VP#2 Calming Chronic Inflammation: Five Steps
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VARSHA: [00:00:00] Welcome to Functional Medicine with Dr. Var. This podcast is to help you explore the underlying root causes of your chronic symptoms and health challenges. Reset your health and reclaim your life.
VARSHA: did you know that the very thing that saves your life in the short term. Can also quietly steal your health if it never turns off. I'm talking about inflammation. An inflammation is your body's built-in healing system. But if it runs constantly, it's like a fire alarm that never stops blaring, and that nonstop alarm is a root cause of most chronic diseases including heart disease, arthritis.
Dementia, even cancer, and many more. Today I'm gonna break down the difference between acute and chronic inflammation. Explain how chronic inflammation damages the body, and most importantly, giving you five simple steps so that you can start turning down that fire and feeling [00:01:00] better.
Hi, I'm Dr. Var. I'm a double board certified physician in family and obesity medicine. With additional training in Functional integrative medicine. Each week we'll dive into topics that really matter for your health, from a Functional medicine perspective, uncovering root causes and sharing real strategies that you can use right away. Today we are talking about one of the most important concepts in Functional medicine, inflammation. So let's get into it.
I can't tell you how many patients walk into my clinic with the same story.
They're exhausted, achy. They can't think straight, and they're so frustrated because they feel like they just can't keep up with their life. There's so many things they wanna do, but they just don't have the energy. And when they go to their healthcare provider, they're told their labs look normal. Yet deep down they know something isn't right.
They don't feel like [00:02:00] themselves. That version of who they used to be or wants to be feels so outta reach. So they chalk it up to being older and think, I guess it's just the way I'm supposed to be. Have you ever felt that way? But. Here's what's really going on.
Their body is stuck in a chronic, smoldering state of inflammation, and the tricky part is it doesn't always show up clearly on your blood work. Meanwhile, it's quietly messing with your brain, causing brain fog, slowing your memory. It affects your joints causing stiffness and pain and your metabolism where you're starting to gain weight, even if you do the right things.
And that's just the beginning. I honestly believe inflammation is the root cause of most chronic diseases. But in conventional medicine, we don't usually frame it that way. We focus on the diagnosis. So for example, if someone has gastritis, which is literally just inflammation of your [00:03:00] stomach, the usual fix is a proton pump inhibitor like omeprazole
And often people stay on those meds for years, sometimes even forever. Because they don't wanna risk feeling bad or they try to go off the meds, but the symptoms come back.
What's missing is asking why the inflammation started in the first place. Why is your stomach inflamed? Because if we ask that question, then maybe we can address the causes. So then we can blunt those causes and you actually might be able to get on a lower dose or even get off of your medicine.
And that's where Functional medicine comes in. Because instead of stopping at the diagnosis, we dig deeper. You know, in conventional medicine we write a prescription and you're off on your way. We follow up in six months. Your symptoms controlled on the medicine.
Okay? You tried to get off it, you couldn't. Here's another year's worth of prescriptions. And I've been guilty of it too. So this isn't to blame conventional medicine doctors, sometimes we [00:04:00] get stuck as to what else to do, and that's why I'm such a proponent of Functional medicine to gimme additional tools to dig deeper.
But we wanna know what's driving your inflammation, what's causing you to not feel well, and the answer can be different for everyone. For one person who has gastritis, it could be stress and a poor diet for another. It might be that they have a food sensitivity or they're being exposed to toxins or deeper issues with their gut immune system, hormones or mitochondria that's causing their stomach to be inflamed.
So Functional medicine is a very personalized approach to try to figure out. What is causing it for you? And once we figure that out, we can start calming down those fuels to your fire and we can start to lower inflammation, which not only helps you feel better every day, but it protects you long term, reducing your risk for things like heart disease, heart attacks, strokes, and disability. Okay, so if inflammation is such a big deal, let's take a step [00:05:00] back and make sure we're on the same page about what it actually is.
Because here's the thing, not all inflammation is bad. In fact, short term inflammation is one of the most important ways your body heals. Think of it as your body's fire alarm system. You cut your finger, the alarms go off. Your immune cells come rushing in.
