Want To Protect Your Body From Chronic Inflammation? Here’s A Rheumatologist’s No. 1 Tip.

Everything from Alzheimer’s to heart disease to depression can be caused by chronic inflammation.

Lately, it feels almost impossible to scroll through social media without coming across someone talking about the dangers of inflammation or the benefits of an anti-inflammatory diet.

But what is inflammation, how do we know if we have it, and what can we do about it?

That’s what we — Raj Punjabi-Johnson and Noah Michelson, co-hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — asked Tamiko Katsumoto, MD, a clinical associate professor in the division of immunology and rheumatology at Stanford University and a board-certified lifestyle medicine physician.

Click here to listen to our full episode on inflammation and what you can do to lessen the amount of chronic inflammation in your life.

“I think the best way to define it is it represents the body’s response to a danger signal or to a damaging signal, and then it’s followed by a repair process,” Katsumoto told us. ”[It’s] this whole process by which our immune system is helping to defend us and it helps them to resolve that insult that we are faced with.”

That means that inflammation isn’t always a bad thing. Acute inflammation, which occurs when our bodies are trying to fight an infection or heal a wound, is short-term, beneficial and absolutely necessary to our health. It is a “knee-jerk response,”........

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