not often in the same discussion. While I’m working to get Brian’s presentation into the podcast, I highly recommend reading Mark’s article here.
–Michael Ventresca
