The TOP CAUSES Of Inflammation & How To Treat it NATURALLY! | Dr. Mark Hyman

today our modern lifestyle is driving so much hidden inflammation that leads to almost every known disease of Aging inflammation isn't just there randomly it's there because there's something causing it so what are the causes in drivers of inflammation well basically number one two and three is diet and guess what the number one two and three and diet thing is Sugar Sugar or the equivalent of sugar starch star starch so anything that sugar and starch drives inflammation particularly high fructose corn syrup so that should not be a staple in your diet unfortunately it is about 60 of our calories in America uh soda is the number one source of calories in America which is terrifying to me and the average American eats 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour every year that's enough to kill you know most of us pretty quickly and it does which is why we see where the sickest population in the world and so many people die from uh diet related diseases so it's in Sugar it's in high fructose corn syrup it's in processed flowers and Foods also inflammatory fats may be a factor so lots of refined oils nine of Omega-3s trans fat which have been ruled not safe to eat by the government but they're still everywhere in food I don't know how that works to be honest with you I guess there's little loopholes that the food industry gets to give them maybe years or decades but this was 2005 seven years ago they said hey guys trans fat kills you not safe to eat don't use it but if you go to the grocery store you can find it everywhere which is terrifying I mean more and more companies are removing it but it's still there also what else can cause low-grade inflammation sitting on your butt not exercising exercise is a powerful anti-inflammatory not over exercising not running a marathon but doing a modern amount of exercise every day really helps to lower inflammation stress another big cause of inflammation so nothing we do about stress it's out there bad things happen reading the news I try to stay away from the news by the way it's so stressful like I figure something really bad is happening I'll hear about it um but but uh the key is to find habits and behaviors that reduce your stress response meditation yoga you know hot and cold Therapies massage breathe breath work whatever whatever works for you try it but it's got to be a daily practice I do it every day today I worked out I did a sauna and a ice bath and that really helped me calm my nervous system I also deal with um toxins toxins are also inflammatory they're called immunotoxins low levels pesticides chemicals petrochemicals heavy metals I encourage you to go to the environmental working group's website ewg and find out how to reduce your exposure through food including fruits and vegetables animal products fish household cleaning products and even skin care products I mean did you know that lead is in a lot of lipsticks that a lot of skincare products have petrochemicals get absorbed through your skin and getting your body and cause harm yeah don't don't be doing that so uh also another source sometimes is uh latent infections we might not know we have it like a virus or tick infection or mold we're exposed to so those all can drive inflammation and of course our microbiome is probably one of the biggest sources of inflammation uh in US we all have an imbalanced microbiome mostly from our poor diet lack of fiber processed food so we want to cultivate our inner Garden I've written a lot about this we created a new product called gut food that helps people actually heal their gut and and and it's like a multivitamin for the gut so encourage you to check it out gutfood.com so really tending your inner Garden is so important because there's actually a phenomenon called metabolic endotoxemia this is a phenomena that is resulting from bad bugs that produce these toxic compounds called endotoxins that get absorbed through your gut lining into your bloodstream and then activate your immune system like for example these lipopolysaccharides which are these little endotoxins and then your immune system gets activated triggers inflammation and there's all the downstream causes consequences of that for example high levels of tnf alpha one of the inflammatory molecules it triggers insulin resistance so literally not even by changing your diet you can become pre-diabetic just by the toxic bacteria in your gut that's why they call it metabolic endotoxemia so what is inflammation what's the big deal why has it become so dangerous well inflammation is a natural part of your body's function it's essential yes you cut yourself what happens the white blood cells gather they come to the site to rescue they create swelling they bring all kinds of healing factors and what you see is redness and swelling and pain and heat that is the classic sign of inflammation in the body we should call that medical score rhubarb dolor corlorn tumor tumor just means swelling not tumor no that's anyway Latin whatever but the key is that it's this normal process that happens as a result of dealing with problems that go wrong but here's the rough in the past most of what we had to deal with was acute things that cause inflammation like a cut or an infection but today our modern lifestyle is driving so much hidden inflammation systemic chronic inflammation silent inflammation it's a silent killer and it turns out that it's not the kind of inflammation that we are familiar with like a sprained ankle or a sore throat or something that's an obvious kind of inflammation the kind that's good the kind that's we're talking about is the kind that's bad and that leads to almost every known disease of Aging heart disease cancer diabetes Alzheimer's not to mention things like add depression obviously autoimmune disease obviously allergies asthma all sorts of gut issues all these problems are caused by inflammation of course then the question is what causes inflammation we're going to get to that so from a functional medicine perspective I don't care that you're inflamed I care about why you're inflamed I don't want to give you an immune suppressant an anti-inflammatory drug a pile of aspirin I want to find out what the causes and get rid of it in functional medicine there's a simple rule and it's this it's called the tact rule if you're standing on attack it takes a lot of asthma to make it feel better take out the tack and if you're standing on two tacks taking one out doesn't make you 50 better so get rid of both of them okay and all of them maybe there's five or ten tax and that's the secret of functional medicine it's a method of investigating the body as a system looking for root causes and getting the body Back in Balance all right so what is the deal with this inflammation I mean I think you know when I when I was in medical school heart disease was a plumbing problem you know it was clogged arteries we now know that it's inflammation problem that the reason your cholesterol becomes an issue is because it gets inflamed and white blood cells scop up the cholesterol and stick it in the arteries causing plaque same thing happens in the brain Alzheimer's is inflammation the brain all those plaques in the brain come from inflammation um so cancer also is a disease of inflammation and when you for example look at various studies even with cholesterol if you're if your inflammation level is high but your cholesterol is also high you're at high risk but if your cholesterol is normal and your inflammations normally you're no risk but if your cholesterol is high and your inflammation is not high you really are not great risk and the worst is if you have obviously both so inflammation is a real big issue they