Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. Jerry's here. We're all swollen in red and that makes this a brand new episode of Stuff you Should Know.
You know, I haven't told you this yet, but this is a very special episode, my friend. Oh yeah, because hopefully, if all goes well, this is the very last episode I will be recording in my basement.
Oh. This is the end of an era.
Chuck, the end of an era that started obviously in March twenty twenty and it's been three just a little over three years in the dark basement.
Dank. Don't forget Dank.
It is dank, and I am very excited. You know this, But I'm going to be moving into my my brand new home studio. That is a very cool space that is built under my staircase.
I have two words to describe it, high falutin.
Well it was. I was inspired by David Diggs. I saw his He has a record listening room heavy digs of Hamilton Fame and other things. But he has a record LP vinyl listening room glassed in and built in under his staircase and I was like, oh wow, I see the future.
Yeah, that's pretty good. Plus also nobody knows what to do with the under the staircase thing.
That's a great use of it wasted space. So now there's a recording studio under there. Jerry is coming over tomorrow with our colleague Josh Than Yeah tech tech wizard, and they're going to get it all set up and we're going to do some testing. And I'm just super excited to be moving into a bright, well lit, beautiful space. And I will put pictures of this studio on my Instagram.
Chuck the podcaster, be sure to like be squinting from the new light that you're exposed to you in your new setup.
And also very quickly. I don't know if you've checked your mail or where your Governor's award was being shipped, But mine just got here today, buddy.
Yeah, mine says it's on the way according to fed X.
Yeah, so we got the Governor's award. They shipped them to us and I just unboxed it and it's really cool and heavy and feels like a real award. And that is going to be displayed in the new studio.
Oh yeah, totally. Well, congratulations Chuck on your award.
I'm very very well you got the award too.
Sure I can still congratulate you, and congratulations on what you thought. I was congratulating you on your new setup.
Some may say that you are more than fifty percent responsible for that award.
No, no, exactly fifty percent down the middle, where's Jerry Finnet? Oh, man, geez the b it's ten percent. I hate fractions because.
You know we always go one hundred and ten percent.
Yeah, I guess. I guess we're each thirty three and a third responsible for it. And then who knows who's making up that extra hundredth of a percent?
All right, So anyway, announcements are out of the way. Let's talk inflammation.
Okay, that's that's the most straight ahead segue I've ever heard us too, But thank you for that, because we are talking about inflammation, and I think everybody's basically heard of inflammation. But the inflammation that you've heard of is like what happens when you sprain your ankle or cut your finger or something like that. Yeah, what we've discovered
is that there's another kind of inflammation. It's the same inflammation, but there's just different parameters to it that take it from being like a really important part of a healthy immune system and turn it into a thing that will kill you basically over time. And it's actually they're finding that inflammation is a common factor in so many different diseases, from heart disease to depression to diabetes, all sorts of stuff,
I mean, just the gamut types of cancer. That there's they basically come up with a new unifying theory of disease, the inflammation theory of disease that if you if you look close enough, in almost any especially noncommunicable diseases, but those two there, there's inflammation and that that's really what's screwing you up.
Yeah, that's it. Goodbye, goodbye. Yeah. It's called chronic inflammation. And the word inflammation and big thanks to Dave Ruse, yeah for this. This is very thorough.
I thought of biblical time machine fame.
That's right. The word inflammation is Latin and root of course in flammatio, and it means to ignite or to set fire in Latin. And that is really kind of straight down the middle as far as what inflammation and feels like, and in fact, the descriptors of the four characteristics, and we'll touch on the fifth of inflammation goes all the way back to our old buddy Galen, the Roman physician from the first century AD.
He pops up almost as much as our friend Pliny.
Did they know each other, Were they contemporaries?
There's plenty I don't. Well, Pliny was in the first half of the first century, I think, and yeah, I think. Yeah, they were probably good friends.
They were drinking buddies.
They probably played cornhole together.
That has many implications. I know, they might beat beer drinkers, they might have their Saturday spree.
What else.