Blood flow increases and the wound heals. You catch a cold, same thing. The immune system ramps up. It comes to attack the virus. It prevents the virus from spreading and the alarm shuts off. That's a good thing. It's protective. It's life saving. But here's the problem. Sometimes that fire alarm never shuts off
So think of chronic inflammation this way. Your body is like a car engine. It is normal for the engine to heat up when you're driving, but if the engine keeps overheating, even when the car is parked, the parts eventually crack and the whole system breaks down. So if you have a lot of inflammation inside your body, it's gonna do [00:06:00] damage to your body. And here's how it unfolds.
Step by step, your immune system turns on because it's trying to help fight whatever's triggering it. But with chronic inflammation, the switch doesn't get turned off. It keeps going and going. It's stuck on, and your immune system keeps firing even if there's not really a threat. So even to minor stresses, it'll turn on when it doesn't have to because it's stuck.
The next thing that happens is your cells get stressed and damaged. The constant firing creates wear and tear on your cells, almost like rust, slowly eating away at metal and over time the cellular rust makes tissues and organs weaker and less able to repair on its own. Then
your mitochondria, which are your energy producers of your cells or your batteries get affected next. And when they are affected by this chronic inflammation, they don't work as efficiently. And so your mitochondria can't take your food and produce energy as [00:07:00] efficiently.
And thus you just feel more and more drained. Then your hormones can get disrupted. Stress hormones, your blood sugar and insulin regulation is affected. Your thyroid then can be awry all going haywire because. Of these changes that are happening,
and then eventually you get wear and tear on your organs. And if this continues for years, bigger systems break down your arteries harden, your joints ache, the brain slows down, and you end up with some sort of chronic disease.
And that's why chronic inflammation is often called the common soil of chronic disease. It damages your foundation until symptoms finally appear problem is the inflammation actually starts before you may even actually feel it until it's too late.
I'm gonna go over the symptoms that you may have if you do have chronic inflammation. Number one is feeling tired all the time, even after a full night's sleep. Number two is brain fog. You [00:08:00] feel like your thinking is slower, or you feel like you have a DHD that you keep forgetting things. Number three, you have achy joints and muscle stiffness and soreness doesn't go away.
Number four, digestive issues where your bowel movements are off, where you're alternating constipation and diarrhea
Number five, you might have skin changes such as eczema or acne, or even psoriasis.
Number six is frequent infections. You're sick all the time. You get over one thing and then. The next thing you know you're sick again, and you just feel like you've been sick for like three or four months.
Number seven, you have unexplained weight gain. You are doing all the right things. You're exercising, you're eating right, and the scale isn't moving. And you are so frustrated and your doctor just tells you to cut more calories, exercise more and more, or they're judgy and they don't believe you're telling the truth.
And then because you're so [00:09:00] tired, you're gaining weight, you're aching, you start to get depressed because inflammation can also affect your brain. And when you have brain inflammation, or we also call it neuroinflammation, that's gonna affect your mood and your memory and your ability to focus.
A lot of times we just brush it off to stress or getting older. And yes, stress does play a role, but it's not an end all be all. There are things that you can do.
It's not an overnight process. It is something that does take time. But yes, you can reverse your inflammation. You can start to feel better. Even conventional medicine is recognizing that it is possible to reverse chronic disease. They have the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, which is recognized by conventional medicine.
Who proposes that changes in your lifestyle can even reverse chronic disease. I mean, that's huge. They're opening up their minds, so it's very hopeful.
Alright, so let's [00:10:00] talk about what you can actually do about it. I'm gonna go over five simple doable steps that you can put into practice today to start calming down inflammation and you know, don't get overwhelmed by the inflammation. I like to just give people a lot of information, but. Just do what you can.
Pick one or two steps that's you can incorporate into your life, or listen to my Daily Wellness Tip podcast and I will be giving you a habit challenge to try each day. And at the end of the week, you can pick a couple of those habits to incorporate on a longer term basis.
