Inflammation: The Slow Killer

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

The standard American diet (SAD) has contributed to millions of deaths and disease processes and is getting worse. Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer cause about 70% of all deaths in the United States and are all thought to be related to chronic inflammation. As most of you know, the SAD is largely filled with highly processed foods, red meats, animal proteins, fats, and sugar, and is exceedingly low on fruits and vegetables and anti-inflammation foods.

Table of Contents

• What is Inflammation and is it Bad?
• What Causes Inflammation?
  • Food, Oxidative Stress, Excessive Free Radicals, Stress, Animal Proteins
• Effects of Diet on Inflammation
  • Animal Protein Results in NAD+, What about your intestinal microbiome?
• Treatment for Inflammation
  • Plant Proteins and Inflammation, What Should You Eat To Fight Inflammation?
• A Very Brief History of Dietary Guidelines
  • Cytokine Storms Ravage Your Body, Now comes my humbling confession…, So, what am I doing in light of that?

What is Inflammation? Is it Bad?

It’s not bad…unless it persists. Inflammation is an essential response of our immune system helping us fight infection and to heal an injury. The redness you get from a burn or an infected cut is all due to inflammation, however, it’s typically limited and goes away shortly. Inflammation is bad for you when it goes into overdrive such as in a cytokine storm due to COVID-19 or influenza, or when it becomes low-grade and chronic.

In this low-grade and chronic state of inflammation, we oftentimes don’t notice it. Sometimes we may have vague symptoms such as fatigue, brain fog, body aches, poor sleep, etc. We only see the results of it years to decades later when we have a or stroke, develop blindness due to uncontrolled diabetes, develop cancer or go into kidney failure or lose a leg because of peripheral arterial disease, or even develop degenerative neurologic diseases like Alzheimer’s, MS or Parkinson’s. Many auto-immune diseases are impacted as well. These include Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, autoimmune hepatitis, and others.

Inflammation is your friend and if you didn’t have it we wouldn’t last very long. It’s a sign that your immune system is working at peak efficiency protecting us from injury and infections and toxins.

What Causes Inflammation?

Food Causes Inflammation

The cells in your body do best with natural whole foods. But it doesn’t always know what to do with highly processed foods like sugars, snacks, fried foods, cured meats, and even red meat which is not highly processed. Your body may see these as foreign agents and then begin mounting an immune response. The sugar or fat high from a single snack is not going to kill you, but repeated onslaughts contribute to major activation of the immune system which leads to chronic inflammation.

Every body responds differently to triggers. That’s why some people can live unhealthy lifestyles yet seemingly have no medical problems. Whereas others may seem to live a healthy lifestyle but have chronic diseases. The more fat you carry and the higher your BMI the more likely you are to have an exaggerated response to dietary inflammation. This attack from your diet causes chronic inflammation. You may have heard of oxidative stress…

Oxidative Stress Causes Inflammation

Oxidative stress is an imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants in the body. Free radicals are oxygen-containing agents that are short one electron which makes them easily reactive to other chemicals in the body. Those reactions are called oxidation and they can hurt you or help you. When oxidation becomes excessive it becomes harmful. Antioxidants are agents that have an extra electron to donate to those free radicals and stabilize them. At the same time, the antioxidants do not become unstable themselves. It’s a win-win situation for your body.

Excessive weight leads to oxidative stress. Exercise can help maintain antioxidant levels which then reduces oxidative stress damage from free radical excess

Excessive Free Radicals

Free radicals are not evil, they help you fight infection. When they are out of balance they can damage your tissues, including fatty tissue, proteins, and DNA. This is what leads to aging, and all sorts of chronic inflammatory diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Risk factors for high levels of free radicals:

• Pesticides
• Cleaners
• Cigarette smoke
• Radiation (including excessive sun exposure)
• Pollution
• Stress & depression
• High sugar, high fat, high alcohol intake

Stress Causes Inflammation

Emotional stress and depression contribute to inflammation using the same chemical pathways as high sugar, high-fat, high alcohol, and processed foods cause stress. There is increasing evidence of the neuro-immunological connection. The autonomic nervous system plays a big role in all this. Autonomic refers to the so-called automatic functions like swallowing breathing etc. It also has to do with the flight or fright phenomenon. It may seem odd that the nervous system plays a role in your immune system but think of it as the command and control center for your body’s defenses.

Animal Proteins Cause Inflammation

Animal proteins promote the bacterial product TMAO, trimethylamine N-oxide. TMAO is associated with an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, chronic kidney disease, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and peripheral artery disease. Unhealthy food feeds unhealthy bacteria that produce unhealthy toxins. It’s a vicious cycle. Paleo diets were strongly associated with toxin-producing bacteria. The one factor most strongly associated was the elimination of whole grains or fiber. Even worse was the so-called Carnivore Diet. The shift of bacteria in the gut to the toxin-producing kind occurred as soon as 24 hours

Effects of Diet on Inflammation

Chronic inflammation can result in reduced NAD+

Dying cells stop reproducing themselves during senescence, or the deterioration phase of their life. When that happens cells release all kinds of pro-inflammatory proteins which increases inflammation as well as decreases NAD +, which is short for “Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide“. NAD+ has anti-oxidant actions in cells. The proteins that dying cells release drive low-grade chronic inflammation. That is why as you get older you get more diseases including cancer. Chronic inflammation reduces NAD +, as does natural aging, obesity, and a diet provoking oxidative stress. NAD+/NADH, the oxidized and reduced forms, occurs in every cell and is a key way cells donate and accept electrons. Without this, many important cellular reactions essential for life couldn’t take place.

What About Your Intestinal Microbiome?

