[wdwvt1]

Inflammation is an extremely broad term which covers an extremely wide range of chemical responses in the body. You should be _extremely_ skeptical of anything that discusses "inflammation" as a single thing or even an easily understandable set of things. You should also be skeptical of people that link certain diets, nutrients, extracts, etc. to changes in "inflammation".

When people think inflammation they think "inflammation up = oxidative damage". This is the tiniest part of the story. Instead, you should think about the following several things.

1. Every individual component of an inflammatory cascade (=different protein signalling molecules released by cells) has a huge number of different effects. Some component that 'increases inflammation' might cause a certain set of neutrophils to increase oxidative activity in a particular area. That same component, however, might signal to nearby cells to turn on repair genes that close a wound or repair oxidative damage. It might also change the lining of the blood vessels to allow passage of different repair cells or more nutrients to the affected tissue. The bottom line is that if you understand only the "inflammation = oxidative damage" part of this story, you miss the much larger effects this inflammatory cascade is having on the body. In this case, the molecule I am talking about is IL-6; it causes 'inflammation' but it also is the canonical regulator of wound repair in your lungs, skin, and liver. It's a good 'pro-inflammatory' molecule in the right context.

2. Inflammation is not a static measure, it's not a state function. Staying on IL-6 as our example, correct timing of release is critical to cause wound repair in epithelial tissues. If you just see "high IL-6" you can't tell whether that's good or bad. You need to know the local tissue history and where you are in the cycle of damage --> repair.

3. Good neighbors make good fences. You are surrounded (both within and without) by hungry microbes that would love to access the energy your body greedily guards. Your body has two predominant modes of resolving this problem; a) it keeps the microbes out of privileged body spaces (e.g. blood, organs, etc.), b) when they reach those areas it responds to kill them with somewhat indiscriminate oxidative damage. The tradeoff is not "inflammation down --> live in harmony" the tradeoff is "inflammation down --> microbes access privileged body spaces --> inflammation incredibly high to prevent sepsis/bone infection/liver infection/etc". You want certain "inflammatory markers" to be high in the body because they keep nice tight barriers at places where microbes like to leak in (the gut).

4. Studies linking particular nutrients or conditions to "high inflammation" are often very low quality. Even when they are not low quality, it's hard to understand if they are correct in any meaningful sense. Nutrition and chemical exposure are extremely hard to study because you can't do very high quality experiments, you have extremely complex and subtle confounders, and you are operating at spatial scales from individual proteins all the way to the organism level. The chemistry, biology, and physics covered is over such a range that it's really hard to get meaningful mechanistic conclusions. Couple this with the fact that there is a high reward for fad diet/environmental toxicant research (e.g. lots of press, lots of commercial opportunities) and you get a low quality literature.

5. Certain types of chronic inflammation is probably bad, but what is inflammation and what is chronic? You are on solid ground if you stay specific and say something like: "chronic release of canonical 'pro-inflammatory' cytokines IL-4/IL-13 causes atopic dermatitis; contributes to SLE, AK, etc. and blockade of those cytokines with antibodies is an incredibly effective therapy". If you say "sugar causes inflammation and that's bad" it's just much harder to even evaluate what the truth value of that statement is.