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Comment by calvano915 | Hacker News Reader

Third year nutrition undergrad. Simple sugar consumption as a high percentage of carbohydrates/calories has the effect of chronic inflammation via oxidative stress, which is a factor of diabetes and other chronic disease.

This article briefly discusses inflammation and has mostly sound nutritional advice: http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/what-you-eat-c...

This lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig has been very popular on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM . Unsure of its veracity since I watched this quite a few years ago.

Many other factors should be considered as many have mentioned like micronutrient intake/absorption, physical activity, gut biome, and genetic predisposition.

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As a layman who got into nutrition for weight training purposes I want to ask you: why have I seen an uptick in the use of "inflammation" more broadly in nutrition from an year or so ago?

You may be well aware of the whole broscience that runs in fitness forums and it's very hard sometimes to find good and scientifically accurate sources and until now I've been lumping most of those "inflammation" articles together with the "toxins" ones, mostly a very broad umbrella term that had no real meaning.

But reading your comment and seeing this article from Harvard made me reconsider it so, again, what is this thing about "inflammation" regarding diet? It really just feels like an umbrella term...

You can almost think of, "inflammation" as a synonym for, "detrimental reaction". The inflammation is going to be a wholly different thing, depending on what you're talking about. But it usually causes response in the body that then becomes a different, chronic problem.

Example: too much sugar -> inflammation of arteries (because reasons) -> buildup of cholesterol -> heart attack.

It's not the sugar that cause the heart attack, it's the inflammation from the sugar and the body's response to it. This may seem like a small detail, but remember the theory was that it was the buildup of dietary cholesterol that caused clogged arteries. That was an easy narrative to follow, since, "(because reasons)" wasn't something you can market easily. Fat-free food usually doesn't have cholesterol either so it's good for you, if you're worried about having a heart attack!

This is the same falisty of thinking that merely eating fat makes you fat.

Excessive sugar causing Type 2 Diabetes is much less a theory than the above (insulin resistance)

Anyways, different inflammation is the pain I feel in my wrists typing this, or the pain my ankle from an accident last year. That inflammation is Not Good, and could lead to other Bad Things, like perhaps cancer (so I'm told by an MD)

So it is a very broad term, but it does def. have meaning.

Inflammation = immune response, and isn't always detrimental (immune response to a foreign body, or healing from trauma are good responses) but can be a bad thing (arthritis from antibody complexes, or artery inflammation as we are focusing on for this discussion).

Otherwise the parent's comment is pretty on point.

Inflammation = immune response, and isn't always detrimental

Yeah, you're right. I would say that one theory is that chronic inflammation can lead to Bad Things, but this is just areas of research at the moment and it's as diverse as types of inflammation.

There is a complex relationship between your diet, your gut microbiota (which pre-process your diet for you), and your immune system (which is sensitive to both gross and fine (signaling molecule) changes in the gut). The scope of this relationship was only recently realized, much of it due to new molecular biology techniques. For example there's the recent article about a boost in neuroinflammation observed from the presence of gut microbiota implicated in Parkison's progression in a mouse model, http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(16)31590-2.pdf ). Celiac disease and inflammatory bowel disease are two well-known categories of disorders, but more generally your gut is the most permeable interface of your body, so the immune system is very buffed up and sensitive to all kinds of signals there, affecting the background state of the entire system. That has the potential to cause harmful unnecessary inflammation in other parts of the body.

So do you still eat birthday cake?

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