The Genius Life
540: What Keeps Chronic Inflammation Turned On, and How to Turn It Off | Josh Redd, NMD
07 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is chronic inflammation and how is it identified?
what's going on everybody it's episode 540 of the genius life let's go the genius life What up, everybody? I'm your host, Max Lugavere, and welcome back to The Genius Life, a show where we try to live a little smarter, a little stronger, and ideally with fewer mysterious symptoms that your doctor labels stress before sending you on your way.
Today's episode is a perfect follow-up to Monday's episode, where we talked about inflammation, because in this conversation... We go even further down the rabbit hole. What inflammation actually is, how it shows up in the real world, how to measure it, and how to start lowering your inflammatory load without sliding into food fear or turning your pantry into a biohazard crime scene.
My guest is Dr. Josh Redd. He runs multiple clinics and sees a staggering number of patients dealing with everything from autoimmune conditions to brain fog, fatigue, and chronic pain. And he's here to share what he's seeing on the front lines, the lab markers he tracks, the biggest lifestyle drivers, and the most common dietary triggers that repeatedly show up in his patient population.
We get into the big rocks, real food, blood sugar stability, gut health, and why digestion is often the missing link behind food sensitivities.
Chapter 2: How does inflammation relate to aging and disease?
Then we take a very genius life detour into vagus nerve hacks, including a protocol that involves aggressive gargling until you tear up. Yes, really, plus other strategies that sound weird until you understand the mechanism. And then because apparently this is the episode where we cover everything, we also talk regenerative medicine and stem cells.
And I share my own experience with an L5-S1 disc replacement that genuinely changed my life. If you listened to Monday's episode and thought, okay, but how deep does this go? Well, this is your answer. With all that out of the way, let's dive in. It's episode 540. Let's rock. Dr. Josh Redd. What's going on, man? Welcome. Thanks for having me.
It's nice to meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you. Heard a lot of great things.
Thanks, dude. Thanks for coming out. I'm very excited. Your book is beautiful.
Chapter 3: What are the cornerstones of an inflamed lifestyle?
Yeah, thank you. I was perusing it. I haven't made any of the recipes yet, but they look delicious.
Yeah. Yeah, we're excited about this. It's going to be great. Is this your first book? I had kind of like a prequel that I just published myself and with a partner of mine, Carlin Call, and then we just completely redid it all. And so- rewrote it, added 90 pages, added 45 recipes, 45 more recipes, and yeah, there it is. Dude, it's awesome. Yeah.
Well, I love the focus on inflammation, which is kind of a buzz term these days, these days being thrown around in the wellness world and probably by a lot of people that don't fully understand the implications of what inflammation is, its impact on the body. So let's just jump right in. What is the relationship between inflammation and aging and disease?
yeah so inflammation single-handedly causing more disease in this country than anything else and you're right where it is loosely termed but in reality i see with my 10 clinics probably 350 patients a day and we see patients from all over the world that are suffering from severe chronic conditions and in reality when they come to us we look at a bunch of other physiological imbalances but what we're really getting to is what's causing inflammation
Do they have inflammation? What's triggering it? What's causing it? And how can we get it to calm down?
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Chapter 4: How can diet affect inflammation levels?
And from there, we'll have a patient go from zero to five good days a month to 20 to 25 good days a month just by addressing inflammation. It's that simple. They could be suffering from a variety of different conditions and problems, and it really stems to just inflammation. How is inflammation felt in the body? Or is it filmed? Yeah, I think a lot of different ways.
Joint pain, intestinal problems, brain fog, depression. Like the way we're treating depression right now is if you have a decreased neurotransmitter, you just replace it. And that's old school, right? Now we're seeing that if you have brain inflammation, then it decreases all neurotransmitters and causes tons of problems. So even depression, fatigue, anxiety, restlessness, neurobehavioral issues.
It's felt in a ton of different ways. But in reality, it's probably one of the most neglected things. And the worst thing is when it comes to our kids. Like, you'll have kids with neurobehavioral disorders and neurobehavioral delays and a ton of different problems. And they're not functioning. They're failing in school.
all these different issues, and yet they just live this inflamed lifestyle that's just jacking them up, right? Their brain's not able to develop properly, and then they just have more problems, and here we are. What would you say are the cornerstones of an inflamed lifestyle?
Chapter 5: What dietary changes can help reduce inflammation?
Food's one, right? I mean, our food really impacts everything that we do from inflammation to our biochemistry. Everything that we eat has a significant impact with our immune system, blood sugar imbalances, cortisol defects, hormones, you name it. we really have to start treating food as medicine. And that's probably the first thing.
