Below is the transcript for the YouTube video above.
So what is Inflammation?
Think of inflammation as the body’s natural response to protect itself against harm.
It is our own internal police force, army, marine corp, and fire station.
There are two major types of inflammation, acute and chronic.
Most of us are familiar with acute inflammation.
Take a small cut in your finger or when you get a cold. Our immune system dispatches an army of white blood cells to surround and protect critical areas and kill or neutralize any pathogens or foreign invaders.
Inflammation, often get’s a bad rap, however it is the response thats keeps us alive when we are in danger.
Now chronic inflammation on the other hand is harder to understand and when elevated throughout our life, it can cause issues.
Chronic inflammation occurs in response to autoimmune conditions or unwanted substances in our body such as toxins from cigarette smoke or as a response to elevated circulating metabolites and certain lipids disrupting the epithelium of our arteries over decades leading to atherosclerosis and plaque formation.
Which brings us to the topic today.
Now when it comes to diet, foods that we eat, affect our immune system.
When we eat food, it enters our gastrointestinal tract, the tract from the mouth to the anus.
Once in our intestinal tract, food is digested and our gastro-intestinal associated lymphoid tissue, a fancy name for our intestinal immune system, maintains immune homeostasis by inducing tolerogenic responses to those orally introduced antigens. i.e. an immune response to food ingredients. How much of a response you ask, well our intestinal immune system makes up 60-80% of our entire immune system.
Now is eating a burger going to cause chronic inflammation in my body, no not exactly.
Is it going to cause acute inflammation? well, to a degree, each meal causes an immunogenic response, a term we call postprandial inflammation.
you may thing that is crazy but you don’t have to take my word on it.
To date there have been 277 different clinical trials, meta-analyses, and randomized trials trying to understand this topic.
So if this one meal can affect acute inflammation, what do you think eating foods like this, every day, for every meal does to your immune system?
Exactly, this leads to chronic inflammation.
Day-in and day-out our dietary choices can add up leading to sustained chronic inflammation.
So how do different food groups affect different parts of the immune system?
Over the years, 3-4 different indices have been studied to describe the dietary inflammatory potential of food groups based on human studies, human food questionnaire data, and concentrations of different inflammatory markers during dietary trials.
Not surprisingly, each of these indices identified the same food groups adding to the validity of the data.
For those wondering, these indexes are not small obscure indexes published in no-name journals. One, the empirical dietary inflammatory index was developed and validated at Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, Mass General Hospital, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Now each of these indices did a few things, they identified dietary food patterns that are predictive of inflammation as measured by different plasma inflammatory markers which we can measure. Some of them have then been validated using prospective studies and one coelated data from over 6500 scientific articles on food substances.
So what do we know:
Certain foods are associated with pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory properties.
Those who consume the highest -pro -inflammatory dietary pattern are at the highest risk of developing things like cancer, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, dementia, and depression.
Those who consume the highest pro-inflammatory dietary pattern have changes in the inflammatory markers IL1B, IL-4, IL-6, IL-10, TNFa, TNFR2a, CRP, adiponectin, leptin, and ICAM1. These dietary patterns are associated with hyperglycemia and unfavorable lipid profiles mainly increased triglycerides, and low HDL.
Some of the more relevant symptoms associated with these inflammatory markers include higher BMI, anhedonia, tiredness, changes in appetite, cravings, and feelings of inadequacy.
Studies:
Several studies have come out backing these dietary indexes and even a recent article in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that those who adhere to a pro-inflammatory dietary pattern are at an increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
At the end of the day, certain foods are known to cause an acute inflammatory response. Take this burger for instance.
The reason why these foods cause inflammation is multifactorial. It is a combination of immunogenic, microbial, and endotoxemic.
Well in our next video we will cover all of the foods that are both
Pro-inflammatory
and Anti-inflammatory
according to the papers mentioned today.
For now, if you have questions make sure you leave a comment below.
If you have topics you want covered on the channel make sure to leave a comment below, DM me on instagram and also leave a comment on one of my instagram posts.
- https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/148/5/771/4979594
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5525108/
- https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/foods-that-fight-inflammation
- https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2020.09.535
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2049080119301311#bib4
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S089990072030126X#:~:text=The%20empirical%20dietary%20inflammatory%20pattern%20(EDIP)%20assesses%20the%20inflammatory%20potential,EDIP%20to%20a%20Brazilian%20population.
Indexes:
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23941862/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958288/pdf/jn228718.pdf
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2049080119301311#bib4
- https://www.aicr.org/assets/docs/pdf/research/rescon2014/steck_dietary-inflammatory-index.pdf
- https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/30BE2C2295CE93DC6B54F9F9AD50CC68/S1368980013002115a.pdf/designing_and_developing_a_literaturederived_populationbased_dietary_inflammatory_index.pdf
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Disclaimer: Opinions on this site or on social media do not reflect that of my institutions. I do not provide medical advice. If you have a medical question please see your doctor or if you have a medical emergency, please go to the nearest emergency room.. I have a PhD in Nutrition and Metabolic Biology and three masters degrees including two master’s in nutrition & metabolism. I am a personal trainer & have researched nutrition for 12 years. The info I post is my interpretation of the medical and scientific literature.
