The Inflammation Zone. Inflammation 101.

You can maintain your body's inflammation within its healthy inflammation zone through diet & exercise.  What is inflammation?  This page provides an inflammation 101 and describes what happens when the body is out of balance with its inflammation zone.

The Gene Smart Anti Inflammatory Diet & Exercise Program contains four diet principles and a specific approach to exercise proven to greatly reduce whole body inflammation to get individuals into a balanced and healthy inflammation zone.  These principles are based on the latest understanding of the relationship between our foods & exercise, our genes and our health, with emphasis on the genes that control the inflammatory process.  The program has been validated in a study recently published in the Center for Disease Control's Preventing Chronic Disease Journal.  The following paragraphs provide an inflammation 101 primer and explains why we especially emphasize proven strategies to reduce whole body inflammation and empower individuals to get into a healthy inflammation zone.

The Inflammation Zone.  What is Inflammation?

It's the Body’s Response to Something Gone Wrong

The first lesson in inflammation 101 is that inflammation is part of the body’s immune response, a complex and elegant system with the ability to recognize and destroy invaders that have the potential to harm us.  When the inflammatory response is in balance, it is a good thing; however, when our body's inflammation zone is out of balance, and inflammation becomes chronic, it spells danger for our health.  Unfortunately, in America, our food supply, diets and lifestyles have created a perfect storm leading to whole body inflammation and dramatic increases in chronic inflammatory conditions.

Inflammation 101: When the Body is Balanced & in its Inflammation Zone

When the body's inflammatory response is working as it should and is in the inflammation zone, it is the body’s first line of defense. Without it, we’re wide open to opportunistic infection, so that exposure to something as innocuous as the common cold or a paper cut could have fatal consequences, so a body that is healthy, balanced and in its inflammation zone is a very good thing.

When you catch a cold or cut yourself, an extremely sophisticated alarm system goes off inside your cells. Certain cells identify the virus or injury, report the nature of the attack, and request the necessary reinforcements to launch a counterattack. Cytokines, adipokines, and eicosanoids, the messengers produced by surveillance cells and fat tissue, dispatch ground troops—white blood cells—to combat the infection. This offensive must be carefully calibrated: sufficiently brutal to immobilize the enemy, yet controlled enough not to completely destroy the cells and tissues surrounding the battlefield.  That's the key to inflammation that is healthy, balanced and in its inflammation zone.

When the Body is Out of Balance with its Inflammation Zone

When the body's inflammatory response is out of balance with its inflammation zone, the inflammation is considered chronic.  Chronic inflammatory disease begins with an exaggeration of the body’s normal inflammatory response, causing it to be out of its inflammation zone.

If our inflammatory system is reacting to a real threat, then it’s keeping the body safe. But if it overreacts—if, say, it interprets a harmless substance (like peanuts) or the body’s own tissue (like cartilage) as a dangerous invader—then the normal inflammatory response becomes a disease state (severe allergies and arthritis, in the examples here).  Sometimes the threat is real, but the inflammatory response is dramatically exaggerated. When this happens, the inflammatory response never stands down, even after the threat is long gone. This, too, leads to a body that is out of balance with its inflammation zone and to inflammatory disease.

Another, more prevalent danger—especially in developed countries—is a relatively low-level, chronic inflammatory state, when the immune system is continuously activated by adipokines from fat tissue. This can lead to the slow but steady destruction of tissues and organs. More importantly, it places the organ systems that are most genetically predisposed to the inflammation at high and constant risk for harm. For example, when a body is outside its inflammation zone, the resulting chronic inflammation can cause the body to attack the islet beta cells in the pancreas. Eventually, the cells aren’t able to produce insulin. The end result: diabetes.

Being Outside the Inflammation Zone is Like Using a Blow Torch to light a Candle

Now a little bit of “collateral damage” is to be expected in the wake of the inflammatory response. It’s a small price to pay for a successfully vanquished infection. Once the immune system has eliminated the intruder, the injured tissues should heal normally, and life goes on.  But when the body launches a full-scale inflammatory response against something inoffensive, any tissues that have the misfortune of being close by are also destroyed. Chronic inflammation is like using a blowtorch to light a candle on a birthday cake. In a person with inflammatory disease, the body adds insult to injury by sending ever more inflammatory reinforcements to compensate for the damage from the initial inflammatory response.

Essentially, inflammatory disease occurs when the body turns its own defenses against itself in a “friendly fire” scenario, and becomes out of balance with its inflammation zone. It inaccurately detects what it perceives to be a threat, or it overreacts to a real threat; it causes damage; then it overreacts again and again with subsequent inflammatory responses in an endless negative-feedback loop that scorches the battlefield. This is chronic inflammation, and it manifests itself as heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, asthma, allergies, COPD, Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, and cancer, to mention only a few.

Same Problem, Different Location: The Inflammation Zone and Inflammation of the Arteries, Airways, Pancreas, Digestive System, etc.

There are many different inflammatory diseases, yet all of them share the same underlying driver: an inappropriate inflammatory response, or a body out of balance with its inflamation zone. The difference between them is where the inflammatory response is taking place. (There are other differences, especially regarding which parts of the immune system are participating in the inflammatory response, but this explanation serves our purposes here.)

Chronic inflammation localized in the coronary arteries surrounding the heart leads to atherosclerosis and heart disease. In diabetes, as mentioned earlier, the body mistakenly identifies the islet beta cells in the pancreas as foreign invaders and destroys them so that they no longer produce insulin. When inflammatory cells such as eosinophils or neutrophils invade the small airways of the lungs, they cause asthma. Arthritis, meanwhile, occurs when the synovium—a thin, specialized tissue responsible for the production of fluid that lubricates joints—becomes inflamed. The list goes on and on. Inflammation in the upper bowel? Crohn’s disease. Lower bowel? Ulcerative colitis. The underlying process is the same; it’s just the location and symptoms that change.  It's all the result of a body out of balance its normal inflammation zone.