From there, you have different dietary and lifestyle things that will trigger it as well, on top of some environmental things as well, too.
Yeah. How do you measure it? I mean, I think many people are probably familiar with, like, CRP, but... Most probably don't. Myself included. I don't even really know what that is. It's like a, you know, it's it reflects inflammation in the body, but it's like not super specific is my understanding of it.
Yeah. I mean, you have serrated protein, which is probably the most common one, which is an acute phase reactant. And when that's high, you have higher inflammation. It can also dictate whether you have an increased risk for cardiovascular event or whatnot too. But there's other markers like homocysteine, lactate dehydrogenase, uric acid, even ferritin. Like ferritin is one for iron.
But if ferritin is too high, it can be due to inflammation.
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Chapter 6: How do you measure inflammation in the body?
So there's a number of different really easy inflammatory markers that we can test in labs. And if they come back high, then you have it.
Wow. So getting to food, which is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to diet, which is my favorite topic to talk about. Are there any foods that you believe are truly anti-inflammatory or is it more about like the dietary pattern as a whole?
That's a good question. I think there's a lot of different foods that are anti-inflammatory, but then even more so there's foods that are really inflammatory, right? And because we see so many patients within our clinics, we're able to like retest, retest. We kind of have our own research in-house. And so we can kind of see which is the most inflammatory food, which isn't.
and our patient population, the most common foods. Do you want to guess just from you? Yeah. Like with our patient population, we deal with autoimmune conditions. We deal with, you know, severe chronic diseases. What do you think the most common foods are that exacerbate their symptoms? Damn. Well, Let me... Gluten, maybe? Gluten.
Chapter 7: What role does the vagus nerve play in inflammation?
Interesting. Gluten's hands down the worst one. And then the second one is dairy and then sugar. And obviously, there's kind of a difference between conventional dairy and whole milk and things like that. But... mainly just conventional dairy that really jacks up our patients.
And with research, it shows that the casein protein, which is the dairy protein, it mimics the gluten protein pretty similarly. And so our immune system gets confused. And those two are kind of go hand in hand to being some of the most common inflammatory triggers for our patients. Whoa, it's probably different from person to person. 100%.
Yeah, and that's kind of the big goal for us is we want to address what their specific inflammatory foods are versus the next patient. Everyone has a little bit different foods that they react to for some reason or another. But the most common overall in a general standpoint is dairy and gluten. And then obviously there's sugar.
Insulin surges and all that stuff cause a lot of inflammatory problems and issues too. But those three are probably the top that we see.
Are you at all familiar with like the A2 casein protein research, like A2 versus A1? A little bit, a little bit. Tell me about it.
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Chapter 8: What advancements are being made in regenerative medicine and stem cell therapy?
You don't know much about it? Well, I know like I have a cursory level understanding. Basically, my understanding is that At some point, cows are man-made like domesticated creations, right? But even among cows at a certain point in their lineage, we bred this new form of casein protein, which is one of the two proteins in dairy. There's whey and there's casein.
And A1, I think it's currently a hypothesis. So it hasn't been proven or anything like that. But that for many people, A1, which is the primary type of dairy casein protein that we get in the modern food supply, is for many people a challenge. So then there's now on the market, there are a number of dairy producers that have put forth this A2, which is like the ancestral protein.
Yeah, dairy. So I don't make sense. I mean, from a gluten protein standpoint, we do the exact same thing with gluten, where there's a ton of different gluten grains that we could use, but we typically in our country only use a few. And those are the ones that withstand the environment and pests and all that. Right.
And so because we're only using those exact same grains over and over and we're not getting that variability, our immune system is becoming a lot more reactive to those specific strands than anything else.
If we used a variety of strands, we wouldn't be as immune reactive, but now we only use two, and we've only done that for the last 20 or 30 years, and now our population is getting more reactive to that. let alone we obviously spray it with glyphosate.
We take out the fiber, take out the protein, add sugar, add folic acid, do all these other things to make it last 30 years on the shelf that make it way more inflammatory. But yeah. But clinically, like you see when people remove it, they do better. Way better. Yeah. Wow. Interesting. Like not even close.
And that's where, you know, sometimes we'll simply do a food intolerance test, but there's sometimes we don't. And if we just have them remove, you know, dairy and gluten and sugar, stabilize their glucose levels, that's a huge change for them.
Wow. Is there a pro-inflammatory villain that you think is over-blamed that people think in the zeitgeist is like very inflammatory, but maybe we're looking in the wrong... I've never been asked that question.
It's a great question.
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