From Gut-Brain Secrets and The Mitochondriac Manifesto.

How inflammation heals

The body uses inflammation to repair pretty much any sort of damage that can happen anywhere in the body, including:

• cuts, bruises and overuse injuries
• damage to bones, muscles, tendons, blood vessels and internal organs
• microbial infection
• radiation damage
• chemical and heavy metal poisoning
• as well as ordinary wear and tear.

It does this by first increasing permeability of blood vessels so immune cells, such as white blood cells, can pass through the vessel wall to fight invading pathogens. This also lets more blood into an area, which we call swelling. Swelling makes movement painful, thus limiting mobility and further damage.

Barring outside intervention, inflammation then launches an oxidative attack on everything in the area that the immune system doesn’t identify as your own healthy cell. Through oxidation, the first stage of inflammation kills infectious microorganisms, neutralizes toxins and heavy metals, and it destroys your own damaged, diseased and dead cells.

When inflammatory processes are working correctly (i.e., acute inflammation), the first phase of inflammation eventually shuts down and the second phase takes over. In the second phase of inflammation – the repair phase – unhealthy cells and debris are replaced with new cells and collagen fibers (made from protein and cholesterol).

On the other hand, when inflammation doesn’t let up, both phases stay active at the same time – destruction and creation. And that’s the leading cause of chronic, degenerative disease today: inflammation that doesn’t stop destroying tissue, which is itself caused by poor redox signaling and a lack of energy from the mitochondria.

Redox signaling: cell-cell communication network, including free radicals, aka reactive oxygen species.

But the mind-blow you need to know is that pain and swelling are integral parts of the healing process. If you prevent pain and swelling from running their course – like with anti-inflammatory painkillers, icing, elevating, compresses, or fever reducers – then full healing may never take place because you shortcut the healing process. Believe it or not, pain itself actually stimulates healing by kicking the immune system into action.

This is why so many people today suffer from chronic pain issues that linger too long, or never end: they’ve interrupted the healing process so many times throughout their life – with drugs that block inflammation and pain – that injuries and inflammation become more or less permanent.

Chronic inflammation drives degenerative diseases

Chronic inflammation is integrally involved in creating most disorders involving the immune system, hormonal system, heart, brain, digestive tract, and cell repair – basically, everything that happens in the body. This is because the majority of damage that a disease causes is not done by the pathogen or problem itself, but by inflammation the body employs to fight the threat.

In other words, most infections, toxins, and disease processes are not the thing that does the most harm. Instead, the body’s own threat annihilation system – inflammation – is far stronger at wiping out friendly cells than the menace itself. When it persists, unchecked inflammation causes the symptoms we collect into categories and call disease.

In fact, practitioners that know their stuff realize that most modern diseases, barring trauma, are nothing more than a variety of different ways and places that chronic inflammation exhibits itself in the body, as repair fails to keep up with injury. Therefore, a failure of cells to repair themselves completely is what causes modern disease (as well as aging). And that’s caused by inadequate energy production, combined with poor redox signaling, which results in chronic inflammation and unfinished repair. They’re partners in degeneration, with chronic inflammation being the culprit that actually “pulls the trigger.”

Cancer cells are a quintessential example of what happens when inflammation persists and cell’s distress signals go unanswered. Cancer is believed to take place after a cell has borne the brunt of some 20,000–25,000 unrepaired injuries to its DNA (i.e., failure to repair/replace).

Acute inflammation vs. chronic inflammation

There are two kinds of inflammation: acute inflammation, which is temporary and beneficial, and chronic inflammation, which is persistent and harmful. Acute inflammation heals and protects you on a daily basis from threats that can damage tissue, such as cuts, bruises, infectious organisms, ordinary wear and tear, oxygen deprivation, and toxin exposure. Everyday occurrences like exercise and sun exposure also turn on inflammation without you even knowing it.

Through acute, fast-acting inflammation, the immune system gets called into action. It wipes out the threat in a matter of days to months using a four-step process whereby: (1) oxidants destroy; (2) antioxidants team up with reductants to neutralize the oxidant; (3) redox signaling partners with the immune system to repair or replace damaged cells; and (4) when that process is finished, if everything’s working properly (i.e., complete healing and the redox signaling to match), inflammation shuts down, and the body resumes normal operation.

Oxidation is the “stealing” of electrons from a molecule – or an increase in the state of oxidation. So molecules with a propensity to oxidize substances are called “oxidants.” To illustrate, when oxygen takes electrons slowly from iron, that’s a form of oxidation we call rust. When a flammable material burns or explodes – again, with oxygen – that’s oxidation happening rapidly right before our eyes. Reduction is the opposite of oxidation. It’s the giving of electrons, or a decrease in the state of oxidation (hence the term “reduction”).

On the other hand, chronic inflammation is where the same processes get activated, but they’re unable to turn themselves off. Step 4 shut down kind of starts, but is never completed. Instead, the first three stages get stuck in a vicious circle of destroying and repairing cells repeatedly, which can smolder along unbeknownst to you for years, or even decades.

