Inflammation is Ageing You and You Can’t Even Feel It

What’s all the fuss about? I’m not in pain, I don’t have any injuries so I don’t need to be worried about having inflammation? Unfortunately for most of us we’re experiencing inflammation in our bodies 24 hours a day and we aren’t even aware of it.

Let’s start by discussing the fact that there are two types of inflammation.

Firstly, there’s acute inflammation caused by an immediate reaction to a stress, infection or injury. This inflammation is beneficial as it primes and activates the immune system to deal with that infection or damage. It comes, does its job and then goes away. It’s when the infection or injury persists that we turn this positive inflammation into a negative. This is called chronic inflammation.

Chronic Inflammation

Chronic inflammation results from long term low level immune reactions to a variety of stressors such as excess cortisol from our adrenals due to situations arising from poor relationships or issues at work, from breathing in pollution from chemicals and city living, from processed food damaging the gut or even having belly fat. Yes, all of these and many more common living experiences cause low grade inflammation in your body. It’s these daily chronic inflammation reactions that we need to be concerned about. This chronic inflammation is the cause of the majority of our modern-day degenerative diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s and cancer.

Chronic inflammation was found to be such an insidious threat to our health that TIME Magazine devoted a whole issue to the subject (Feb 23, 2004). It was titled “Inflammation – The Secret Killer”. It’s “secret” because you can’t feel it. It’s “secret” because you can’t see it. It’s “secret” because your doctor doesn’t often test for it.

I liken chronic inflammation to a smouldering fire, a fire that is slowly creeping along burning everything in its path but it isn’t big enough to call out the fire brigade, until it’s too late and it has caused untold damage. This is exactly what happens with chronic inflammation. It slowly and silently damages all in its path and causes untold damage to your organs, glands, cells and DNA, making us look and feel older and progressively lose our vitality until we get diagnosed with one of the many degenerative diseases mentioned above.

So what is the answer to dealing with this “Silent Killer”? What does the science say about reducing inflammation? It’s simple, we take heavily researched natural compounds to reduce the inflammation and douse the flames to protect our cells and DNA from damage. These natural compounds contain antioxidants that mop up oxidation caused by the inflammation and also repair molecules to regenerate our cell membranes and DNA.

The next step is to test regularly to make sure our inflammation markers are kept at a low level and that the natural medicines we’re taking are doing their job. There are many inflammation markers we can request to have tested but the main ones that you may have heard of are highly sensitive: (hs)C Reactive Protein, Fibrinogen, ESR, Thyroid Antibodies, Homocysteine and Tumor Necrosis Factor-alpha. If one or more of these are even mildly elevated, then we need to look at what might be causing our inflammation and increase our anti-inflammatory support.

Our blends are designed to provide powerful compounds and antioxidants to reduce inflammation and protect the cells from the continuous damage caused by day to day living in our toxic and stressful world. 

Contact us if you want more advice and how I can treat your chronic inflamation.

About the author

Peter Kahler ND has over 25 years experience within the naturopathy and anti-ageing area.

Peter currently owns and manages Oxford Naturopathics Anti-Ageing & Wellnesss Centre based out of Bullimba, Queensland.