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"Inflammation is a basic life process, not a reaction to the food you eat. Inflammation plays an active part in wound-healing. Teething in infants has an inflam
by rsync 6y ago
"Inflammation is a basic life process, not a reaction to the food you eat. Inflammation plays an active part in wound-healing. Teething in infants has an inflammatory component. Systemic inflammation is ubiquitous during and following parturition in mammals. There is inflammation everywhere, it's as generic a word as "oxidation" and "metabolism.""
Everything you have said is true.
What I think you are missing is that there is both a per-calorie inflammation cost for all food inputs and a minimum inflammatory startup cost just to metabolize at all.
More simply: 1000 calories spread across two meals will generate more inflammation than 1000 calories in a single meal.
There are two analogies that I think are useful when thinking about this:
First, introducing food inputs appears to be an interrupt for most other bodily activities - even very essential ones like sleep and reproduction, etc. You might consider how many hours each day your body spends not digesting. It doesn't take much to increase that by 50% or more...
Second, electric motors like pumps and fans have failures ("deaths") that are much more accurately predicted by number of start-stop cycles than by the number of hours run. Startup is expensive for these devices and I suspect that startup is expensive for our food metabolism as well.
- andy_ppp 6y agoYes, also we know cell machinery operates in a different mode when the body is without fuel, it’s moves in a repair/conserve mode that includes preferential autophagy of damaged cells. It makes sense, eating used to be extremely dangerous so the body mounts an immune response including inflammation every time.
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 6y ago> eating used to be extremely dangerous You're talking a very long time ago. Shouldn't that be already disregarded from an evolutionary POV?
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago> You're talking a very long time ago. We've made strong progress in food security in the last 100-200 years, not sure about before that. I suspect hunter/gatherers had it actually better than farmers. What time spans are you talking about?
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 6y ago> What time spans are you talking about? I would assume (from ignorance) than knowledge about food security is older than us as a species. And by food security I mean "don't eat plant A", or "don't eat plant B raw, put it first on the fire or it will make you sick" etc.
- andy_ppp 6y agoI’m not even talking about the food, more the bacteria from the environment on the food, in some places still today even the water isn’t safe to drink. You can easily have food in a developing country that makes you sick. These simply aren’t past problems and it makes sense the body mounts defences just in case!