They might be handy with a saw so they build their own. Sure, they may like football games and tailgating.
Yeah, there was a lot wrapped up in corn hole playing. Yeah.
So Galen is the one who who kind of nailed it out of the gate way back then and said that if you are inflamed, you will have redness, you have swelling, Sure, you will have heat check, you will have pain out, and then you have My friend Josh emailed me today and just saying no, Josh Clark and said that there's also a fifth one, buddy, and you have loss of function. But I'm going to amend your email to impaired function, okay for reduced function.
Yeah, which is like if you have if you have that sprained ankle and it's inflamed, you're not walking around on that ankle, you're basically not using it for the time being, or you're barely, very gingerly using it. So yeah, impaired function makes actually a lot more sense. Way to go.
Sure, and this is all good stuff like this acute inflammation. And we've talked about it before plenty of times, and oh boy, lots of podcasts pollin autoimmune disorders, like actually autoimmune you probably touched on it, but that's as we'll see a different thing. But acute inflammation is a good thing.
This is when your body mounts a defense and you know, if you sprain that ankle, or if you cut your hand, or if you have stripped throat or something, then your body basically says, all right, you know, we need to go to that wound with a lot of stuff with T cells, with B cells. I think they're basically all lumped into this group called inflammatory mediators.
Right, yeah, well they are the ones that release inflammatory mediators, I believe, So like these are the cells that go and do stuff like eat other cells or eat pathogens and spit them out or carry them into the lymph nodes. But the inflammatory mediators are what they release, and those are like hormones like histamines and brady Kinan's right. And then those mediators are the ones that are actually having
like effects on your body. They're the ones that like dilate your blood vessels to bring more blood to the area, which makes itmer and red or they also they also irritate your nerve endings, so that's where the pain comes from. That's the mediators that are doing all the stuff that your body is experiencing as like acute inflammation. But they're brought to that site, I believe, by white blood cells, right.
And the reason and we're saying it kind of like everyone knows, because I think everyone kind of knows this, sure, But the reason why your capillaries are expanding around the ankle sprain or around the cut or whatever is is basically just saying like, hey, we need to get more blood there, so take the express train. We're gonna puff up and no stopping along the way, and let's just get as much good stuff in there as fast as we can.
Yeah, which also accounts for fluid collection, which is another kind of sub feature of inflammation, which which I've never really thought of before, but it makes sense. And then consequently, your lymph note do you know when those get kind of swollen when you're sick, that's because all that inflame stuff that those macrofages are eating and carrying out take them to the lymph nodes, and your lift notes get swollen from over work and eventually go back down once
they drain out all of that crud. And the same thing to you also chuck for your running nose.
My running knows that I have right now.
Yes, it's because your mucous membranes are inflamed, and by bringing more fluid to the site, it's easier to more quickly flush out all that crud.
Yeah. Do you remember when I went to the hospital in New York when we were had our initial book push that didn't become the book.
Yeah, with our buddy Steven. I was thinking about it. Not a week ago.
Really, Yeah, So remember I went to the hospital. What hospital was it, I can't remember, you know, one of the New York City hospitals, right like Manhattan. Yeah, it was what did I end up having I can't even remember now.
I thought it was like a like some sort of terrible astritis or something like that.
I don't remember. That probably blocked it out of my mind. But long story short, after they had sort of healed me from this and they were like, all right, you can go. And I woke up from my drug induced stupor in my hospital bed. I felt behind my ear and I had a like a ping pong ball behind my ear.
And I was like so disconcerting, what is this?
And I would go to the nurse and I was like, hey, man, what is hair Bab Sammy Davis Junior hair Bab? I have a golf ball behind my ear? And he he was. He kind of gave me a look like what is it with you? Like are you a hypochondriac? And I was like, no, dude, look at it. It's huge. And I think he could just sort of dismissed it and was like, yeah, it's probably just some sort of a swollen node from whatever this was, and you don't worry about it.
Yeah. No, I remember you coming to lunch and being like I was just roundly mistreated by like this nurse.
