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Comment by grugagag | Hacker News Reader

Also let's also keep in mind not all inflammation is bad.

As an anecdote, I know someone who had rosacea breakout and ended up eliminating tomatoes in particular from her diet and it seemed to do the trick so there should be something in tomatoes that causes inflammation...

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What is an example of good inflammation?

Inflammation is a crucial part of the body's response to tissue damage, infection, foreign matter, and more. In response, the capillaries become more permeable. This allows white blood cells to leave the blood stream and enter the tissues to combat infection and destroy damaged tissue. The inflammatory response is part of a complex set of self-defense and repair mechanisms. Sometimes these go wrong, but without them you'd most certainly be dead.

Tissue damage, infection, foreign matter, etc are all bad. Inflation might help, but I think you’d need to show it’d be helpful without the presence of some worse thing to truly call it beneficial.

Inflammation is part of the immune response. It is beneficial when wounded and that's when the local body should become inflamed.

Chronic inflammation is not beneficial.

You are conflating the two

I’m not conflating anything. You’re saying the inflammation is beneficial, but what you’re describing is really a “lesser of two evils” situation, e.g. it’s better to have inflammation than it is to bleed out from a wound. But the best thing would be not to get a wound in the first place.

Sure boss, you're right. I'm guessing you're right a lot

Inflammation is your body increasing blood flow, heat and nutrient supplies somewhere. The usual function is to heal something in a specific place (good inflammation), diet, lack of exercise, environment, and other factors can cause inflammation in many places in the body where it isn't needed. This often leads to issues.

Inflammation helps fight infection of any kind. You know fever? That's your body heating up to wean off infection.

When you tear a muscle or a tendon, inflammation helps blood to flow into the affected areas, speeding up the healing process.

Inflammation is one of the tools your immune system has to keep you in good health. Too much of it can have bad side-effects though, which is why we need to keep it under control.

Ok, I was imagining some food-induced inflammation since that was the context. Is there some healthy inflammation that comes from food vs the body’s natural immune response?

i believe there's some inflamation and immune system response anytime you introduce foreign bodies, including when you eat.

Inflammation which is completely normal after a hard gym session

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