by cheald | 2025-09-30 22:03:49+00:00
I'm not a doctor, but I am passionate about this stuff in my own life.

tl;dr: Exercise, sleep, and diet. Plus a zillion different supplements and medicines as adjuncts to a healthy lifestyle.

First, consider what inflammation is. It's fundamentally an immune response designed to attack unhealthy tissue and to facilitate repair of healthy tissue - the effects of inflammation are largely driven by cytokines like TNF-alpha (which is responsible for killing unhealthy cells and recruiting immune cells), IL-1 (which recruits immune cells), and IL-6 (which drives cRP production - the biomarker that you usually look for to gauge systemic inflammation). The production of these is mediated by nuclear factor kappa B (NF-kB).

Other major factors are things like reactive oxygen species (or "free radicals"), which can oxidize all sorts of things in the body and cause damage (which is good when the thing being damaged is a pathogen or damaged cell, bad when it's healthy tissue). Damaged tissue provokes immune responses.

So, if you want to "reduce inflammation", you want to:

1. Reduce stimuli or downregulate processes which are causing the production of inflammatory cytokines

2. Upregulate the production of anti-inflammatory cytokines

3. Ensure sufficient antioxidant capacity to deal with ROS production and oxidative stress

If you've got a chronic illness or autoimmune disorder, you're dealing with inflammation just because your "make immune defenses" signals are stuck on. But you can also have chronic inflammation through too much fat (adipose tissue is an endocrine organ!), environmental or diet factors, or just behaviors which result in an imbalance between pro- and anti-inflammatory responses in the body (for example: smoking induces consistent tissue damage, which drives immune responses).

Exercise upregulates production of anti-inflammatory cytokines and improves mitochondrial efficiency, which results in less ROS production during cellular respiration. Sugar surges cause elevated ROS production, and chronically-elevated blood glucose results in insulin resistance, which promotes inflammatory cytokine production. Lipopolysaccharides from gut bacteria in the bloodstream stimulate immune responses. Insufficient sleep upregulates NF-kB directly, but also contributes to dysfunction of other systems which can upregulate NF-kB.

If you're sleeping plenty, eating well, and exercising, and you don't have a chronic health condition, your inflammation levels are probably pretty good. But you can generally further reduce them with supplementation of things like:

* Omega-3 fatty acids (which compete with omega-6 fatty acids - "seed oils", which produce inflammatory prostaglandins) - this is why your doctor wants you to take fish oil

* Turmeric, resveratrol, and green tea extracts (which contain compounds which inhibit NF-kB and are ROS scavengers),

* Vitamin D (which inhibits cytokine production and supports your natural antioxidant systems)

* NAC, which replenishes glutathione (the primary driver of the body's antioxidant systems)

There are medications, of course, like your regular old aspirin and ibuprofen, which reduce prostoglandin production (which is one upstream of NF-kB), corticosteroids (which block NF-kB), as well as more exotic entries such as GLP-1 peptides (which, among other things, improve insulin sensitivty and reduce adipose tissue, which results in reduced systemic inflammation) or BPC-157 peptides (which acutely inhibit NF-kB, upregulate antioxidant enzymes, and help regulate nitrous oxide, which is how they can help heal NSAID-induced leisons).

This is by no means comprehensive - there are plenty more mechanisms and interventions to explore - but it should be a pretty good clue as to why "diet and exercise" are standard health advice. You don't want to turn off your inflammation responses - they're responsible for taking out pathogens, killing tumors and maintaining a healthy body - but you don't want them chronically upregulated, either.