What are inflammatory responses? Most chronic conditions are inflammatory.

Nancy janssens
Sep 11
3 min read

Did you know that most chronic conditions are inflammatory? That's why many naturopaths focus on reducing inflammation. Of course, to do that, you first have to identify the cause, which many conventional doctors don't. Dr. Peter Glidden explains in simple terms what inflammatory reactions are.

Dr. Peter Glidden: The biggest cause of inflammatory reactions is, first of all, life itself. The second law of thermodynamics is that everything dissolves and decays. That's simply the law of physics. Mountains turn to dust and iron turns to rust. Everything decays all the time. The same thing happens in the human body. I always make a funny comparison.

Within the body, there's a police force that's supposed to represent the immune system, and the body also has a fire department that no one talks about. The fire department has the ability to extinguish the fires (inflammatory responses) in the body with its water (antioxidants), which are a normal part of life. Antioxidants are only obtained through REAL food.

Toxins disrupt the absorption of antioxidants.

For example, you're walking down the street and you breathe in carbon monoxide from a car. The carbon monoxide enters your body and creates a compound called a free radical. A free radical is an oxygen atom that has lost an electron.

An oxygen atom that has lost an electron will cling to everything in the body. It's like metabolic Velcro.

When enough oxygen atoms have attached to something in the body, regardless of what it's attached to, it will begin to oxidize (think of an apple turning brown). And anything that becomes oxidized will be destroyed.

So oxidative damage in the body is the main cause of inflammatory responses.

If the body has enough nutrients, it can handle oxidative stress. But if the body doesn't have enough nutrients, you can compare it to a fire hydrant with no water coming out. If there's no water coming out, the firefighter can't extinguish the fire. If the body is deficient in nutrients, it can't extinguish inflammatory reactions. Inflammatory reactions are a natural part of life.

There are two things we need to do in this area. We need to support the fire department. We do this with the 90 essential nutrients, especially selenium, and also the whole concept of nutritional antioxidants. The fire department extinguishes fires with antioxidants; this is the water they use to extinguish fires.

Therefore, food, drinks and supplements that have a high antioxidant value are a very important part of the fight against disease and aging.

Therefore, as humans, we need to avoid things in our environment that trigger the inflammatory response because they create free radicals and free radicals become oxidized and create an inflammatory response in our body.

And you know what, for me, is the biggest cause of free radical development? Fried food and bottled oils like olive oil. Putting oil on a salad just loads it with free radicals. And deep-frying your food is even worse. If you look at a map of America and look at life expectancy, we've noticed that the Old South has the lowest life expectancy.

How does this happen? It's because fried food is a religion for them. They're crazy about it. They eat more fried food than all of America combined.

Fried foods load your body with free radicals, so they don't have the raw materials (nutrients) to extinguish their fire (inflammatory response). Your body then deteriorates much faster.