Who was he was great actually, but he was just basically like, don't sweat it, please leave. We need Yeah, for sure, But anyway, that was my body again, just puffing up when something happened exactly.
So that's part of your acute immune response. You get dilated blood vessels, you get more blood there, it's easier for the white blood cells to get in and out of those vessels. You got irritated, nurse, you have pain, you got fluid collecting all the stuff that happens when you cut yourself or you sprain an ankle. I don't know why I keep going to that, but it's a good one. It's a good one, and that's normal. That's
your acute immune inflammatory response. Is that's a normal part of getting rid of a pathogen or treating an injury or a good thing like that. Yeah, your body's under some sort of stress and your immune system goes swarm swarm and inflames the area to help repair it more.
It also one of the reasons why it gets warm and one of the reasons also why you might feel tired if you have a particularly bad infection, is because your body is diverting a lot of your energy and tabolism too, fighting off whatever that is or treating that site, whatever it is, so you don't have like the energy to do cartwheels or anything because it's being used otherwise, again,
totally normal. The problem is is if this keeps going on, even if it drops down to a lower level, if it continues long after it should have stopped, now you've got problems. And this is the basis of that unified theory of disease, that chronic inflammation, systemic chronic inflammation that you're talking about.
Yeah, sci or ci ski Ski that's what they call them. The BIZ Sure one example of this, and we're going to go over a lot of different examples, but one example is, you know, sometimes you have infections that don't go away and your body mounts that immune response, but it's not just like, okay, we cured your or we got rid of your bronchitis for an now or whatever. There are long term infections that are very persistent. Hepatitis is one, HIV is another, they think long COVID maybe another.
Where your body has this immune response and it mounts it, but it doesn't go away completely, so it doesn't wipe out all those pathogens and so it just stays around. So your body has sort of a low level inflammatory response always happening in the case of these long term infections, and your body is just sort of constantly trying to fight it.
Right, So that's one that's a you can at least trace it back to a cause in that instance. Right. Yes, there's another thing that triggers chronic systemic chronic inflammation. That's oxidative stress, which we talked about in our Free Radicals episode. Is the free radical theory of aging. Wrong, Remember it came out but in the last couple of years.
Right, it's a good one.
Yeah, it was. But we talked about oxidative stress, which is where free radicals these radically free little molecules that borrow electrons from whatever is around it. They're super reactive molecules, and by borrowing an electron, that cell or that other molecule needed that electron. So it's now in disrepair, it's not functioning correctly, maybe it's dying. It's a problem. And free radicals another term from is reactive oxidative species, reactive
oxygen species. I think they're normal, like we produce those just from everything from like breathing to the immune system. Right, but they're supposed to be in balance. We have antioxidants naturally produced, and we can also absorb them from food that neutralize them. They go up to them, they say, take my electron, and they're now neutralized. They're not going to take it from a nearby cell or something like that.
If that gets out of balance, you've got oxidative stress where you have more cells than you should being damaged by these free radicals because you have more free radicals than you should. And then the immune response says, we got a problem over there. Let's get this area inflamed. That's right, and that's oxidative stress. That's another reason that you could point to for systemic chronic inflammation. The problem
is chuck. There's also there's also types of chronic inflammation that have no reason whatsoever, like the body's just not doing what it's supposed to do. It's basically confused in your suffering as a result.
Yeah, and we talked about, you know, autoimmune disorders, and we haven't done one on rum it's what arthritis yet, but I think that's probably coming.
Sure.
Lupus is another example. I mean, we talked about allergies and how that's that's an overblown immune response to yourself. Yeah, so in these cases, you're you know, your white blood cells are being dispatched to you know, whatever you would consider like the point of origin. I guess, and the body makes a mistake and said, all right, well I gotta I gotta start inflaming myself, and it inflames healthy tissues and healthy organs, and a lot of damage can be caused in a big, big way.
Yeah, because again, like this immune response, this inflammation shouldn't be happening anyway. It's targeting healthy stuff. It's turned on itself. Your body's turned on itself. That's problematic in and of itself. But because your body's still producing all the same things that your immune system is now mistaking as like foreign invaders or pathogens, it's constantly going to be mounting this inflammatory response, and so you're going to have systemic chronic inflammation from that as well.
