Inflammation Increases Risk Of Cancer

[doom&gloom]

Re: Inflammation Increases Risk Of Cancer

I don't know how accurate any of this is and I was focussing on inflammation and heart disease not caner ... I'll just leave this here.

The way I understand things is that inflammation damages the cell lining of your arteries (which is a single cell thick), then the cholesterol gets lodged in the empty spaces and causes a build up of plaque due to persistant chronic inflammation. That is a greatly simplified version. So yes, eliminate chronic inflammation and you eliminate aterial disease.

What causes the inflammation? I think mostly sugar and some meats. I'm not sure if sugar directly causes inflammation or if it is insulin. In that case, the inflammation may get progressively worse as a person becomes more overweight and thus insulin resistant (a process that can be reversed by losing weight). And that would also explain the mechanism by which excess carbs (particularly refined ones that spike blood sugar) cause heart discease.

The problem with meat is that it is covered with a varying degree of bacteria at different points in production. Sure this is all killed before you eat it (most of the time), but cooking temperatures do not destroy bacterial endotoxin. If I recall correctly, this gets into the blood stream via the saturated fat pathway which may be why reducing saturated fat once seemed beneficial. If this is right, some meats are worse than others and meats could be rendered safer if they were handled better (if we prevented bacteria from ever growing on it instead of relying on killing it).

There are so many angles.

I think I read about the link between inflammation and SOME types of cancer is that inflammation delivers blood and nutrients to the site of certain kinds of cancer. The idea is to feed the immune system. But the cancer outgrows the immune system partly on the extra nutrients delivered by the inflammation response.

Unfortunately, I doubt we can ever expect to eliminate ALL inflammation in today's society. It would be impossible to ensure there is no contamination of meat by micro-organisms even if we grew and slaughtered it ourselves (short of a sterile lab setting). I now look at it as if you can do 85% or better, you are doing much much better than 85% of the population nowadays it seems...

[davidstvz]

Re: Inflammation Increases Risk Of Cancer

I agree, trying to find the perfect diet is pretty much futile. Sometimes I wish I went into biomedicine instead of computer science. I wish I had the time to study and learn a lot more about all of this. The information I currently have is highly fragmentary and incomplete and probably rife with subtle errors.