It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways by Melissa Hartwig, Dallas Hartwig
Authors: Melissa Hartwig, Dallas Hartwig
Ads: Link
inflammation, and possibly an autoimmune condition.
Bad things happen when you confuse or overwork your immune system.
And to drive the point home, we’ll show you exactly what that looks like.
FIGHT FIRES AND FIX FLAWS
Your immune system defends you against external invaders, but it also plays a critical role in recovery from injury and the repair and maintenance of various body structures. Your immune system has its priorities and tends to rank fighting off invaders above general repair and maintenance. (Getting the guy out of your kitchen is more important than doing the dishes.) But all of these jobs are important in the body—and if something doesn’t get done, there will eventually be consequences.
Let’s use another analogy.
Think of your immune system as a team of firefighters. Their top priority is to defend against potentially damaging threats—fires. But they also have to do routine maintenance and repair jobs, like fixing damaged tools, washing fire trucks, sleeping, and eating. Your firefighters work very hard when they’re fighting a fire, but they also have periods of time when they are relatively relaxed. There is a distinct difference between infrequent responses to fires (acute conditions, like a traumatic injury or short-term infection) and having to battle them 24-7 (chronic activation of your immune system, or systemic inflammation).
In the “healthy immune balance” example, your firefighters respond to a four-alarm fire. They fight the blaze, head back to the station, and have time to clean up and do some low-level repair and maintenance before they’re expected to go all out again. In this situation, your firefighters (immune system) ramp way up for the fire (acute inflammation from traumatic injury, infection, etc.), but once the fire is out, immune activity decreases, allowing for repair, recovery and maintenance tasks to be performed.
This is normal, and represents a healthy, balanced response. Your immune system needs an “on” switch to be able to ramp up to a threat, but it also needs an “off” switch in order to allow for recovery and have the time and resources to complete important repair and maintenance chores.
In the “chronic systemic inflammation” example, however, as the firefighters are winding down from the acutely stressful and demanding fire, they’re told that while they’re still expected to fulfill their normal firehouse repair and maintenance obligations, their job parameters have expanded to include sweeping the city streets, collecting the garbage, teaching the school kids, and filling in potholes.
Whew.
As if their original job description didn’t entail enough responsibility, now they’ve got a lot more work to do. If this were a one-time event, they could manage—they’d do the extra work and eventually catch up on their repair and maintenance functions. But if this situation continues for any length of time, it causes serious trouble long-term.
An overworked, out-of-balance immune system is very unhealthy.
If certain factors (like your food choices) are overloading your immune system with too many tasks, it’s going to be less effective at doing its main jobs, and something is going to be left undone, or done ineffectively.
Like fighting off that bug that’s going around.
Or healing that stubborn tendonitis.
Or keeping your arteries clear of plaque.
All very important jobs, we think you’d agree.
WHY IT MATTERS
The reason we are so adamant about reducing chronic systemic inflammation is that it has been clearly implicated as a causative factor for most lifestyle-related diseases.
Medical researchers have long known that a cluster of symptoms (labeled “metabolic syndrome”) were highly statistically correlated, often occurring together and increasing your risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. What they didn’t know for a long time, however, was exactly how they were related. They used to think that obesity caused diabetes,
Bad things happen when you confuse or overwork your immune system.
And to drive the point home, we’ll show you exactly what that looks like.
FIGHT FIRES AND FIX FLAWS
Your immune system defends you against external invaders, but it also plays a critical role in recovery from injury and the repair and maintenance of various body structures. Your immune system has its priorities and tends to rank fighting off invaders above general repair and maintenance. (Getting the guy out of your kitchen is more important than doing the dishes.) But all of these jobs are important in the body—and if something doesn’t get done, there will eventually be consequences.
Let’s use another analogy.
Think of your immune system as a team of firefighters. Their top priority is to defend against potentially damaging threats—fires. But they also have to do routine maintenance and repair jobs, like fixing damaged tools, washing fire trucks, sleeping, and eating. Your firefighters work very hard when they’re fighting a fire, but they also have periods of time when they are relatively relaxed. There is a distinct difference between infrequent responses to fires (acute conditions, like a traumatic injury or short-term infection) and having to battle them 24-7 (chronic activation of your immune system, or systemic inflammation).
In the “healthy immune balance” example, your firefighters respond to a four-alarm fire. They fight the blaze, head back to the station, and have time to clean up and do some low-level repair and maintenance before they’re expected to go all out again. In this situation, your firefighters (immune system) ramp way up for the fire (acute inflammation from traumatic injury, infection, etc.), but once the fire is out, immune activity decreases, allowing for repair, recovery and maintenance tasks to be performed.
This is normal, and represents a healthy, balanced response. Your immune system needs an “on” switch to be able to ramp up to a threat, but it also needs an “off” switch in order to allow for recovery and have the time and resources to complete important repair and maintenance chores.
In the “chronic systemic inflammation” example, however, as the firefighters are winding down from the acutely stressful and demanding fire, they’re told that while they’re still expected to fulfill their normal firehouse repair and maintenance obligations, their job parameters have expanded to include sweeping the city streets, collecting the garbage, teaching the school kids, and filling in potholes.
Whew.
As if their original job description didn’t entail enough responsibility, now they’ve got a lot more work to do. If this were a one-time event, they could manage—they’d do the extra work and eventually catch up on their repair and maintenance functions. But if this situation continues for any length of time, it causes serious trouble long-term.
An overworked, out-of-balance immune system is very unhealthy.
If certain factors (like your food choices) are overloading your immune system with too many tasks, it’s going to be less effective at doing its main jobs, and something is going to be left undone, or done ineffectively.
Like fighting off that bug that’s going around.
Or healing that stubborn tendonitis.
Or keeping your arteries clear of plaque.
All very important jobs, we think you’d agree.
WHY IT MATTERS
The reason we are so adamant about reducing chronic systemic inflammation is that it has been clearly implicated as a causative factor for most lifestyle-related diseases.
Medical researchers have long known that a cluster of symptoms (labeled “metabolic syndrome”) were highly statistically correlated, often occurring together and increasing your risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. What they didn’t know for a long time, however, was exactly how they were related. They used to think that obesity caused diabetes,
Similar Books