All right, shall we take a break, I think so all right, we're gonna take a break. I'm gonna move into the new studio. Oh wait, best tomorrow, sorry very eager. Oh wait, we'll be right back. All right, So we're back talking inflammation. This is Inflammatalk with Josh and Chuck and not every chronic disease or everything that can kill
you is linked to chronic inflammation. But yeah, you go over the list, it's like the most the major killers of humans you can usually link to chronic inflammation, high blood pressure, heart disease, type two diabetes, chronic kidney disease, IBS. Inflammatory, the word is even in there, inflammatory, bowel disease, asthma. Other you know, we'll talk about lung cancer later and colon cancer later, but those are a couple of kinds
of cancer. We mentioned rheumatoid arthritis. But there are some surprising things in here that we're going to go over here in a few minutes. What is depression, Another is Parkinson's and dementia yep. And then the final one on Dave's list, it's a very thorough list, is non alcoholic
fatty liver disease. And this is basically, you know, all the doctors have gotten together now, they all got together in one room and they said, we've got a situation on our hands where we can officially all agree, like the inflammation theory of disease is sort of coalescing, and we we're pretty sure about all this.
Right, there's an outstanding chicken or the egg question though, that they've yet to answer, and that is the inflammation. Is chronic inflammation the cause of these chronic diseases or is it a symptom of these chronic diseases And they don't know yet. I'm going to put a substantial amount of my money on it's the cause. Yeah, I don't
think it's the symptom. I think the way that we've been approaching disease is the idea that inflammation would be a symptom of it, like you have some problem, some external problem that's coming into your body that's causing wreaking all this havoc. It's actually not right. So let's say you're talking about sugar. You eat a bunch of sugar. The sugar itself is not causing problems in your body. The sugar is triggering inflammation and chronic inflammation in some cases,
and that's the problem. That doesn't mean sugar is blameless because your body's still responding to it and it's it's just going to do that every time you eat sugar. But it's not the sugar itself. So I think the inflammation is the cause of the disease.
Yeah, I think I'm with you. Let's go over this first really interesting example of something that we kind of thought we had figured out and now we know so much more about, and that is Alzheimer's disease. I'll give you a we've do we do one specifically on Alzheimer's.
I think it was dementia. I don't. I think it was I don't. I don't remember.
Okay, well, I know we've talked about it. But the quickest refresher Alzheimer's is a type of dementia, and it's neuronal death. Is what's going on. We have a couple of things in the brain that function well until they don't. One is called amyloid beta proteins. These are little clusters around your neurons in a healthy brain, and they aid in neural growth and repair, doing a really good job.
But when they become misfolded, then all of a sudden, it becomes We've talked about amyloid plaques, and that's what they are. These plaques form and they're basically misfolded versions of ordinarily good amyloid beta proteins, and these are outside the neurons. There's also something inside the neurons called taulproteins, and these are also great. They do great work, big fan they aid in neuron structure and kind of keep them nice and strong from the inside. But these can
also become misfolded. But they're misfolded on the inside and all of a sudden it becomes what's called a neurofibrillary tangle or a towel tangle.
That sounds bad.
It does sound bad, And we've known for a while now, like, hey, if you have amyloid plaques and these towel tangles in your brain, then that is what is causing this Alzheimer's disease, the type of dementia. But now they've zeroed in and said, you know what, we think it's really this neuroinflammation that's going on in the brain that's the real root cause.
Yeah, that's actually a good example of this inflammatory theory of disease. Creating a chicken or egg question about those tau tangles and amyloid plaques, Like, we used to think that that was the problem, but now is that just a symptom of it. We're not sure. But there's a couple theories on how neuroinflammation would cause Alzheimer's, specifically and one of them is that it's based around microglia cells. We talked about macrophasias that go around and eat like pathogens.
