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>This topic is interesting to me for a few reasons...

>Cognitive impairment has long been associated with inflammation in older adults: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3390758/

Once upon a time, when I was an itty bitty grad student, I had an appointment with an immunology PI to ask to be involved in their research.

One of the first questions they asked me was, what's inflammation?

"You want the layman's answer or the real answer?"

"Both."

"The layman's answer is that set of cellular and biochemical reactions involved with infections and their resolution."

"And the real answer?"

"There's no such thing. 'Inflammation' is the set of cellular and molecular biology that immunologists discovered before everyone else did. There isn't a single molecule in the body that isn't involved in a wide variety of functions, and there isn't a single function -be it extracellular remodeling, monitoring of cells for expression of abnormal proteins, cell signaling, cell life cycle regulation, etc. - that doesn't hook into a hundred different functions in a hundred different contexts. 'Inflammation' refers to the lens of the person studying the thing, not the thing."

I got a happy smile and a welcome handshake with that answer.

"Inflammation" as an explanation in medicine ranks alongside "Quantum Physics" as an explanation in everything else. When someone starts citing "quantum physics" for why anything, you can safely tune them out 99.99% of the time.

Well now that's interesting. A lot of medical/health/nutrition information these days seems to revolve around inflammation. Much of it is supposedly backed by studies (that I don't really have the time or understanding to dive into), but there's just so many things that supposedly cause it and are supposedly caused by it that I get the feeling that we don't really have any idea at all what it is and what it does. It's like it's some magic spell that is caused by whatever thing you're ideologically against, and causes basically everything you don't like.

We do know a lot about it, though, much more, I'm assuming, than we did when the previous poster was a grad student.

We know about different types of inflammation and the cellular processes involved, we know how it turns on and off, we know more about how it effects different systems and organs in the body. We can distinguish between short term and chronic inflammation and differentiate between types of inflammation that are beneficial and types that aren't.

There are, of course, lots of articles and trends out there that over simplify and make unreasonable associations and leaps... the comparison to quantum mechanics is apt in that way. But irresponsible reporting doesn't invalidate the source.

Our understanding is well beyond abstract at this point, despite how much we still don't know. The bulk of what we don't know outweighs what we do in most areas of biology.

OP went on to medical school after finishing that grad degree. We know a lot more about molecular biology. That we clump stuff under the header of "inflammation" is a categorization/naming issue, not a biology issue :)

This topic is also interesting to me and I’ve thankfully had some opportunity to observe friends and family in a way that verifies a lot of the claims.

Here are my thoughts on why it’s not in the zeitgeist to the level you’d expect:

1) A lot of people have normalized to inflammation and just assume that’s how their brains function

2) In addition to the “obvious” things like diet and exercise, there’s a significant impact through environment: lack of clean fresh air, mold, detergents, building material (and/or furniture) off-gassing, dust and dander especially in the sleeping space, and so-on. In cases like this people “try eating properly”, don’t see the kind of benefits that people talk about, and write off the whole thing as a not working “for them” before going back to their original diet.

3) We rarely talk socially about symptoms like brain fog, memory lapses, mild pain, anxiousness, speediness, etc as anything related to diet or environmental exposure. Previous generations seem to have mental and emotional wellbeing the same attention as they gave to the supernatural, and we seem to have to continually shake off mindsets like “if I can’t measure it it doesn’t exist”

> there’s a significant impact through environment

Yes environment is a better term (it includes diet, medically speaking). Modern life isn't something we're well suited for from an evolutionary standpoint.

> We rarely talk socially about symptoms like brain fog, memory lapses, mild pain, anxiousness, speediness, etc as anything related to diet or environmental exposure. Previous generations seem to have mental and emotional wellbeing the same attention as they gave to the supernatural, and we seem to have to continually shake off mindsets like “if I can’t measure it it doesn’t exist”

So true, and it's still a thing to a lesser degree in younger generations. Fortunately we increasingly can measure it.

>We know that exercise levels and diet can lower or increase inflammation.

I think it is extremely important to distinguish the types of inflammation. Exercise creates acute inflammation (for example the breakdown of certain muscle tissue in response to being worked) and the inflammation causes the body to repair the muscle, typically the resulting muscle tissue is improved. Whereas dietary inflammation, or inflammation caused by certain foods, is generally chronic and has damaging effects on everything down to DNA in the cells and this damaged DNA can get copied into new cells.

>So we have this sort of rare magic bullet when it comes to health, cognition and aging. Lowering inflammation won't fix everything of course, but it will lower your risk of pretty much everything.

You said it perfectly following this statement, it is simple but unfortunately that does not make it easy.

Sometimes the body gets confused about what it's supposed to be doing and accidentally fixes another problem.

We had a story recently about viral infections and cancer. Someone reminded me the other day that, before antibiotics, one treatment for venereal diseases was to expose yourself to another disease.

I wonder if we're going to figure out that these "dietary inflammation" issues were always in our diets, but that we were so active that muscle tissue repair mopped up most of the problem.

Big part of the problem is that inflammation is beneficial, only chronic inflammation is a problem. But treatments would reduce both.

> Big part of the problem is that inflammation is beneficial, only chronic inflammation is a problem.

But what about anaphylaxis, hay fever, mild allergies etc. There are plenty of acute or non-chronic inflammatory conditions that are a problem.

We have acute antiinflammatories for these cases. And they have serious side effects, especially treatments for asthmatics.

Now interesting part here is the mechanism which is different from the one targeted by current drugs.

> But treatments would reduce both.

Which is why the suggested solution is a lifestyle change to avoid the things that cause inflammation unnecessarily.