All the small changes add up. So don't feel that you have to be perfect with these steps. If we're always trying to get perfectionism, then you'll never move ahead. You need to focus on progress and focus on how often you're doing these habits
Just keep trying, and eventually a lot of these habits will start to be part of your everyday norm. [00:11:00] So number one is upgrade your plate. Make your plate colorful. There are so many foods that have color in them, such as fruits, vegetables, spices, dark chocolate, even beans, legumes, and Omega-3 rich foods.
These all help calm down the inflammatory fire and there are six major groups of colors, red, orange. Yellow, green and blue, purple, black and white, tan, brown. These colors are important because they have something called polyphenols in them. That's what gives them their rich color.
And these polyphenols are also antioxidants, which help neutralize free radicals and free radicals are. Um, unstable molecules that are in our body that are a result of the various chemical processes that are going on, or even just from our diet. If you eat a lot of processed foods, you're generating a lot of free radicals, but these free radicals can damage our [00:12:00] DNA.
They can damage our tissues and our organs , which set us up for chronic disease. So these polyphenols, because they're also antioxidants, can neutralize these free radicals and thus help prevent some of the damage. So I'm not proposing to eat donuts, but if you do eat donuts,
eat a colorful salad with it to at least get some antioxidants to try to neutralize some of those free radicals from the donut. And you may have heard the term oxidative stress. So oxidative stress is basically the balance of free radicals to antioxidants. If you have more pre radicals than you do antioxidants, so they can't be neutralized, that means you have high oxidative stress.
If you have. More antioxidants than free radicals. Then you have low oxidative stress, and that's favorable.
But anyways, studies have shown that these polyphenols can lower inflammation. They improve your gut health because they are a food source for the good bacteria in your [00:13:00] gut. So they allow the good bacteria to make certain substances that help lower inflammation. And these substances that these good bacteria produce from eating the polyphenols also can help signal some of your appetite and satiety hormones, so it plays a role in your weight. They also can signal neurotransmitters, so they play a role in your mood, but emerging research has shown that these.
Substances that are produced, which are called short-chain fatty acids, may actually protect your brain health and could reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. But you know, more research is needed. But it's very exciting that they're looking at this. So ideally, you wanna get one to two servings from each color group each day.
That can seem like a lot if you're not hardly eating any vegetables. So if you're not, just pick one color group for that day. Okay? I'm gonna get one or two servings of a green vegetable on Monday. Tuesday. I'll pick orange Wednesday, I'll might go for it and pick two color groups, like the [00:14:00] blue, purple, black, and the red.
The important thing is just getting a variety and mixing it up. Don't always eat. Green fruits and vegetables every day. So if you eat a salad every day, that's great, but if you're not eating other, other colors, you could be missing out on some of these other polyphenols
so each polyphenol color has different purposes and it's too much to go into now, all the different types. But perhaps I will do that on a future video if anybody's interested.
The second strategy is to cut back on sugar and processed foods. So sugar is the most potent fuel for inflammation. And it makes me sad because I do love a good gummy bear, but sugar fuels this fire and here's why. First. In your body, Sugar creates something called an advanced glycation end product, and these are sticky and they're damaged proteins that build up inside your body, so it's like rust on your tissues, it's stiffening [00:15:00] your arteries, it's damaging the collagen in your skin, so you start aging faster.
I mean, sugar is almost as bad as cigarettes as far as aging, these advanced glycation end products, or they're also called ages, are highly inflammatory. So every bite of sugar is literally feeding the fire. The other thing is sugar spikes insulin.
When you eat a sugary food that causes your blood sugar to go up, your body will start releasing insulin to bring it back down. But when this happens over and over again, you can develop something called insulin resistance, where your cells stop responding well to insulin, so your body has to make more to in order to control your blood sugars, and then insulin itself can trigger inflammation.
And the high blood sugars also trigger inflammation.
So your body starts to pump out more and more insulin, and if you're insulin resistant but you're not yet pre-diabetic or diabetic, your that insulin will actually work, and it may even drop your sugars to where you're [00:16:00] feeling hypoglycemic, which then triggers your appetite more and makes you eat more sugar to feel better, and then also continues to fuel that inflammation.
Now when you have high levels of insulin, that's a problem itself because insulin is also inflammatory.