This is the brain's version of that, a really specialized version that goes around and like cleans up the brain, eating neurons that are problematic or have stopped functioning or
it's just their time to go. And they do a really good job normally, but over time, especially when we get old, those microglia can also turn on healthy neurons and which would make Alzheimer's and all of the loss of function and cognitive ability and behavioral changes in autoimmune condition, right, Yeah, which is not exactly what you think of when you think of Alzheimer's.
Yeah, But here's the thing is, they've done some interesting studies. They've done autopsies on patients that have, like you know, we talked about the build up of these amyloid plaques and everyone's like, that's what causes Alzheimer's. They've done autopsies on these brains that had really far gone amyloid plaque build ups but really not much neuroinflammation going on, and the patients had no symptoms of dementia in these cases.
But I mean, isn't it possible it's just because they were dead, they probably didn't have symptoms of anything.
Very funny, Go ahead, all right, Sorry I was holding for applause. But then they looked at patients with not very many plaque formations, so you wouldn't think that they had dementia or Alzheimer's, but they had really high levels of neuroinflammation. And these people had basically all the signs and symptoms of advanced Alzheimer's.
That's pretty good evidence of that theory then.
I mean, it's kind of a reversal almost.
Yeah. I saw Another interpretation of the neuroinflammation theory of Alzheimer's is that those amyloid plaques and tau tangles, right as they build up in the brain, those microglias start to attack them and try to clear them out, as it should do. But because the brain is constantly after a certain age or or whatever, producing these tangles and plaques,
the microglie are constantly attacking them. So you now have chronic chronic inflammation in your brain, which is another explanation of neuroinflammation for Alzheimer's.
Yeah, so like neuronal death happens, let's just face it, and it happens more as you age. But like these microglia cells that are misidentifying the normal cells. When I read this stuff, it feels like science can figure this out one day. It feels like they just did well figure out how to fix it. Oh yeah, you know, I mean, like how to switch something off. And I know they're getting close with with with a lot of this stuff, but I don't know, like so much of
this inflammation. As I was reading it, I just kept thinking, like, they're going to figure this out at some point.
Yeah, And I was wondering, So, Chuck, I don't know if we said this or not, but there they attribute fifty percent of the deaths around the world in any given year to chronic inflammation or a disease that is connected to chronic inflammation. Right, Yeah, sixty seven million people died in twenty twenty two. If they can figure out chronic inflammation, you would ostensibly save the lives of thirty three and a half million people in a year. Yeah,
which is amazing. But I'm also wondering, like, isn't that gonna cause like one hell of a population crisis if we have an extra thirty three million people every year that we're going to be there previously, and great, their lives are saved. But I guess my point is not like, oh, no, they need to die. No, Instead, it's we would actually need to prepare and look down the road at how to deal with that because it would be a and it'd be significant and fast if we figured out chronic inflammation.
Yeah, calling Norman Borlaw right exactly. Yeah, but something will kill you eventually, but you're right, it would extend lives, like a lot of lives.
Vastly and also I mean especially in the case of something No, definitely not, but in the case of Alzheimer's especially, it would vastly improve later life as well.
Quality of life.
Sure, yeah, I mean just like it'd be like night and day if we could figure out chronic inflammation, even for just Alzheimer's.
Yeah, I mean, well, I mean quality of life for most of these if you talk about something like IBS or Crohn's disease, like so much of this stuff is, yeah, stuff that people these chronic conditions people just live with every day that makes their life miserable.
Yeah. And if you're one of those fiscal conservatives and you're like I don't care about any of this. How does this? How are you going to make me care? Buckle up? In twenty sixteen, just that year, just in the United States, we spent one point one trillion dollars directly on healthcare for diseases associated with chronic inflammation. Indirectly, if you take like lost productivity and all that stuff into account, it cost us three point seven trillion dollars
in twenty sixteen. Think about what you could do with three point seven trillion dollars that you just suddenly had in your pocket because we figured out chronic inflammation.
Yeah, we'd all just get that back, right.
Sure, they just distributed it to everyone, and we would never have to work again, and things would just keep going on smoothly.
