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It seems everyone and everything is inflamed, but is that really such a bad thing?
From cortisol to caffeine, the wellness world loves a scapegoat for stress. It’s easy to blame life’s problems on some controllable symptom that can be stifled with the right pill or lavish morning routine.
The latest buzzword to take charge of the health conversation is ‘inflammation’. To look at any wellness page is to feel as though we’re all inflamed, and everything from our food to our schedules is causing it.
This kind of inflammation is both specific and vague – it lingers beneath the surface, disrupting our energy levels and digestive systems. Even our hormones. It’s not the inflammation that comes from a sprained ankle. ‘Chronic inflammation’ as the wellness lot have dubbed it, is more subtle.
Like most catch-all terms thrown about in pursuit of longevity, ‘inflammation’ has been commercialised to make the rich richer and the health-conscious anxious. Expensive retreats have cropped up promising anti-inflammatory schedules, hotels and restaurants are even redesigning their menus to accommodate an ‘anti-inflammatory diet’, and fitness influencers are sharing their daily eats designed to target so-called inflammation.
But what does this actually mean? And it inflammation – in this wishy-washy form – actually all that bad?
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Let’s have a look at the science. Inflammation can be defined as both acute and chronic, with the former reserved for short-term immune responses to injury or infection (like swelling after a cut).
Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, has dominated wellness conversations for the better part of a decade. But no matter how many teas, gels, cookbooks and cryochambers promise to solve this insidious issue, scientists say that inflammation is a vital part of our bodies immune response, and not something to be eliminated.
When faced with a trauma – which could be anything from a broken knee to a flu – the immune system releases white blood cells to protect the area. This acute inflammation is only an issue when it goes wrong, ‘usually by overreacting in some way,’ says Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London.
When the body continues to send white blood cells on the attack in the absence of any threat, this is called chronic inflammation. Autoimmune disease may trigger it, but so can a foreign object entering the body.
Doctors and scientists have suggested modern life, including ultra processed foods, can be a trigger for low-levels of chronic inflammation – but like most health issues, our chronically online culture has taken this diagnostic and run with it.
Now the pendulum is swinging in the other direction, to the point that inflammation anxiety is hard to avoid.
