Understanding inflammation

[Music] hi guys um my name is Sanjay Gupta I am a cardiologist in York hospital and today I wanted to talk to you about something I'm very passionate about and that is the subject of inflammation so this talk is entitled understanding inflammation and inflammation is really um Central to understanding why heart disease develops and in some ways [Music] um once you understand inflammation you understand you will understand why people develop problems um and how you can go about minimizing your chance of developing heart problems okay so the um the first thing to say is that every action has a reaction when it comes to the body okay if you do something to the body then the body will react and there are a variety of different ways to do things to the body so for example I want to show you two uh little um things I have in my hand a knife and I have in my hand a toothbrush right okay so a lot of people will think oh the knife is more dangerous than the toothbrush because if I for example um uh cut my cut my skin with the knife then I am causing an acute injury to my skin and my body will react to that injury and what will happen is my I will start bleeding my after I start bleeding a clot will form and then um my skin will be red and hot for a few days and as long as I leave it alone it will settle and I'll be left with a tiny small scar which after a few weeks so months will not even be visible now so most people think oh this knife is more dangerous than the toothbrush now the toothbrush actually so what I've just explained to you with the knife is what is called acute inflammation okay acute inflammation means you have a big insult uh you have a reaction from the body the body reacts with getting red and hot and then it bleeds and the scar forms and then the inflammation settles down now think of I want to explain to you what chronic inflammation is okay chronic inflammation is me taking my hand for example let me just show you this um and if I take this toothbrush and I run it over my hand like this all right and I keep running it and I keep running it and keep running it I keep running it I keep running keep running it and then after a little while what will happen is my skin will start going great all right it'll go red and it'll look a little bit hot it won't be as painful as me cutting myself with a knife but it'll still be a little bit red and a little bit angry now imagine if I do that all the time I keep doing that I keep doing that I keep doing that if I keep doing that after a while what will happen is my skin will start permanently getting affected it'll become um it'll change texture it will become more fragile it'll be more uh discolored it'll it'll it'll start looking more ulcerated the skin will start thickening over it and actually it from time to time it will start bleeding you know so after a little while after months of me just rubbing this toothbrush against my skin um eventually you will find that it'll get itchy it will bleed whenever it wants to even a little insult to this will be that is what chronic inflammation is okay chronic inflammation is continuous inflammation which may not be hideously um painful or uh dramatic in the first instance but it is just going on and it is slowly and slowly slowly causing these horrible changes to happen and making this area very vulnerable and this is what happens uh with our heart arteries when we have when we are putting things inside our body uh which the body is not used to the body reacts okay if we put our body through things it shouldn't do have to do if we put our body through excessive stress then the body reacts um and that reaction is the inflammation and that reaction is usually measured by the sort of things like cortisol and adrenaline and inflammatory markers and interleukins and things like things called tumor necrosis Factor Alpha but basically the body reacts all right and the body is trying to react because um in the hoop that um the inflammation you know it'll it inflamed in the hope that the insult will go away and everything will start healing but actually if the inflammation doesn't go away the body continues reacting and all these chemicals that the body is producing in response can in the long run start harming the body and this is what happens when we say eat bad things this is what happens when we smoke for example uh we're putting chemicals in the body reacts but if you keep doing it you get this chronic inflammatory reaction and this happens in our blood vessels okay it happens in other tissues as well but it happens in our blood vessels and what then happens is we start developing hardening of Our arteries because of this continuous inflammation that goes on and because you develop this hardening of the arteries the arteries are never the same okay and because they become hardened they become rougher cholesterol bits of cholesterol come and join in on them and slowly and gradually the heart artery gets starts getting narrower this is what coronary diseases this is what atherosclerosis is this is what everyone worries about because once your heart arteries once your arteries start getting diseased you will never go back to the way they were you have done permanent damage to those right now a lot of the people a lot of management a lot of treatment is aimed at preventing the heart arteries from getting very narrow and because um once the heart arteries get narrower and narrower and narrower they will stop blood from getting through to where the blood is needed okay and eventually in the most severe form if they close up it would cause a heart attack but before they close up they will get so narrow that they would actually stop blood from getting through when the demand is raised so when the heart is beating faster the Blood can't get through and therefore a lot of these people who have this will say I'm I was fine six months ago now I walk um uh 500 yards I get this chest discomfort I get breathless I have to stop and as I stop the discomfort goes away so basically what's happened is as they're walking their heart rate goes up the heart wants more blood but the blood can't get through quick enough through the narrowing and because of that the person develops symptoms of chest discomfort and therefore stops and then the blood can get through because the heart is not beating so fast so it doesn't require as much and because the blood can then get through the discomfort goes away but there is more than this okay so that is what happens if you keep getting the hardening of the arteries but remember what can also happen because these arteries are now more fragile like the skin which has been continuously excoriated by the toothbrush it can bleed and you know a slight insult slight slight um extra excoriation on top of what has already happened can cause it to bleed and that's what happens sometimes in people so they have this disease they have this fragile uh area in their heart arteries and then they go through another level of inflammation something else causes more inflammation maybe they go under extreme stress or maybe they develop an infection or maybe something else happens some kind of event happens and then what happens is that the area which is excoriated starts bleeding and when it bleeds then a clot has to form to stop the bleeding and when the clot forms that clot although it's designed to stop the bleeding where this excoriated area is it actually uh inadvertently blocks off the whole blood vessel and therefore bloodstocks going through and you have a heart attack and that is without warning the heart attack just happens out of the blue there's been no preceding symptoms of discomfort of the chest after walking or anything patient as well suddenly has a heart attack and often such patients can drop down dead as well so why am I telling you this I'm telling you this because one of the most important