Inflammatory Control

Why do you hurt? Why is it that your hip has a twinge after a long run – or your Achilles is tight following a hard ride? You can think of pain and inflammation, as different sides of a coin – front and back or heads and tails – whatever analogy you prefer. The point is that pain and inflammation are driven by different – but related – biochemical factors. The good news is that we have a number of natural options that are safe and effective for controlling both pain and inflammation.

Both pain and inflammation are normal body processes – without them we would literally not be able to survive for very long. Pain is a signal to your body that damage is occurring and you need to stop doing whatever it is that is causing that damage. Inflammation is a process controlled by the immune system that protects us from invading bacteria and viruses, but also helps regulate heart function, blood flow, and many vital functions. Keeping a normal balance of pain signals and inflammatory balance is vital to good health and well-being. When this balance becomes disrupted – or unbalanced – we experience more inflammation and increased pain and less flexibility and reduced mobility. When we have too much inflammation, this process that is supposed to be protecting us actually causes more and more damage. For example, an overactive inflammatory response is known to stimulate bone breakdown (leading to osteoporosis) and interfere with cartilage repair (leading to a worsening of arthritis).

Your doctor may have given your unbalanced inflammation another kind of label – one that ends in “itis” (in medical terminology, “-itis” is used to denote inflammation). So you may have arthritis (inflammation of the joint – “arthros” is latin for joint), or tendonitis (inflammation of the tendon), or fasciitis (inflammation of the fascia – the tough layer of connective tissue over muscles, tendons and ligaments that can be come inflamed following excessive exercise).

Normal Inflammatory Balance Versus Chronic Inflammation
Your normal process of inflammation helps to dismantle and recycle older cartilage and other connective tissues (tendons, ligaments, muscles, etc) that have become damaged or worn out or simply need repairing. This process is called “turnover” – where older tissue is replaced with newer tissue. When we’re young (before the age of 30 or so) this turnover process is perfectly balanced – for every bit of cartilage that is damaged and removed – another similar (or greater) bit is put in its place. This means that, under normal circumstances, we’re always making our connective tissue – our cartilage and bones and muscles and tendons and ligaments – stronger and more resilient. After about age 30, however, our turnover process becomes a bit less efficient year after year. This causes a very slight loss of healthy tissue – where we breakdown and remove a certain amount, but the amount of healthy tissue added back is just a little bit less than it should be. As we age, the turnover process becomes less and less efficient and our body’s ability to heal itself from injury is reduced. This imbalance in tissue turnover and inflammatory balance is the primary cause of the loss of flexibility and the various “itis” diseases that we all tend to encounter as we age.

Let’s keep in mind that not all inflammation is bad – remember that inflammation is part of the normal healing and turnover process for any tissue. It’s just when we get too much inflammation that things go awry. When this happens, healing is suppressed and tissue destruction is accelerated – your body simply cannot heal itself or stop the damage when the inflammatory process is unbalanced. To illustrate this point, think about the ocean crashing against a protective seawall. The seawall is your joint and other tissues, and the ocean is your inflammatory process. Over time, that wall will become broken and weakened by the crashing waves and will need to be repaired back to optimal function. If the pace of repair fails to keep up with the pace of destruction, then the seawall fails and the ocean comes rushing in (leading to total destruction and dysfunction). We need to maintain the integrity of the seawall (your joint) by keeping up with repair and maintenance – but we can’t even do that if the ocean is continually crashing down on us.

Luckily, there is a plethora of scientific and medical evidence that shows us how to use diet, exercise, and supplementation to “calm” the ocean (to reduce damage caused by excessive inflammation) and the accelerate tissue repair (keep that seawall intact). It’s all a question of balance. We want to maintain that normal inflammatory balance, so we can maintain a normal pace of tissue turnover, and thus balance healthy tissue, flexibility and mobility. As soon as we fall out of inflammatory balance – even by a little bit – we see a little bit more tissue deterioration, leading to a little more inflammation and still more tissue breakdown. Once this vicious cycle of inflammation/damage has begun, it can be very difficult to stop – unless you have a comprehensive plan (like Intense Defense) to re-balance inflammation from multiple perspectives.