How to lower inflammation from morning to evening | Dr Jenna Macciochi

Dr Rupy Aujla (0:00)

I'm Doctor Rupy, and on this show, I help you feel more in control of your health through food and lifestyle medicine.

One of my biggest tips for better health is to lower inflammation. Long-term raised inflammation can increase your risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and other long-term health problems. And it can show up daily as poor gut health, skin issues and low energy. The good news is that what you eat and how you live can make a real difference. So today, we're diving into the best foods and lifestyle habits that can help lower inflammation with Dr. Jenna Macciochi, an immunologist, author and expert in all things inflammation with over 20 years of experience. By the end of this pod, you will know all about inflammation and what to do from morning to evening to feel better, stronger, and healthier today.

Dr. Jenna Macciochi, what actually is inflammation and why is everyone suddenly talking about it?

Dr Jenna Macciochi (1:11)

That's a very good question.

Inflammation is a mechanism that your immune system has to protect you. So it's neither good nor bad. And I think it's a great example of how biology is contextual. And to your second point, why is everyone talking about it? Mostly they're talking about it as something that's really bad. And I think this stems from the...

When we look at sort of the history, my field, immunology, the study of the immune system branched off of microbiology, the study of microbes that make us sick. So we have this really strong association that microbes make us sick, and the immune system protects us from microbes, using inflammation as one of its tools to keep us well. And so we sort of tie those two together. And then over the last few decades, we started to make a link between sort of unwanted inflammation, so-called chronic inflammation and chronic disease. And that understanding in the scientific world seems to have got into social commentary and got a bit flattened.

Dr Rupy Aujla (2:12)

Yeah.

Dr Jenna Macciochi (2:13)

Inflammation is the new wellness enemy. We should all be fighting it off.

Dr Rupy Aujla (2:17)

Yeah.

Dr Jenna Macciochi (2:17)

And I always annoy people by saying, like, well, it depends. It depends on the context.

Dr Rupy Aujla (2:23)

Yeah.

Dr Jenna Macciochi (2:23)

Inflammation is kind of the reason that we're still alive today, because if we didn't have it, we would probably have died out as a species, because it is the thing that keeps us well. But as I said, it's contextual, so it can also cause us problems.

Dr Rupy Aujla (2:39)

Yeah. I love the way you started that, you know, inflammation is our protective process, our protective mechanism. I think that's really important to keep front and center, whenever you're thinking about this evolutionary process that has kept us healthy.

In the context of our modern lifestyles, why is suddenly inflammation something that a lot of us need to keep in balance, reduce?

Dr Jenna Macciochi (3:04)

I think the evolutionary lens is really interesting.

A part of it is just because we live much longer than we used to. If you think of, I don't know if you've heard of Otzi the Ice Man. So I think he's about 5,000 years old. Obviously, this is a case study of one man that's been preserved in ice, but they actually looked at various things when they studied him and found that he had signs of atherosclerosis in his blood vessels. And we think of that as being linked to heart disease and being a very modern problem and linked to things like chronic inflammation.

But they suspect that it's not actually a modern problem per se. It's perhaps that Otzi was living in a time where he would have had a high inflammatory burden, because he didn't have all the public health things that we have. You know, we might all complain about getting a cold, but we weren't, you know, we're not dying from infectious diseases the way that our ancestors were. And that inflammation in his blood vessels fighting off infection after infection as he was doing his thing would have caused some wear and tear on the blood vessels and that would have contributed to things like atherosclerosis. So, it's not a new phenomenon per se, but we have different challenges today. So, we're not dealing with here in the UK the same infectious burden, but we do tend to live a lot longer. And again, just before we dive into sort of modern ways of life, there's two evolutionary things I think are quite important. There is this idea of antagonistic pleiotropy. So, evolution kind of only cares about you passing on your genes, and that means having children. And I mean that at the population level, not that one has to have children, but at the population level, evolution cares about passing on your genes. So, the selective pressure to have genetically the best human before kind of midlife when, you know, historically, we might have no longer been alive to pass on our genes. It's very high. And so, after 40, that selective pressure is less. And this is really important in terms of the immune system genes, because early in life, children are really vulnerable to infections, so they need an aggressive inflammatory response to protect them until their immune system matures and they become adults. And that's really helpful early in life. So, evolution kind of kept that in there.