Lately, it feels almost impossible to scroll through social media without coming across someone talking about the dangers of inflammation or the benefits of an anti-inflammatory diet.
But what is inflammation, how do we know if we have it, and what can we do about it?
That’s what we — Raj Punjabi-Johnson and Noah Michelson, co-hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — asked Tamiko Katsumoto, MD, a clinical associate professor in the division of immunology and rheumatology at Stanford University and a board-certified lifestyle medicine physician.
“I think the best way to define it is it represents the body’s response to a danger signal or to a damaging signal, and then it’s followed by a repair process,” Katsumoto told us. ”[It’s] this whole process by which our immune system is helping to defend us and it helps them to resolve that insult that we are faced with.”
That means that inflammation isn’t always a bad thing. Acute inflammation, which occurs when our bodies are trying to fight an infection or heal a wound, is short-term, beneficial and absolutely necessary to our health. It is a “knee-jerk response,” Katsumoto said, that involves a “very robust kind of activation of the immune system.”
“Without inflammation, we would be dead — it keeps us alive,” she emphasized.
However chronic inflammation is often “subtler.”
“Sometimes that flies a little bit below the radar, and we may not fully be aware that it’s happening,” Katsumoto said, but there is one symptom she hears in her client from her patients more than anything else: fatigue.
“People that say, oh, I’m just so tired. I have no energy.”
This kind of long-term inflammation, which can be caused by environmental exposures, our diets, and other lifestyle factors, is to blame for “a lot of the diseases that we’re dealing with in the Western world.”
“It’s little bit more insidious. It’s not as obvious. It’s not like when you have the flu, but it’s like some people kind of get more of a chronic ongoing low level of inflammation that can then lead to the development of a lot of these diseases,” Katsumoto noted.
Everything from Alzheimer’s to heart disease to depression can be caused by chronic inflammation.
“And then, of course, what I deal with in my clinic is maybe a higher level of that inflammation — things like rheumatoid arthritis, things like lupus, these are autoimmune conditions,” she said, adding that “the vast majority of our diseases are driven by inflammation, maybe like 80% or so.”
Katsumoto told us that those 80% of diseases caused by inflammation are believed to be “driven by lifestyle-related factors that we can have some control over.”
“We can’t control everything about what we’re exposed to, but we can control lifestyle factors that can be very, very protective of this inflammation and really can dampen it so that we don’t end up with a lot of these chronic diseases,” she said.
The first thing we should do to ward off harmful inflammation, according to Katsumoto, is ensure we have a healthy gut microbiome.
“It turns out that probably about 70% of our immune system resides in the gut,” she said. “To keep the microbiome happy, we’ve got to feed it fiber, and fiber, guess what? It’s only found in plants. Animal products do not have fiber. So we need to have plants to feed that gut … to create a very happy, healthy, diverse group of bugs that are going to keep what’s called immune homeostasis.”
Katsumoto noted that 95% of Americans are deficient in fiber, so we should concentrate on consuming 30 — the “magic number” for gut health — different kinds of plants each week, including fruits, vegetables, legumes, herbs and nuts.
“Fiber gets fermented by these microbes in our gut, and they produce these molecules that are called short-chain fatty acids. These short-chain fatty acids are really important in keeping our immune system in check and dampening it so it doesn’t overreact.”
Though Katsumoto tells her patients to avoid eating ultra-processed foods whenever possible because they can harm our gut microbiomes, she acknowledged that practicing moderation is our best bet.
“It’s really focusing on the whole food plants as much as possible, [but], you know, it doesn’t mean you have to be a saint,” she told us.
“I never draw lines in the sand. I think that’s not helpful … We don’t demonize anything. Yes, we all will eat some of those ultra-processed foods sometimes, and that’s okay,” Katsumoto said. “I think the bottom line is, if we can really try to keep our gut as happy as possible by really loading up with a lot of diverse plants, right? And, occasionally, some animal [products] are OK. But I just want to say, really, the plants are where the money is. And the plants are what are anti-inflammatory … and there’s been so much data suggesting that plants are super important for health and longevity.”
We also spoke with Katsumoto about other ways to fight chronic inflammation, the number one anti-inflammatory thing she is working on in her own life and much more, so click above to hear the full episode or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also watch the full episode on YouTube.
For more from Dr. Tamiko Katsumoto, head here.
Have a question or need some help with something you’ve been doing wrong? Email us at [email protected], and we might investigate the topic in an upcoming episode.