The reason the immune system is not able to turn itself off after the initial burst of activity is due to one or more of the following circumstances:

1. Your antioxidant system is overwhelmed

First, some significant insult takes place requiring the immune system to use its oxidative stress tool – often between the ages of ten and thirty. This could be a sports injury, a nasty infection, or an acute poisoning event such as a major round of vaccines.

In this situation, cells don’t have antioxidant and reductant reservoirs large enough to neutralize the oxidation being done. So the repairing and replacing of damaged cells is done slower, and less completely, than it should. Cells then eke by and reproduce themselves in a partially-damaged state, which is frustrated by lingering attempts by the immune system to simultaneously destroy with low-grade oxidative stress and heal using redox signaling and repair processes.

This smolders along underneath your conscious awareness until later in life your cells are being injured by oxidative stress faster than they’re able to heal. At that point, you get symptoms that bother you. But, all the while, you’ve had chronic inflammation you only noticed occasionally (like an old knee injury that only hurts when it starts to get cold out).

2. Pro-inflammatory exposures sustain the situation

• You eat pro-inflammatory foods, such as refined vegetable oils.
• Leaky membranes cause poor digestion, food sensitivities, immune system hyper-activation, and autoimmune
• You continue to stress that old knee injury with the help of anti-inflammatory painkillers or other medications.
• You come down with a long-term illness such as Lyme’s disease.
• You continue to take in toxins faster than you release them.

3. Fewer reductants, diminished redox signaling capacity, and a shortage of energy all prolong inflammation

As we age, we lose mitochondria. Scarcity of mitochondria means fewer reductants get made, diminished redox signaling capacity, and not enough ATP for all bodily processes. Plus, the mitochondria that do stick around age with us. Their DNA accumulates damage just like ours does.

As our mitochondria age, our once-balanced blend of oxidants-to-reductants tends to tip toward a surplus of oxidants, and a deficiency of reductants. That pushes us increasingly in the direction of oxidative stress as we grow older. However, too much of either one – oxidation or reduction – results in unregulated oxidation and cell damage. To complicate matters further, inefficient redox signaling sends unclear messages to the nucleus, which then makes fewer antioxidants.

In this situation, any sort of severe or prolonged damage can cause the immune system to dump oxidant into an area that it’s not able to clean up properly due to reductant and/or antioxidant deficiency. So as oxidative stress, positive charge, and acidity build up in the cell, the clarity of the message conveyed by redox molecules declines.

From that point on, the immune system’s oxidative response becomes its own worst enemy. Oxidant is dumped in the area to start the clean-up process, but cells don’t have antioxidant reserves large enough to clean up the oxidation. Full healing never takes place. The immune system senses something’s wrong, but it gets confused by the mixed signals, and failure of its tools to do their jobs properly. So it continues to promote the destructive component of inflammation, as it tries in vain to rebuild as best it can.

Neither side – destruction or healing – is able to prevail while the immune system is caught in a vicious cycle of antioxidant/reductant deficiency and imbalanced/unclear redox messaging. That’s what’s happening when acute inflammation turns into chronic inflammation. And that’s how chronic inflammation causes disease. It’s the failure of cells to repair or replace themselves effectively. Cells then continue to live and reproduce in an unrepaired state. That’s most of what drives modern, degenerative diseases today – including heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, and GAPS conditions.

GAPS: Coined by gut-brain health pioneer Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, Gut and Psychology Syndrome conditions are gut imbalances, such as leaky gut and gut dysbiosis, that cause impaired brain function, such as ADD, autism, anxiety and depression.

Negative charge and alkalinity are synonymous with health and healing. Positive charge and acidity create inflammation and disease

If you had to pick only one metric to assess your relative state of health or sickness, electrical charge and pH belong near the top of that list. You can think of the two as pretty much the same thing in the body, because they’re like dance partners. When oxidation steals electrons, cells and atoms gain positive charge. That means more corrosion, greater instability, and inflammation that doesn’t know when to quit. It means your cells and atoms are literally falling apart and not repairing themselves efficiently, which is imbalance, sickness and aging, in a nutshell.

On the other hand, when your immune system is good at making antioxidants, and it has all the electrons it needs for reduction, the atoms in your cells stay happy and whole, instead of falling apart. We call this neutralizing, quenching, or extinguishing oxidative stress. This translates into better cell-cell communication, inflammation that starts and stops appropriately, and healing capacity to spare.

On the other side of the scale, acids have more protons than electrons, which gives them a positive charge. The more protons a substance has, the more acidic it is. And the opposite is true: the more electrons something has in relation to protons, the greater its alkalinity. Hence, many alkaline foods and substances are famous for their healing/antioxidant effects.

In short, extra electrons are negative charge and healing capacity through oxidation quenching, and helping the immune system know when to shut down inflammation (alkalinity supports cell-cell communication). While at the other end of the spectrum, electron deficiency is positive charge and poor healing ability through corrosion, lack of light energy (electrons hold light energy), and failure to realize that inflammation is not working the way it should. Acidity aids and abets breakdown.