Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

Inflammation makes you strong and resilient.

We evolved to have inflammation for critical reasons.

It protects us from infections.

It helps us to heal wounds to recover our body.

So with that in mind, we can't sit here and pretend that it's inherently bad.

Instead, we have to acknowledge that there's something different that has changed.

We have gone from a place where the activation of the immune system, which is essentially what inflammation is, when the immune system identifies a threat,

activates and attempts to eliminate that threat or to address some specific health-related condition, when the immune system gets activated to do that, that is inflammation.

Acute inflammation is the time-limited type of inflammation that occurs when your body is fighting an infection, when your body is recovering from some sort of injury.

And that is good.

But chronic inflammation, the term that we're using in medical papers is chronic low-grade inflammation, is a different story.

Because what's happening is that our immune system sits there, and when well-protected and kept safe, it should only be reacting to really serious threats.

But with chronic low-grade inflammation, what we have is an immune system that is perpetually turned on.

because it's being exposed to things that are basically saying, hey, as the immune cells, we need to go to war and we need to fight to protect this body.

When the immune system is turned on, when we have inflammation, there is always, unfortunately, a price to pay.

You can't have your army going to war and not simultaneously create damage in the process of that occurring.

Chronic low-grade inflammation is the ongoing activation of the immune system that's unremitting

And that buildup of damage and injury to bodily tissues is what explains the connection between inflammation and these more than 130 health conditions.

Yeah, exactly.

And when you think about that idea, like this, you know, acute where it's getting switched on for a period of time, inflammation, there's symptoms, there's symptoms that we classically associate with that.