Sugar also disrupts your gut. It feeds the bad bacteria in your gut, so it allows the bad bacteria to produce substances that actually may increase inflammation. It also will affect your digestion, your cell wall integrity in your gut, where you may get leaky gut, or we call it intestinal permeability.
And it also may disrupt the signaling from those short chain fatty acids, which regulate your appetite and satiety hormones to where it causes you to gain weight and possibly even burn less calories when you work out or. Extract more calories from the foods that you're eating.
And then finally, uh, sugar drives the oxidative stress. When you eat sugar, you make more free radicals and thus you'll have higher oxidative [00:17:00] stress, especially if you aren't eating any fruits or vegetables.
So cutting out sugar can be challenging if you are eating a lot of it because you might end up with a withdrawal headache. Uh, usually a withdrawal headache can last three to five days, but it can be very disabling and hard to deal with, so then you ate sugar and you feel better. So what I would suggest instead of doing anything drastic is just pick one thing that you're gonna swap out.
Your sugary food for. So pick your breakfast muffin, for example, and swap it out with some unsweetened gluten-free oatmeal with some blueberries on there. And then you can also put some chia hemp and ground flax seeds on it for some omega threes, which reduce inflammation and also have some fiber.
And if you really need something sweet, I prefer allulose. That's my favorite one. But Allulose doesn't have any impact on your blood sugar. There's also stevia and monk fruit. So those are the three sweeteners I [00:18:00] would choose from. I would try to stay away from the other ones like sucralose, aspartame Acesulfame potassium but uh, those possibly could still trigger your insulin.
Response. There's conflicting data on that, but I would just stay away from it.
And then as you start with one swap, then you can continue to make more and more healthier swaps. You could swap out your. Soda with some sparkling water with lemon instead.
If you grab, candy or chips, you could try walnuts or berries, and they might be more filling. I like to make my own trail mix with some walnuts, almonds, , you have to be careful with cranberries, but I found that Trader Joe's has some unsweetened cranberries and they have no added sugar in them.
I'll just take a dark chocolate square and break it up in there. But that's a healthier trail mix than some of the ones you buy in the store.
All right. The third strategy is prioritizing sleep. Sleep. Is when your body repairs itself. So if you are getting less than seven hours of sleep, and [00:19:00] especially if you're getting less than six hours of sleep, you are not allowing your body to repair itself. So if you are doing damage during the day, your body doesn't have a chance to recover.
You wake up the next day and you're still in that inflammatory state, and then you continue to add more to it over time, that just adds up and you're not going to feel great.
Now during the deep sleep, your body activates its anti-inflammatory pathways and it clears out the waste that builds up during the day. Your brain even has its own cleaning system, the glymphatic system that flushes out toxins and inflammatory proteins, including the ones linked to Alzheimer's.
And then here's another fascinating fact that deep sleep also increases something called BDNF, brain-derived Neurotrophic factor. Think of BDNF as your growth fertilizer for your brain cells. It helps repair existing neurons, grow new connections, and protects your brain from damaging effects of stress and inflammation Without enough sleep, [00:20:00] BDNF levels drop and your brain literally has a harder time.
Healing, learning and remembering. So when you don't sleep enough, your cortisol shoots up, your immune cells go into overdrive and your body pumps out more. Inflammatory chemicals and research shows that even a single night of poor sleep can raise those inflammatory markers by 25 to 40%.
So if you're not sleeping enough, you're getting a double whammy because you're not getting the full repair. But then to top it off, these inflammatory markers are going up too as well. And over time, poor sleep keeps your body stuck in a state of chronic low grade inflammation, the very same kind that'll drive heart disease, Alzheimer's, dementia.
Or other dementia and accelerated aging. And you also wanna make sure you're getting quality of sleep. So even if you are sleeping enough hours, you wanna make sure that you're not waking up periodically where you might have sleep apnea. [00:21:00] You know, I have a lot of patients that think they get up to go to the bathroom, but we're finding that it's really sleep apnea that's waking them up and they think they have to go to the bathroom.
But if you have sleep apnea and it's not treated, that can really increase your risk for dementia.