By that, I mean the bacteria that inhabit your GI tract. Let’s see what gastroenterologist Will Bulsiewicz, MD has to say. In his book, Fiber Fueled he noted the following thoughts from pg. 44-46… Proteins are very important to our diet, but the kind of protein makes all the difference in the world. Animal proteins are associated with toxin-producing bacteria like Bilophila, Alistipes, and Bacteroides. They produce toxins like amines, sulfides, and secondary bile salts. Amines cause food sensitivities, and when you char meat it turns them into carcinogens. Hydrogen sulfide is associated with ulcerative colitis, and secondary bile acid salts are associated with cancer of the colon, stomach, small intestine, pancreas, liver, esophagus, and biliary tract. All this is from animal proteins.

Treatment for Inflammation

Plant Proteins and Inflammation

Plant proteins, increase anti-inflammatory bacteria like Bifidobacterium and lactobacillus. You might notice those are two main ingredients of many OTC probiotics. Many diets can help you lose weight, but some do so while sabotaging you from the inside out. If you find Dr. Bulsiewicz’s thoughts interesting, I strongly suggest you buy his book, Fiber Fueled.

Many new medications target inflammatory cytokines to help these chronic inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, etc. They work well, but often have significant and potentially severe side effects, and are often very expensive. Now, I would like to suggest to you a better way to help…

What Should You Eat To Fight Inflammation?

So, What should you eat? This is my opinion…whole foods as much as possible. If you can’t make it at home, like corn chips of many varieties (which I love, BTW) then try not to eat it.

1. Fiber – fiber-rich diets protect against inflammation. Gut bacteria metabolize fiber to make short-chain fatty acids which have anti-inflammatory effects. It also helps keep your sugar controlled.

2. Plant-based proteins like nuts and legumes

3. Colored fruits and vegetables like beets, berries, tomatoes, cherries, cauliflower, broccoli, and garlic.

4. Spices such as turmeric, ginger, basil, oregano, cayenne, and cinnamon

5. Omega-3 oils, which are heart-healthy and reduce inflammation. High-fat fish like salmon are high in omega-3. You can also get omega-3’s from seeds. The standard American diet has a ratio of 10:1 omega-6 to omega-3 fats. A ratio of 2 to 1 is thought to be optimal, but even 5 to 1 can be beneficial. You get your Omega 6’ s from processed foods, fried foods, fast food, snacks etc. Reduce those and increase omega 3’s with fish or supplements.

6. Polyphenols are good for you, two of the more famous ones are EGCG in green tea and resveratrol in red grapes and wine. Most of the over 8,000 polyphenols, work as antioxidants.

Berries are high in anti-oxidants and are delicious.

Any changes you make to improve your health I heartily applaud you for. Weight loss is good, but more important than that is reducing chronic inflammation. If you do that via a healthy diet and lifestyle, then the weight will come off.

A Very Brief History of Dietary Guidelines

As you might guess, this article is about how you can help with chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, and the advancement of many chronic diseases. Before we go into those details, I want to tell you a little bit about my journey.

I graduated with honors from medical school in 1990, and like my colleagues both before and after me, I learned that fat and sugar were bad.

For a time, the national dietary narrative was to avoid fats as the culprit of heart disease and other illnesses. The food industry went along and touted low-fat versions of many of their products.

However, low-fat food often doesn’t taste very good and so sugar was added to make it more palatable. Not just any sugar was added, but HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) which is cheaper, sweeter, and more readily absorbed by the body. Too much of it can lead to obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes, and hypertension. All by itself HFCS can lead to neuro-inflammation, and oxidative stress and interfere with brain mitochondrial function. Mitochondria are the engines that drive cell machinery.

While all this was going on, there was a new emphasis on taking in less processed sugars as well. This includes HFCS as well as table sugar, also known as sucrose. Xylitol, an alcohol sugar, has been in the news lately for potential dangers to dogs.

Cytokine Storms Ravage Your Body

Cut to 2023 and we’ve just come out of the worst scourge to hit mankind in the last 100 years…the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve all heard about inflammation due to COVID, cytokine storms, and the like. Cytokine storms are intense, high grade immune attacks on almost everything in your body. Suddenly, Americans are awake and attuned to inflammation and want to know how to combat it. There were plenty of doctors, scientists, and ordinary people who already knew about chronic inflammation and what to do about it before COVID, to be sure.

Now comes my humbling confession…

I was generally unaware of how much of our food causes inflammation! I knew sugar was bad and too much of anything was not good, etc. It all came into my wheelhouse when I developed a painful case of diverticulitis as well as symptoms of long COVID. In my investigation, I came across all kinds of good research detailing how the SAD is killing us! So, here’s my apology for that. Consider it to be one of my deepest apologies!

So, what am I doing in light of this?

Great question. In general, I am modifying my diet to be less inflammatory and more anti-inflammatory, simply put. How did I do that you may ask? With some difficulty, honestly. I love red meat and that has been my biggest challenge. I’ve learned that animal proteins are highly inflammatory, which left unchecked in my life would bring diverticulitis and potential recurrences and prolong my long-COVID.

So I’ve cut way back on eggs, meat, and dairy while increasing fruits and vegetables and exercise by getting an exercise bike for the long rainy winters in SW Washington.

I do take a few supplements like omega-3 oils, alpha-lipoic acid, and a combination of turmeric and resveratrol, generally addressing anti-inflammation and brain health. The early results in my first month of changes showed a 13 lb weight loss and my best lipid (cholesterol) panel ever!

I’ll be honest with you, it’s not easy but I am motivated to do all that I can for my health. Not just for me but for my wife, kids, and grandkids as well. I want to be there to experience all that family means to me.

To Your Good non-inflammed Health,

Kevin McCurry, MD