The other source of inflammation your doctor will not reveal to you

The Other Source of Inflammation Your Doctor Probably Will Not Tell You About

There is something about inflammation and your health that most doctors are not telling you. In this case, they are not hiding it. They simply do not know it exists. After reading this, you will know more about at least half of the inflammatory process than most physicians do, and more importantly, you will know what to do about it.

First, the basics you probably do know. Inflammation is a natural process. It is the way the body clears sick, dead, and dying tissue. It is the trigger that signals the remaining healthy cells to divide and replace what was lost, shortening telomeres in the process. It is also the way the body recruits stem cells into an area to provide new cells so the entire burden does not fall on the existing population.

But, as you also probably know, most of us walk around in a chronically inflamed state. The main reason: a lack of dietary antioxidants and a skewed omega 6 to omega 3 ratio. Fruits and vegetables provide good antioxidants, but they also contribute some of the omega 6 fatty acids that drive inflammation. Most people do not realize this. Take a look at the avocado and you will see what I mean. In most cases it is not the fruits or vegetables themselves doing the damage. It is the oils.

Our diet is full of vegetable seed and grain oils that are highly concentrated and provide unnatural amounts of omega 6 inflammatory fats. You do not squeeze a head of lettuce to get “lettuce oil.” You do not squeeze an ear of corn to get corn oil. One bottle of corn oil takes about 100 pounds of corn to produce. No one eats 100 pounds of corn in a week. If you cook with vegetable oil, eat out, and buy processed foods, you can consume that much corn oil in under 2 weeks.

There are some omega 3s from plant sources, but they are poorly processed by the human body. If they are from the sea (algae) they are far too DHA-dominant and contain little EPA. DHA and EPA are the end-game fats your body actually uses.

The solution is oil from fish. But if you eat the fish itself, you are also taking in mercury, lead, PCBs, PVCs, dioxins, and a host of other contaminants. For both reasons (the need for more omega 3s and the contamination of the fish supply) I recommend 3 to 6 grams of fish oil a day. I personally take more.

You probably also know that insulin, blood sugar, lack of exercise, stress, and lack of sleep all accelerate the inflammatory process. This puts a lot of stress on the health of all your cells and accelerates the aging process, the cancer process, the heart disease process, and so on. Just like aging, it accelerates the ticking of the biologic time clocks at the ends of your chromosomes, the telomeres.

Here is something you probably did not know. When you shorten your telomeres, the cell can either go into senescence and sit there, unable to reproduce, eventually dying, or it can blow up from the inside out by a process called apoptosis. I refer to apoptosis as cellular suicide.

It is easy to see how a cell blowing up and releasing its contents damages the cells around it and calls in the inflammatory and immune army to clean up the mess. Some innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire. What is less obvious is how dangerous and inflammatory the senescence process itself can be. Senescence is, by some counts, more common in the human body than apoptosis.

My friend Mike West, one of the foremost stem cell scientists, coined the term “senstatic activation” to describe what happens. Picture slamming on the gas pedal and the brakes at the same time. As a result, the senescent cell releases inflammatory signals into the surrounding tissue, prompting nearly the same response as a cellular suicide. Healthy cells nearby take damage, and more become victims when the immune army arrives.

The good news is the supplements mentioned above (fish oil and CoQ10) help quiet inflammatory signaling in the body. They may also help slow the senescence/apoptosis cycle by slowing telomere loss. But the only way to add length to telomeres is telomerase activation, and the only telomerase activator with published human data is TA-65.

The three takeaways:

1. Free radicals from diet or environment are not the only source of harmful inflammation in your body. They are probably not even the main source.
2. The main source (around 75 percent) of unneeded inflammation comes from an imbalanced omega 6 to omega 3 ratio. It can be corrected by careful attention to diet, or much more simply, by taking a high-concentration fish oil.
3. Aging itself is an inflammatory process. As you age, you need to address inflammation more aggressively, not less.

Dr. Dave, author of The Immortality Edge

— Doc