did a study of an elderly population they found that if their CRP was high which was a blood test for inflammation and interleukin-6 another cytokine test for inflammation they had a 216 percent more likely chance of dying in the next four years so this is no joke so you might feel fine the other patient with me I don't know what's wrong I feel fine I don't I saw my blood test this I don't really care I feel fine why should I change what I'm doing I'm like well if you don't change what you're doing it might not go well for you now there's no guarantees that's true but it's likely true so the real concern isn't our response to an injury or an acute infection or something like that but this chronic smoldering inflammation that slowly destroys our organs and our ability to function and leads to Rapid Aging in fact I just finished my book on Aging called young forever and they talk about the Hallmarks of Aging one of the key Hallmarks is inflammation or they call it aging itself inflammaging and what happens with aging is Runaway inflammation that just degrades your whole body so understanding what inflammation is how to diagnose it and how to deal with it and get rid of it is so essential if you want to be healthy now what's the problem with the treatments we use why not just take Advil or aspirin or take a steroid like prednisone well they're fine for acute problems but when things are in this slow smoldering State they really don't work uh in fact the new data on aspirin was pretty scary about heart disease now it's going to help you and stabilize your blood blah blah blah prevent clotting but it turns out that the recommendations for Aspen were over enthusiastic and that there are certain patients who should be on aspirin but very few compared to the you know universal statement that everybody should take an aspirin to prevent heart disease no because it causes strokes and it causes uh bleeding which is not good like GI bleeding so you know uh if you if you look at those drugs like aspirin or Advil or Aleve they're not benign I mean they're really helpful when you need them but they can cause terrible gut issues I add gastritis for example after taking them for a broken arm and many many people die in fact many as many people die from taking those drugs as from asthma or leukemia so imagine if we literally eliminated those drugs we'd basically be essential it'd be the equivalent of curing leukemia or asthma so it's not not a joke um so you know statins for example even cholesterol drugs like statins like Lipitor they may not have their main effect by lowering cholesterol in fact it may be because they actually lower inflammation that's what they do it's a quote a side effect of the Statin but actually maybe their main effect so how do you know if you have inflammation is there a way to test for it is there a blood test well there are and there are more more coming so the most common one that people do is called C reactive protein it's high sensitivity C reactive protein and you're something your doctor can order it's on any lab panel you can get and you can also see that as a sign of hidden inflammation now if it's super high it could be infection but if it's in the sort of one to ten range that's usually the hidden inflammation um there ideally it should be less than one any higher than that means you're on your way now there are other blood tests you can check cytokines sed rate and so forth may not be as helpful but there's a new test by developed by a professor at Stanford called IH i a g e the meaning immune age and it really looks at your immunome which are 50 different cytokines many of which you've never heard of they're molecules that are regulating immunity inflammation that he was able to correlate by using artificial intelligence with disease so we found there really there were about four that highly correlated with your risk of heart attack cancer diabetes Alzheimer's and so forth what's so amazing that this test is really not that expensive it's easy to get and you can track it over time and then the good news is you can change things and change your inflammation anyway enough with that so um you know the reason we really don't track this is because doctors just kind of are not thinking about the root causes of disease they're like okay what's your symptom what are you suffering from okay let me find the drug that best matches that you know if you have a strep throat and it can give you penicillin grade I'll get a cure but most of them I'm just managing symptoms and uh or I'm giving you an immune suppressant and that's not the answer unfortunately so okay so let's say you've identified the causes you've figured out you have inflammation you know how do you live in anti-inflammatory lifestyle it's the same old stuff I hate to say it but it's eat real food lots of phytochemicals all those colorful plant compounds are anti-inflammatory uh all the the phytochemicals in food are so powerful for reducing inflammation also you know just real whole unrefined unprocessed foods not lots of sugar and starch not no trans fats no no refined oils and get lots of those phytonutrients good fats are really important too avocados olive oil extra virgin olive oil ideally omega-3 fats things like sardines Herring Sable wild salmon they're all really rich in omega-3 fats and they're very healthy for you exercise lots of research on exercise can reduce inflammation it helps your immune system it strengthens your heart it corrects insulin resistance and improves your mood it helps reduce stress I mean it's one of those Miracle therapies that can really do so much for you at so many levels practice active relaxation which sounds like a contradiction or an oxymoron but no you have to actively relax it's not I don't mean sitting watching TV drinking a beer I mean meditating doing yoga deep breathing getting a massage doing something where your body just kind of hits down into the parasympathetic State and calms your nervous system hot bath I love that last night I was a little had a very busy day uh Lots going on and I just took a hot bath with epsom salt and I just kind of floated away it was great also food sensitivity is another big factor you might not know this but a lot of hidden inflammation come from not allergies but food sensitivities things like gluten dairy and certain things that people react to that they may not know they react to so I often recommend an Elimination Diet like the 10 day detox diet that I've created to help people reduce their overall level of inflammation and then you can add back foods and see what's really the problem so maybe uh it'll made a lot of things and then you just add back one at a time and for example Dairy I know caused inflammation if I have dairy I get pimples my Skin's weird I get congestion so I don't need Dairy although I do manage to tolerate goat and sheep okay healing your gut you know doing a gut repair program that's why we've created gut food that's so important and I think many people would benefit from actually focused gut repair program because because a lot of their imbalanced bacteria are causing inflammation and lastly take it takes the right supplements a multivitamin fish oil vitamin D all help drop inflammation if you love that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here what is the causes of this problem and and from traditional medicine it really there's really no quote known cause but in fact from a functional medicine perspective there are really clear causes and we Now understand that more than we ever have in functional medicine

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 166,186

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: iattSxMI9SY

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 14 2022