If you knew you were at serious risk for heart disease, you’d try to dodge that speeding bullet by cutting down on the amount of cholesterol in your diet, wouldn’t you? Well, if you have or are pre-disposed to an inflammatory disease like asthma, allergies, arthritis, obesity, psoriasis or diabetes—as so many of us in today’s Inflammation Nation are—new revolutionary studies reveal that it is essential to good health that you reduce your consumption of another dietary fat.
The epidemic rise in inflammatory diseases is being driven, in large part, by the foods we're eating - but not the foods you'd expect.
It might sound shocking, but that lean beef you’re eating maybe much better for you than a piece of salmon or an egg or a slice of turkey. Inflammation Nation is NOT another diet or diet book, but a vital information guide if you or a loved one suffers from an inflammatory disease. In Inflammation Nation, award winning Immunologist, Floyd (Ski) H. Chilton, Ph.D., supplies simple dietary changes that could dramatically change the way you feel for the rest of your life.
Q. What is Inflammation?
A. To understand inflammation, you must look at the diseases it causes. These diseases are not exotic, but are some of the most common diseases that affect our everyday lives. They include arthritis, asthma, allergies and diabetes and more recently understood to consist of heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and many types of cancer.
All of you know that there are red cells and white cells in our bodies. Inflammatory diseases are a result of white cells moving to places in our body that they shouldn’t be and becoming over-active causing massive destruction. There are certain messengers in our bodies that control the movement and activity of our white cells. In all inflammatory diseases, we produce way too many of these messengers and this over-production causes our white cells to become over-active. Whether it is joints in arthritis or the lung in asthma, these over-active white cells cause inflammatory diseases.
Q. Tell me about the epidemic of inflammatory diseases?
A. The incidence of most of what we call classical inflammatory diseases have doubled in the last 20 years. Let me give you some examples: 70 million Americans have arthritis-or 1 in 3 Americans-that’s two times the number there was twenty years ago. More than 50 million Americans have allergies-that’s two times the number twenty years ago. The rate of allergic skin disorders have tripled since 1960. There has been a 49% increase in diabetes in the past ten years. Asthma rates have more than doubled in the past twenty years. Our bodies are turning against themselves in record numbers.
Q. Why Now?
A. As we evolved as a society, populations shifted from rural to urban areas, foods that we used to eat a thousand years ago are foods that we don’t even think about eating now. A hundred years ago, there were no processed foods. As populations centered themselves in major cities and we became much more affluent, we as a society were forced to dramatically change the foods that we eat to feed these populations.
There are components in foods that cause our bodies to produce more messengers that talk to white cells. These foods play a major role in turning the volume of our immune systems up and down. The shift in foods that have accompanied our affluence are massive and global, and a hundred plus years in the making. These changes have dramatically turned the volume up on our immune systems causing them to become our enemy. Our bodies are revolting; our white blood cells have overreacted resulting in a plague of epidemics of inflammatory diseases.
Q. What is the scariest part?
A. The foods we’re being told to eat that are healthy, in fact, are not. You have heard of cholesterol and saturated fats and how important limiting these in your diet is to controlling heart disease. But there was a time when no one knew how harmful those things were. Now we know that for a large percentage of our population, if you eat these as part of your diet, they cause heart disease.
I’m here to say that there’s another fat that we need to be aware of that’s equally harmful, known as AA. If you are genetically susceptible to an inflammatory disease such as arthritis, AA is probably playing a critical role in making that disease worse. This type of fat is more dangerous right now because we don’t know about it, and the scariest part is, it is found in the very foods we thought were healthiest.
This information might startle a lot of people, but please bear with me. It might sound shocking, but that lean beef you’re eating is much better for you than a piece of fish if it’s farmed raised or raised in warm water or an egg or a slice of turkey.
Why? These meats contain high amounts of the dangerous fat, AA. Farm-raised salmon are fed a certain diets to make them grow rapidly, but a fat in their diets is converted into the dangerous fat, AA. Foods that have that fat cause our bodies to produce more messengers that cause inflammatory diseases. We are only now learning how detrimental this fat can be.
Q. How can we protect ourselves?
A. There are simple alternatives. As long as you know the truth, you can make simple decisions about your health. For example, fat in egg yolk is very harmful, but fat in egg white is a perfectly good food. It is the small alterations in your diet described in Inflammation Nation that will have huge effects on your health.
I’m not here to scare you. I’m here to help you make different, better and much more healthy choices.
