The inflammation you can’t feel

When my kids were little, I cried every day. They were sick, they were too young to tell me what was wrong, and their dad was sick too. We had a lot of health conditions under one roof, and the path we were on wasn't getting us anywhere. I'm not a crier by nature. I'm a pharmacist. And I still didn't know what to do.

Then one idea crossed my path: that the food we were eating was causing inflammation, and that inflammation sat at the root of everything. It landed. I changed what came into our house, and over time I watched every one of those conditions melt away. All of them. It changed my family's life, and it's the reason I do this work.

I firmly believe conventional medicine can be lifesaving. But there is a kind of inflammation most of us never think about, and that's the one I want to talk about.

Not the swollen knee kind

Most of us picture inflammation as a knee that swells up after you hurt it. What I mean is low grade, underlying inflammation that touches every system in your body. You don't feel it. You don't know it's there.

It shows up as small things. A little acid reflux. Some stiffness when you get out of bed. Maybe it starts in your 30s or 40s, and we don't recognize it for what it is: the beginning of a chronic process that gets worse. Sometimes inflammation takes 20 or 30 years to show up as something big. Those small signs are your body trying to talk to you. Listen early, and you can stop it sooner.

A blowtorch for a mosquito

Your immune system works in two phases. The first one, the acute phase, kicks in the moment you're hurt or exposed to a virus or bacteria. It's there to save you, but it works like killing a mosquito with a blowtorch. The mosquito dies, and so does a lot of healthy tissue around it.

That first phase is designed to retreat after about 24 hours, so a trained, efficient second phase can take over. Low grade inflammation is what happens when the blowtorch never gets put away. That's where chronic conditions start.

Three things keeping the blowtorch lit

There are more, but these are the big three.

1. A gut out of balance

Your gut holds trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that are meant to live together in balance. The standard American diet, antibiotics, stress and toxins kill off the good ones, and the bad ones overgrow. That imbalance is called dysbiosis. Those bad bacteria make toxins called LPS that wear down the mucus layer protecting your gut wall.

Your gut wall is one cell thin. Think of a coffee filter, built to let only very small things through. When the junctions in that wall loosen, the filter gets bigger holes. Poorly digested food proteins and toxins slip into your bloodstream, your immune system says “I don't recognize that,” and it attacks. Your blood travels everywhere, so the inflammation can land anywhere. Often your genes decide where.

This is why so many people end up on very restrictive diets. They feel better without dairy, or without gluten. But the real problem is the state of the gut. Restore the balance, tighten up the gut wall, digest better, and many of those foods stop causing a reaction.

2. Blood sugar that stays high

Carbs break down into sugar. Your pancreas sends out insulin, and insulin drives that sugar into your cells for energy. But we eat often, and we eat a lot of sugar and carbs. Eventually the cells close the door. They've had enough. That's insulin resistance, and I see it more and more, even in kids.

Your body adapts. It may send the overflow to the liver, which can lead to non alcoholic fatty liver disease. I worked with a 19 year old who was diagnosed with it and had to come home from college. I sat down with him and his mom and walked them through the physiology of what was happening. His mom did the hard work of changing what he ate. We added fish oil, a probiotic and a digestive enzyme, calmed his blood sugar, and cleaned up his food. In eight months, all of it had reversed, his liver scarring included. Understanding why it's happening can change everything.

3. Cortisol that never comes down

Cortisol is your stress hormone, and if you're fighting a bear, it saves your life. It thickens your blood so a cut won't bleed out. It sharpens your focus. It pauses your sex hormones, because survival comes first. It breaks down muscle and bone for fuel.

Now look at how we live. Work over family. Work over sleep. Social media and comparing ourselves to everyone. Busy kids. Aging parents. Our own health. It's a bear that never leaves. Over the years, high cortisol raises cardiovascular risk, feeds anxiety and depression, thins bones, weakens muscle and throws off hormones. It even shrinks the part of the brain that stores memories.

I lived this. When my kids were sick, I was up in the 5 o'clock hour putting dinner in the slow cooker, packing whole food lunches, working a full day in a chaotic pharmacy, running on my lunch hour and slamming food down my throat, then coaching both kids' soccer teams back to back. I wish I'd sat down at lunch, taken some deep breaths and digested my food. That stress was driving me toward a thyroid disorder. My conventional labs looked normal. Functional labs showed thyroid antibodies: my immune system was attacking my thyroid before anyone could see it.

Walk upstream

Picture yourself sitting by a river, reading a book. Someone floats by yelling for help, so you pull them out. You sit back down. Another person comes. Then another. At some point, you have to walk upstream and see why people keep falling in the river.

“At what point do you walk upstream and see why people keep falling in the river?”

Or picture a fish in a tank. Eventually the water gets murky and the glass gets dirty. So you take out the fish, clean the walls and give it fresh water. You fix the environment.

That's functional medicine. Instead of cutting off a sick branch, it treats the roots: nutrition, movement, sleep, stress and relationships. Your genes load the gun, but your environment pulls the trigger. Lower the inflammation and you can turn down the expression of the gene traits you were worried about. You have more control than you think.

• Inflammation
• Gut health
• Blood sugar
• Stress