Inflammation, Aging, & How to Put Out the Fires Your Body Keeps Setting | David Furman, PhD

Jonathan Fields (0:00)

So every year, someone in a white coat probably draws your blood, circles a number, and tells you that's your inflammation level.

Turns out, that number may be barely more accurate than a coin flip. And the real story of what's aging you from the inside out, it's almost nothing like what's on that lab report. In today's conversation, you'll discover why everyday objects in our house, probably sitting right in your living room right now, might be quietly raising one of the biological markers tied to heart disease and aging. Why chronic stress can make anti-inflammatory drugs stop working no matter how much you take. We'll talk about the single 10-minute habit that our guest says can add about 15 years to how long you stay healthy. The changes in lifestyle that make the biggest difference. We'll talk about what GLP-1s might actually be doing to slow aging that has nothing to do with weight loss. We'll also explore why a food fight everyone's already having, gluten in or out, it might have a real biological mechanism behind it that accelerates aging and inflammation. And we'll discover the small kind of unglamorous morning ritual that our guest credits with keeping his own inflammation down and the groundbreaking new test that can now predict who's headed towards frailty seven years before it happens. Our guide is Stanford immunologist, David Furman, the director of the Stanford 1000 Immunomes Project, and the Bioinformatics and Data Science Core at Buck Institute for Research on Aging. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project, and we'll jump in right after this short break.

So we've all heard the word inflammation. If you're paying any attention to health, to well-being, to aging these days, the word inflammation just keeps popping up in the conversation, in the news, in the media, in individual conversations. Probably if you've gone to a health care practitioner, you've heard that word, especially if you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s. Often, it is attached to a wide range of conditions. You're somebody who has studied inflammation, chronic inflammation, especially as we age, and also seen its relationship to a wide variety of diseases, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer.

These are all outwardly different conditions. How does inflammation tie them together?

David Furman (2:20)

The clinical manifestations of these diseases are different. So these are indeed different conditions that are driven, at least in part, by a common denominator, a root cause that we've been studying for now two decades, and that is systemic chronic, age-related inflammation that increases as we age, and some people more or less, and that's the determinant of most of these diseases.

Jonathan Fields (2:50)

So systemic chronic, age-related inflammation, how is this different from the type of inflammation that we probably heard about when we were young? Are you stub a toe, are you sprain your ankle, are you break a bone, or maybe you have a bad virus, and we see some sort of inflammatory response in the body. Distinguish between that and the type of age-related chronic inflammation that you're talking about.

David Furman (3:17)

They are very different entities. The acute form of inflammation is a response to your immune system, to viral infections, to bacterial infections, to other sorts of pathogens or trauma.

If you cut your finger and it gets red and swollen and warm, those are signs of acute inflammation. And we can measure the different proteins that are secreted by immune cells. Those are well-established biomarkers of acute inflammation. It's typically of high grade. So what that means is that these proteins go and are expressed in high quantities, but then they should go back down to a baseline. And that takes around three to seven days to clear up the infection or repair the tissue.

In the case of age-related chronic inflammation, the sensors are different. So the receptors in the immune cells are completely different. This doesn't happen from one day to the other. It accumulates with age and is responsive to how we treat our bodies, our lifestyle decisions, our level of stress, the amount of plastics and plasticizers that we're exposed to and stuff like that.

So very different monsters. And in the case of acute inflammation, again they're well-established biomarkers. In the case of chronic inflammation, there's not.

Jonathan Fields (4:50)

So why is the inflammation that goes to heal something and last for three to seven days good, but the inflammation that accumulates in our body chronically over time and just kind of stays bad?

David Furman (5:07)

Well, the immune system has evolved to protect us from infectious disease, protect us from injury. When we have a cut or we have any trauma, the immune system will repair that trauma. It's beneficial. And that's the purpose of the immune system as a sensory system.