Ask Dr. Scott
Inflammation, what the heck is it?
Medical research is showing inflammation is becoming a bigger trigger of heart attacks than cholesterol.
Q: Dr. Scott, I watched a TV show called The Doctors and they spoke about the great danger that inflammation creates for health. Can you talk about this a bit?
A: A great question. I can tell you specifically about what more and more cardiologists are saying right now. Inflammation is worse for your heart than cholesterol! After all these years it may be hard to believe this change in message, but the top health concern for millions of Americans (high cholesterol) is about to be trumped by what doctors say is an even bigger trigger of heart attacks.
This condition is low-grade inflammation, which may originate in a variety of unlikely places throughout the body, including even excess fat and the lining of your bowels and arteries. New federal recommendations have been written that urge doctors to test millions of middle-aged Americans for inflammation. The Standard American Diet (SAD) adds a heavy burden to your inflammatory state, inducing chronic low-grade inflammation to the interior lining of your arteries (called the endothelium) with all its low-nutrient, processed, high-glycemic foods and animal products. The body-wide stress and inflammation from the SAD is often called oxidative stress, because it reflects the increased presence of free radicals which speed your body’s aging and its development of diseases.
The discovery of inflammation’s surprising bad-effects is causing a top-to-bottom rethinking of the origins and prevention of heart disease. Doctors call it a revolutionary departure from viewing the world’s top killer as largely a plumbing problem blamed on cholesterol-clogged arteries, which had been the standard theory throughout the modern era of cardiology.
Preventing and reversing chronic inflammation is a cornerstone for any healthy living and heart-recovery program. Testing for inflammation is essential, especially if you are someone who is at risk for heart disease, or someone who constantly takes anti-inflammatory medications for pain. C-reactive protein (CRP) is a protein normally produced by the liver that increases during an acute inflammatory response. It’s not an expensive test and you can ask your physician for it.
One major study published in the New England Journal of Medicine followed 27,939 women for eight years. The researchers found that more than ½ of the women who eventually developed heart disease had high CRP levels even though their levels of LDL (“bad”) cholesterol were not considered high. Today it appears that CRP is a reliable indicator of cardiovascular risk — and even of death. Another large study in the American Journal of Medicine found that otherwise healthy older people with the highest levels of CRP were a huge 260% more likely to die within the next four years, mainly from heart disease. (Fuhrman, 2016)
Chronic inflammation also appears to drive other chronic diseases that blend into (are co-morbid with) cardiovascular disease, including obesity, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.
The good news? You don’t need to rely on drugs to reduce inflammation. One of the most powerful ways inflammation can be readily lowered is simply by losing weight. Exercise also helps, as does giving up smoking, lowering your blood pressure, and perhaps most profoundly: improving your diet. Shift all your eating to whole foods: plenty of fruits and vegetables, nuts, legumes, oily, coldwater fish, and other lean proteins. When you eat an anti-inflammatory diet, cut the salt out of your diet, exercise regularly, and lose weight, you remove inflammation, reduce atherosclerosis, and eliminate the inflammation of the endothelium. In other words, the causes of high blood pressure are eliminated, and the blood vessels begin to heal themselves.
In fact, when 134,796 adults were followed for years (women were followed for a mean of 10.2 years, and men for 4.6 years), a linear inverse association was revealed between eating these green vegetables and cardiovascular mortality. This means that the more greens eaten, the fewer heart attacks and stroke deaths, with no leveling off of the trend. All vegetables were linked to increased protection from premature death, but green cruciferous vegetables offered the most protection. (That’s broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprout, cauliflower, kale, radish, watercress, turnips and others.) One hundred grams of vegetables is about a cup, so you should be eating all of these up every single day!
Additionally, one of the most difficult medical problems discussed on The Doctors is chronic, unrelenting pain. So far, medical treatments for chronic pain have had only minor success. The new science of inflammation has shown that what is driving the pain is inflammation triggering pain in the nerve, the nerve ganglion (mass of nerves alongside the spinal cord), and the spinal cord itself. Cooling the inflammation dramatically using chiropractic, acupuncture, nutrition and other non-invasive, cost-effective modalities reduces pain, and in many cases can even end pain altogether. (Cuthbert, 2014)
In the past 30 years, people talked about their cholesterol levels. In the next decade, the cocktail chatter will be, “What’s your C-reactive protein?” Everyone will need to know that.
Dr. Scott Cuthbert is the chief clinician at the Chiropractic Health Center in Pueblo, Colorado, as well as the author of two new textbooks and over 50 peer-reviewed research articles.