You wanna have good sleep hygiene, you wanna shut down screens at least an hour before bed, and you want to also make sure the temperature is nice and cool. Usually 68 to 69 degrees are good for most people. And , having some sort of nighttime ritual also helps relax you for bed, whether it's meditating, reading a good book, or just spending time with family and enjoying their company.
What you wanna do is if you are sleeping, five hours a night, then you know, for a week or two, try going to bed. , 10 minutes earlier, or waking up 10 minutes later, and if you can even do 15, that's even better.
And then every couple weeks, just keep adding more time until you're at least reaching the minimum goal of seven hours.
[00:22:00] And instead of thinking of sleep, just taking away from the time. Instead of thinking of sleep as something that is stealing the time away from things you need to do, think of it as a way, think of sleep as your repair time where you are rebuilding, resetting, and protecting your brain and body.
And prioritizing. Sleep isn't a luxury. It's one of the most powerful tools you have to slow down aging, boost your energy, and protect your long-term health. All right. The fourth strategy is to move gently and consistently. You don't need an intense workout. In fact, if you're chronically inflamed and chronically stressed, gentler, easier, lower impact workouts are actually better because you don't wanna further increase your cortisol and stress on your body because then you will find that you are.
Seriously hurting the day after a workout, and then you won't do it anymore. But just try to do small and steady. Just start with a 10 to 15 minute walk after a meal. That can [00:23:00] really shift your body's chemistry. It also helps reduce the sugar load, so it also helps from the sugar aspect so that you don't get these insulin surges.
And plus, if you're walking on your lunch hour, you get some light exposure, which is also very good to help, uh, lower inflammation.
And number five is to stress less. Have some sort of stress management practice in place that you do on a everyday basis, even if you feel like you're not stressed, because it helps reset your nervous system instead of being in the stress inflammatory state because stress raises inflammation. It gets your body into being more resilient.
Because what happens is when you have a lot of inflammation, especially when your brain is inflamed, any little thing that you are asked to do feels like you have to walk through mud to do it.
But if your body's rewired where your stress system is not the go-to, and you're more often activating your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your anti-stress [00:24:00] system, then when people ask you to do things, it doesn't seem so life altering .
But there are many different activities and if you Google vagal nerve stimulation exercises, ' because the vagus nerve is basically the parasympathetic system. This is what keeps you calm. But if you Google that. Then you will find a bunch of resources on different exercises that you can do.
I also have a video on 10 activities to help trigger this parasympathetic nervous system and to reduce your stress naturally. And I'll leave the link in the description. Okay, here's the bottom line.
Inflammation isn't just about being brain foggy, tired, achy. It's the hidden driver behind a lot of chronic diseases from heart disease to diabetes to cognitive decline. But the good news is you can start making small changes that will add up over time to help reduce your inflammation , and it will make a difference.
Every choice you make. Whether [00:25:00] it's what you eat, how you sleep, how you move, how you manage stress is either adding to your inflammation or not. I encourage you to be more aware about it when you're eating, think about is this a food that's gonna help my inflammation or not?
Because sometimes that is enough for you to pivot and make a different change. But if we are just on autopilot and we're not really aware of it, we may tend to just go for whatever we think is gonna make us feel better in the short time. And it does make you feel better in the short run, but think of the long-term consequences.
Start with a small step . And as you feel comfortable with that small step, add more small steps and eventually you will have added a lot of small steps which will compound and help crush inflammation over time. And you'll have less habits that are fueling your inflammation and more habits that are anti-inflammatory.
Small changes lead to big results. I hope this was helpful, [00:26:00] and if you enjoy this episode, please watch my daily wellness tips that are about three to five minutes long and it has a daily habit challenge for you to incorporate that day.
After a year of doing these habits, you could feel a lot healthier
If you like to watch things on video, these will also be on my YouTube channel, Functional Medicine with Dr. Var
and on my YouTube channel. I also have additional videos that aren't. posted on this podcast, so you may wanna check that out if you're interested. And then please share this with someone that may benefit. Thanks for listening or watching, and have a fantastic day.
