What is inflammation? Inflammation is a natural part of the body’s immune defense and self-regulatory system when the body runs into infectious agents like viruses or bacteria or is physically injured.  Physical, chemical, or biological — and even psychological — stressors can trigger an inflammatory response.

The classical ways in which you know that you are experiencing inflammation is that the area if red, warm or hot, swollen, and painful. These types of changes often signal your brain to slow down and rest — in part because you just do not feel well and in part because you cannot continue to function as you had been doing before the infection or injury.

The healthy way in which inflammation helps you is to mobilize mediators and changes in the body’s function temporarily to bring about tissue repair and healing back to a normal state. However, chronic inflammation can also occur in a wide range of diseases and disorders.

These types of chronic disorders (long term health problems) with the ability to flare up acutely (in the short term) include inflammatory processes in various body parts. Chronic and many acute inflammatory disorders are often “-itis” conditions named for the body part(s) they affect– arthritis (joints), sinusitis, bronchitis (lungs), conjunctivitis (eye), gingivitis (gums), eosophagitis, gastritis (stomach), colitis (bowels), appendicitis, cholecystitis (gallbladder), hepatitis (liver), thyroiditis, vasculitis (blood vessels), and so on. Recent studies suggest that inflammation plays a role in cancer as well as atherosclerotic heart disease and heart attacks too.

What causes inflammation? One obvious cause is physical injury such as a fall or collision or a wound from a cut or scrape. Sometimes the immune system gets out of control in autoimmune diseases and attacks the body’s own cells and tissues, as in rheumatoid arthritis or systemic lupus erythematosis.

However, more subtle non-physical causes also exist, including loss of sleep or poor sleep and/or stress.Being overweight or having vitamin A or vitamin D deficiencies tend to favor the biology of inflammation as well. Some research indicates that people who exercise or are at least physically more active have lower risk for inflammation in terms of the amounts of one widely-used marker of inflammation in the blood called C-reactive protein.

The body has a set of biological messengers (mediators) that cause inflammation when the events set it into motion. Those messengers do not care if the trigger is physical, chemical, biological, or psychological. The pathways in the body kick into gear, and inflammation occurs.

One thing that scientists know for sure is that inflammation is complex. It has multiple possible causes and contributing factors. As you can see from the information in this article, someone with malnutrition or undernutrition and out of shape could be more likely to have worse inflammatory response to the same type of injury as someone who is in excellent nutritional health and highly active.

At Inflammation Advisor, we bring you the latest information you need for improving your self care to reduce your risk of unhealthy inflammation and to recover from injuries and illnesses faster. A healthy inflammation response is good – and there are many simple things you can do to help yourself along the way. Our focus here is natural anti inflammatory strategies – ranging from foods and diet to natural herbs and dietary supplements to earthing to exercise, and everything in between. The goal is to teach you how to prevent or at least reduce inflammation in your body — to feel better and more energetic without relying on drugs. Let’s begin…