things we can do for ourselves is reduce the inflammation that goes on in our bodies okay because we know that certain things cause inflammation so if we avoid doing those certain things then we will reduce the inflammation so what are those things that cause inflammation number one by far turn away more important than everything else is bad food supermarket food food that's got preservatives food that's got additives food that's had pesticides spread over it food with excessive amounts of sugar you know processing um this is by far the worst thing we can do but we do it we do it happily because to when we go to the supermarket we don't see this we see this we think this is harmless it's not this is this is worse than this in the chronic state and therefore I think that this is by far the biggest problem that we face and this is why we see so much heart disease it is nutrition and the nutrition that we are exposed to these days is um fed To Us by greedy people who are not interested in our health they are not interested in whether we live or die they're interested in making a quick buck and therefore it is very very important for ourselves to try and reclaim our health back to try and avoid processed food to try and avoid all this kind of rubbish that goes on in supermarkets and try and see if you can get access to local locally grown food food that has been grown by someone you know or someone you can trust rather than some obscure person you know who you don't know and who doesn't know you uh which is what most supermarket food is number two smoking smoking also causes a huge level of inflammation in the body you know and that is why they say that sometimes it's not just about how yeah cumulative amount of smoking that is of course important but even one cigarette if you're unlucky enough could cause that little bit of bleeding and if that bleeding happens then the clot happens and the clot happens that's when you have a heart attack out of the blue and that is why it's so important that when you when you're smoking to stop smoking completely not to cut down to stop smoking completely because every cigarette has that potential of causing a heart attack number three um sleep you know people don't sleep enough it is incredibly important to sleep sleep is a natural anti-inflammatory and it reduces the amount of inflammation it allows things to heal all right remember cortisol adrenaline these are all things that propagate this if you sleep everything comes down it gives your blood vessels a chance to heal um what else exercise exercise is really important the more exercise the more sort of the you know moderate exercise you get the better I'm not talking about very uh severe unaccustomed exercise I'm not talking about running Ultra marathons but I do think it is very important to get some degree of cardiovascular exercise uh every day all right um even though if that would be you know just jogging on the treadmill for 30 minutes great stuff hugely anti-inflammatory hugely beneficial um stress stress is hugely inflammatory you know everyone is stressed we're bombarded by the media we're bombarded by everyone we're bombarded by the politicians and we're put under so much stress and stress is hugely inflammatory and that will undoubtedly cause this kind of inflammation within the body um uh similarly negative emotions like anger anger is hugely inflammatory um anxiety is hugely inflammatory depression is hugely inflammatory if you have other conditions like diabetes people who have chronic conditions like rheumatoid arthritis ulcerative colitis you know inflammatory bowel disease I think even things like reflux are very inflammatory and so gastroesophageal reflux so it's really important to try and suppress your inflammation levels to date we are not at that stage where we can predict who's going to have a heart attack and who isn't despite all the technology we have people still have heart attacks out of the blue and are our technology is not sophisticated enough to um tell us who is going to have a heart attack and who isn't and I suspect that the answer lies in something called the inflammatory index or the inflammatory load now this is not something that is done routinely but I think that at some point someone is going to develop a way of measuring how inflamed you are and I suspect that we probably cross a threshold of how inflamed we are and once we cross that threshold that's when things start going wrong with our bodies and therefore I think that a lot of if we modify Our Lives according to how inflamed we are and try and take holidays and cut out our workloads and cut down on our stress levels as for our inflammatory levels then um then there is going to be a substantial decrease in sudden heart attacks there's going to be a decrease in the development of a heart disease now you've heard this here first no one has done this so far and I suspect that someone will or 50 years from now I may not be around by then but if you are please tell them you heard this first here all right so um I may be wrong of course but uh this is what I think so I I just wanted to point out inflammation to you and undoubtedly we know that 80 of Western diseases are now due to Lifestyle all right it is not something that is inherent in us but something we are doing to our body it's also worth remembering that a ton of people come to me with heart disease now and I say well you know yeah I look and I find that they've been smoking although they were smokers and they turn around and say well yeah I know I've got heart disease I used to smoke but in those days no one told us that smoking was harmful so we used to just smoke that's true no one is telling us that supermarket food is bad for us and no one is telling us that all the stress is bad for us uh no one is telling us that all the sugar that is put in the food these days when we buy it is bad for us but I wouldn't be surprised if 30 40 years down the line we have heart disease and we turn around and tell their doctors then that oh well you know that's what it was you know no one told us this everyone did it and so we did it and here we are um uh reaping the consequences off those mistakes which are not really your mistakes this is really driven by uh greedy people who run the food industry uh the tobacco industry and the media who are very responsible for the amount of stress that we're under so I hope this was useful um my name is Sanjay Gupta I'm a consultant cardiologist I have a website your Cardiology dot Co dot UK I have the Facebook page and um I have a long-suffering secretary Jeanette so if you ever want to get in touch with me please feel free to get in touch with me by Jeanette on my website and I'd be delighted to talk to you I um if you found this useful then please do consider sharing it because it means a lot to me to know that my message is getting across in a world where you know [Music] what is fed To Us by the media and and about help is not really about health it's more about disease and I'm really passionate about driving this message of let's be healthy let's reclaim our health let's try and stop a disease from happening rather than worrying about getting sorted once we've developed a disease because Often by that time you can never go back once you've got this inflammation in your skin and you've done 10 years of damage to it it will never be the same again so thank you so much for listening if you like this please share the video and give me a call you know send me a message all the best take care bye oh by the way it's a really important day for a member of the York Cardiology family so our mom happy birthday all right bye

Channel: York Cardiology

Views: 157,238

Keywords: #hangoutsonair, Hangouts On Air, #hoa, inflammation, heart disease, heart attacks, palpitations, sanjay gupta, yorkcardiology

Id: 1yldV0L1FiI

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2016