And this happens to who? Does it hurt? Why should I care?
I know literally no-one that has ever complained about 'inflammation'. When I say explain what it means IRL, I mean please explain the impact.
I know literally no-one that has ever complained about 'inflammation'. When I say explain what it means IRL, I mean please explain the impact.
A sore throat, is caused by inflammation of the mucus tissues in your throat, for example. A mosquito bite itches due to inflammation, it is the immune response to the mosquito's saliva that you feel as an itching sensation.
The 'new' thing however is that this mechanism can occur pretty much in every cell of your body and some people have speculated it is the root of a number of ailments. Google 'inflammation' on scholar.google.com and you will find a number of papers discussing different ways that it can affect you.
No thanks, I'm specifically asking for an explanation of how it affects me.
More seriously, your question, as stated, can only be answered by your doctor and then probably only after taking various samples. What is worse is that inflammation is typically a response to something else, so it is at least a second order symptom rather than a primary cause. (for example your sore throat is from inflammation, but the inflammation is from a response to something the mucus membrane didn't like. Could be a cold, it could be the chlorine you drank.)
Symptoms associated with inflammation are aches, pain, vomiting, diarrhea, fainting, swelling, and itching at least. If you have any of those symptoms, it is affecting you.
What your cells feel, are signals from your immune system (cops) to "freeze and stop doing shit". This message is delivered in the form of cytokines. What happens inside the cell, is metabolism slows, and recycling begins. Too much of this leads to atrophy.
At the organ level, this causes various diseases of aging. Muscle wasting. Brain atrophy. Liver disease (alcoholic or dietary).
Athletes feel aches and pain from inflammation of their muscles.
Old persons frequently have inflammation in their joints which causes pain and stiffness.
Asthma sufferers have inflammation in their lungs.
Anyone (except hemophiliacs) who receives a skin cut has inflammation at the site of the cut.
It's an immune response and is a level of abstraction away from the actual observable symptoms, hence the general confusion about what it is.
So when people say 'eating sugar causes inflammation' what do they mean? How is THAT inflammation felt?
They do, in fact; a pro-inflammatory diet makes the threshold at which symptoms are felt from any of those other source lower, because inflammation has a substantial systemic component.
(It may produce unique symptoms of its own, too, but I think the main dietary concern with inflammation is systemic contribution to lowering thresholds to inflammatory symptoms when other triggers are present.)
We know there is inflammation there because the brains immune system goes apeshit, and we can see this under the microscope. Gliosis is the technical name.
High amounts of sugar that trigger the symptoms means >100g in 24 h or >60g per day over several days. The effect also depends on the food, probably because of how it is digested. Sugary water (fruit juice, soda) is worse than solid meals. Some forms of sugar are worse than others, e.g. I can eat some chocolate in moderation but others (e.g. Milka) I get a soar throat within minutes of eating a single piece (<10g).
That's one example but these inflammatory responses are also linked to a bunch of diseases. I hope that is a helpful answer.
From the 'article' you linked to:
> Obesity and its constant companion, type 2 diabetes, are at epidemic proportions in this country. One thing that connects them is inflammation.
How is this not a most blatant case of 'correlation vs causation'? We know the causes of obesity AND type 2 diabetes. Surely inflammation, a cellular immune thing ... is just a correlating factor?
So yeah, the causality is actually circular, which in the context of human health implies that a snowball effect is in fact occurring. Escaping this feedback loop is the hard part that we are still working on in the lab.