You know what they in the business they call what you just did? What hit him in the pocketbook?
Yeah, that makes sense. That's a pretty good term for that.
Yeah, I'll go. People still say pocketbook, right, that's a modern relevant term. Yeah, Oh, I forgot my.
Pocketbook right in my goloshes.
My goloshes, my pocketbook. Do people not say goloshes where they say wellies?
Yeah, they say wellies. Now, they definitely don't say rubbers anymore. That was always weird.
I think yeah, I think that ended in like the seventies or something.
Probably.
I don't feel like we should take our next break yet. Do you should we talk about cancer first?
Hold on, I'm looking inside myself. No, I don't think we should either.
Okay, well let's talk about cancer. We can start it out with lung cancer. Everyone knows that when you smoke, you have a pretty decent chance of getting lung cancer. The question is like, what exactly is going on there? And it's pretty easy. You inhale smoke along with other things that are in cigarettes, and that really is going to irritate the cells inside your lungs. That's going to trigger that inflammatory response because your body is like, what
is going on? I shouldn't have this thing in my lungs? And if you do this for years and years and years, that's called chronic inflammation, and it's going to damage your lung tissues over time.
Tissues tissue tissue. Sure, But the mechanism even further on, like a deeper basis, is that smoke contains reactive oxygen species. So that's going and running buck wild through your lung tissue tearing stuff up. So not only is it messing up your cells and creating inflammation some of those cells it's messing up, it's also messing with their DNA too, And when cells with broken basically DNA or altered DNA start dividing and creating new cells, they pass along that
altered DNA. And if the DNA the genes that are altered, say, are like tumor suppressing genes, all of a sudden, they're not going to stop dividing. They're going to keep going and going, and now you have a tumor. So it's kind of like a one to two punch just from cigarette smoke.
Yeah. Well, I mean, like we said, the inflammation is going to increase the blood flow, increase that cell division rate, so it's just like this sort of cycle spinning in on itself.
Yeah, and I think the inflammation is kind of like I think COPD is like the inflammation without the tumor part, and lung cancer is like the whole package. That's my take on it.
Yeah. So we mentioned earlier that not all cancers are due to inflammation, but one we can definitely sort of look at now is colon cancer. If you have Crohn's disease. If you have ulcer of colitis, then you are way more likely to develop colon cancer. And like I said earlier, tho,
the word inflammatory is in the name there. It's an inflammatory bowel disease because you're once again your immune system is making a mistake and it's attacking those great healthy gut microbes that are keeping your gut nice and balanced, and that is going to cause that inflammation just to
stick around forever. Basically can lead to ulcers as well, and that again just sort of like the lung cancer that can damage the DNA in the same way we were talking about with lung cancer and all of a sudden you have a tumor.
Yep, And the same process can also happen with chronic infections like tuberculosis and HPV, which is like I've always been like, how a virus caused cancer. That's how it creates. It brings chronic inflammation to the site of the cancer.
All Right, I feel like now we should take the break.
Yeah, I think you're right. I can find that too.
We'll be right back and talk about sort of a surprising thing and how depression relates to this.
All right, Chuck, So you mentioned depression before the break, and that is I mean, at least as surprising as Alzheimer's potentially being caused by chronic inflammation. Agreed, There's a again, a few interpretations of this that we'll get to. But the reason that they're like, I really think not for all of them, but that there's a significant portion of people with depression who are suffering depression not because of
a neurochemical imbalance but because of inflammation. And the reason that that group has kind of emerged as a possibility is because there's always been about thirty percent of people who've never really responded to SSRIs and other treatments for depression, other chemical treatments for depression that target neurotransmitters and try to restore balance in the brain. And if your chemicals aren't out of balance, you're not going to respond to
those if the problem is that you have neuroinflammation. And they're saying for at least about a third of people, it's possible that it's neuroinflammation and causing depression.
