What is inflammation? There’s a defensive war going on in your body, conducted by intelligence officers (ordinary cells), signalers (interferons and cytokines), generals (endothelial cells), armed soldiers (white blood cells). Their mission: to detect, envelop, destroy, and purge your body of bad germs, viruses, parasites, oxidizing molecules, and cancerous cells. That war, necessary for existence, leaves behind redness, swelling, heat, pain, loss of function. Inflammation.
Inflammation can be acute and short-term, depending on the insult to the body: a sprain, poison ivy, acne, pneumonia, burns. Short-term, the army is deployed, does its job, and the body is healed.
But chronic long-term inflammation has a dark side, playing a role in health concerns like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, psoriasis, asthma, skin aging, inflammatory arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease. Read more
More than 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates—the father of modern medicine—suggested that all disease begins in the gut. While he was not completely right, scientists and medical professionals have recently linked a huge number of diseases to the makeup of our gut microbiome. 