Okay, we all get it, we need to exercise more, and it's certainly not a new innovation by any means. Most of us just know that with exercise comes desirable body weight and aesthetics, however, in reality you should be doing physical activity for so many more reasons…one of many is to reduce inflammation.
How Inflammation Affects You
Let’s take some time to chat about inflammation. Inflammation is your bodies protective response to eliminate the cause of injury and repair cells and tissues that may be damaged. This happens by increasing blood flow to the point of injury or infection and recruiting immune cells and proteins for clean up and rebuilding. For most, inflammation means the swelling of a body appendage when you injure yourself or get a cold. This type of short term inflammation is known as acute inflammation, it’s short lived and usually goes away within hours or a few days. Another, more serious, form of inflammation is known as chronic inflammation, it’s slow (usually so slow you don’t realize it until it’s too late) and builds up over time. Chronic inflammation can start when your initial immune response gets altered and can no longer do its appropriate job to eradicate and repair. It’s attributed to many age onset diseases, such as heart disease, Alzheimer's and cancer.
Overtime, your immune system begins to weaken and biological garbage that may have once been cleared away by your young and active defensive line, begins to build up. Subsequently, your immune system may notice a build up of junk and try to clear it away by calling its guards to the infected site (the biological irony!)...however your weakened and dysfunctional immune system can no longer get the job done before more waste piles up. Your body enters the state of chronic inflammation, a vicious cycle of too much work to do and not enough proper help to accomplish it. As depressing as it is, scientists are still working on ways to reverse chronic inflammation, a question that has boggled researchers for years.
How do we prevent this?
Ask a professional. Know your family health history and know what you should be looking out for! See a doctor or genetic counselor, talk to them about concerns.
Get your waist in line. Fat cells produce pro-inflammatory cytokines (cytokines are little protein messages your immune system sends around the body to know how to react to changes in your body) like IL-6 and TNF-α. These messages are sent to recruit immune responders to a questionable site that needs to be fixed, which causes inflammation. If you have more sites inflammation occurring in your body, it's more likely to have an immune system dysfunction (much like a working office, if you have too much work and not enough people to help complete the jobs something won't get done and problems will arise). To put it simply, the more excess fat you have, the more problems you're likely to encounter.
START EXERCISING (this might be the easiest on the addendum, and can help check off the previous points). Exercise has been found to reduce inflammation by producing anti-inflammatory cytokines like IL-4 and IL-10*. These anti-inflammatory molecules communicate with your immune cells to let them know that everything is fine...no need to freak out. It’s been reported that even with 20-30 minutes of extra physical activity added to your daily routine, can decrease your inflammation and slow down onset of these disease.
Wrapping it up.
Yes, inflammation is way more complicated than that, and chronic inflammation still has a lot of unanswered questions. No, there are not any single perfect cures to many of these diseases caused by chronic inflammation, such as Alzheimer's and cancer, although scientists are working hard everyday to make this happen. Lastly, we can do our best to prevent by keeping ourselves healthy and exercising more!
***I want to note that yes, when you exercise you will be slightly tearing muscles, which will rebuild causing acute inflammation. But remember, this is the short term inflammation, and studies have shown that overall inflammation is reduced by exercise.
If you want to learn more about how the inflammation or check the sources I used to write this, please see these publications and sources that I took from:
http://nnr.sagepub.com/content/29/6/577.full.pdf+html
http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2016summer/inflammation-implication.html
http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2016summer/what-can-we-do-.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI-BLaj5nFk&list=PLA3Q2987XBPhQ9yLT_xaeNAH-_BONQH0T
![Eat Yo Greens! [and not ONLY because your Mom said so.]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/94c8f9_b7788a6c1b384adfb8afac0db67caf00~mv2_d_1836_3264_s_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_175,h_311,fp_0.50_0.50,q_90,enc_auto/94c8f9_b7788a6c1b384adfb8afac0db67caf00~mv2_d_1836_3264_s_2.jpg)
