Health: Does your body feel on fire?

Imagine you have burned your hand on the kitchen cooker. You dash to the sink and turn on the cold tap to take heat from the burn.

To your surprise, despite the cold tap on and the hot tap off, the water is burning hot, not soothing cold.

The burn will not heal and soon you have a new problem caused by the hot water. In this analogy the burn is some form of damage sustained by your body; the cold water is the absence of inflammation and the hot water unwanted inflammation.

Like hot water in your kitchen tap, inflammation needs to be turned on when needed but just as importantly turned off when no longer required. But here is the problem; most people are in a permanent stage of inflammation and this unwanted inflammation is both the cause and driver of most chronic disease. The body creates specific chemicals that are both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory. These are created directly from dietary fats.

The omega 6 oils are mostly inflammatory while the omega 3 fats in fish oils produce potent anti-inflammatory compounds.

Your doctor can order blood tests which measure inflammation. The most important is C-reactive protein (CRP). This is a test that measures levels of a protein produced in response to a number of chemicals released by immune cells during the inflammatory response. There are two types of CRP test; the first measures the high levels present with inflammatory diseases such as Polymyalgia Rheumatica (PMR) and Rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The second is high sensitivity CRP (hs-CRP) which measures the very lowest levels of background or silent inflammation.

In the next column, we will investigate both chronic inflammatory disease as indicated by high CRP and secondly the many health problems, especially coronary heart disease directly caused by raised levels of background inflammation.

John Arts is the founder of Abundant Health Ltd. If you have questions or a free health plan contact John on 0800 423559 or email john@johnarts.co.nz. You can join his weekly email newsletter at www.johnarts.co.nz