What I Tell Anyone Who Struggles With Inflammation + How To Get Back To Optimal Health

Inflammation is an essential, natural part of your body's system. If you get a cut or catch a virus, acute inflammation helps fight off the intruder and repair damaged tissue.

But for some people, there is a violent storm going on within their bodies and they don't even know it: the storm of chronic, low-grade inflammation. This is not natural, and over time, this chronic inflammation is associated with many diseases—from the painful inflammation of arthritis to the systemic inflammation of heart disease to the insidious variety that's associated with brain fog, fatigue, and weight gain.

CRP: C-Reactive Protein is an inflammatory protein. It is also a surrogate lab to measure IL-6, another pro-inflammatory protein. They are both linked to chronic inflammatory health problems.

Optimal Range: < 0.5 mg/L

Homocysteine: This inflammatory amino acid is linked to heart disease and destruction of the blood-brain barrier and dementia. This is also commonly seen with people struggling with autoimmune problems.

Optimal Range: < 7 Umol/L

Ferritin: This lab is normally run to look at stored iron levels, but it's also considered acute phase reactant, and when high it's a sign of inflammation.

Once you get a baseline for what your inflammation levels look like, I recommend investigating why you have chronic inflammation in the first place. Consider these labs, which could help:

Methylation gene testing: Methylation is a biochemical superhighway that helps maintain a healthy brain and gut, protects our DNA, and detoxes our bodies. Gene mutations such as MTHFR polymorphism can inhibit your body's ability to bring down inflammation levels, such as homocysteine.

GI labs: Your gut is the foundation of health. By running labs we can rule out underlying gut problems like leaky gut syndrome and inflammatory gut proteins, such as calprotectin. It's also a good idea to look for microbiome dysfunctions like SIBO and candida overgrowth, to understand sources of inflammation.

Many of you probably already avoid junk foods. But just because something is better than the Standard American Diet, doesn't mean it's optimal for you.

What the heck are PPARs? Studies suggest that Peroxisome Proliferator–activated Receptors (PPARs) may help improve inflammatory conditions such as atherosclerosis, asthma, colitis, MS, and other autoimmune conditions.

Nrf-2, a protein, plays a role in regulating antioxidant gene induction. Nrf-2 actually turns on genes that are responsible for antioxidant and detox pathways. Inflammation is calmed when Nrf-2 is activate, and worse when there are low levels of Nrf-2.

One particularly bad guy in high amounts is the inflammatory nuclear factor kappa B, or NF-kB for short. When NF-kB is activated in the body, it actually binds to your DNA and triggers a number of different inflammatory cascades in the body. NF-kB has been implicated in the pathogenesis of many chronic inflammatory conditions.