Yeah, and you know, there's a lot of things to go over here. One is, if you have an autoimmune disorder and it's an autoimmune disorder, that causes chronic inflammation, then you are way more likely to be diagnosed with depression. That is again, that's sort of a correlation I guess that we can look at right now. They have done autopsies on people who have died by suicide that have
also shown elevated levels of neuroinflammation. And then this study that our ol buddy Dave Rus found in cancer patients. Forty different cancer patients that had no history of depression at all in their life were treated with a chemical, an inflammatory cytokine known as interferon alpha, which your body naturally releases all the time as part of our inflammatory response,
part of our immune system. And when these patients said no history of depression, these cancer patients were injected with interfer on alpha, their moods were altered, and many of them said, you know, I feel depressed.
Yeah, which is I mean, all of that put together especially, is pretty strong evidence for that theory. The question or the answer to the question like how is this happening or how is this creating depression? Again, there's a couple of theories. One is straightforward as well. The inflammation is messing with some of your pathways that produce things like happiness and pleasure and your ability to relax. That's pretty straightforward.
There's another kind of more roundabout one that says that this chronic inflammation is triggering a sweeter cluster of behaviors called sickness behaviors, where you're fatigued, you're anhdonic, which means you can't experience pleasure, you don't eat very much, you don't really feel like interacting with other people, and that that is actually like that group of sickness behaviors kind of evolved in humans to get us to just sit down and relax and rest when we were sick, so
that our immune system could like take over and take care of it without having to shuffle some of that metabolism for us going for a jog or something, right, And that the brain is is not really differentiating between the two because you're not sick, but you still have the sickness behaviors, and that they're saying that is that specific variety of depression.
I really, you know how much we love when something goes back to evolutionary advantage, right, And it's just so cool to think about tuktok tuk tuk no feel good, right, Tuck Tuck go and sit by himself and let and let and let body fix itself. Sure, Tuck Tuck no want to play rock ball, Tuck Tuck need time alone.
Tuk tuk need to dial up out of office email.
Yeah, so people say tuktuk depressed and tuk tuk say no natural body response.
Right, but again, if you can attribute it to a sickness, it might be confused for depression.
Yeah. I think that's really super fascinating.
Totally, and that actually the evolution thing really kind of underscores the explanation for a whole other group of diseases that are linked to chronic inflammation, things like heart disease, type two diabetes, some types of cancer, kidney failure, a lot of stuff that a lot of diseases I should say that kill a lot of people and make even
more people suffer that are probably not very old. They probably don't go very far back in our evolutionary history because they're probably the result of just kind of the trappings of industrialization. The food we eat, the environmental toxins were exposed to, the work hours that we set for ourselves, the stress that can kind of come from living in the modern world, and that all of these new things that we humans expose ourselves too don't really jibe with
the way that we evolve to live. And so we're in this really rough transition period right now where our bodies are like this is all wrong and this is all disease, and we're like, no, this is the food we eat now. And that evolutionary mismatch is One group of authors of a really influential paper put it as what causes that chronic inflammation and hence those diseases.
Yeah, I mean it makes sense when you think about it. We have the same brain that tuk Took had when they found uncontacted tribes, and uncontacted is a It doesn't mean literally no one has ever talked to them. It just means they're generally left alone.
They want to be left alone, so we leave them alone.
Yeah, but still we don't leave them alone because sometimes anthropologists will go in there and spend time with them. But what they're not finding in those tribes is type two diabetes, and they're not finding ibs, and they're not finding these like very sort of not to name check another Chevy Chase movie, but they're not finding these modern problems.
Right, And so some people are like, well, hunter gatherers typically don't have the same lifespans that we do, so it's probably aging. It's that free radical theory of aging. That's what causes inflammation. It's not the food we eat or anything. It's like, no, it's definitely the food that we eat. It's definitely the environmental toxins. It's definitely the stress because if you study all those things, they cause
that inflammation. And if you look at like hunter gatherers or uncontacted tribes, like they're not eating that stuff, they don't have that kind of inflammation, they don't have those diseases. It's not to do with the lower life expectancy. It's to do with the fact that they don't expose themselves to the things that we expose ourselves. So industrialization has kind of led to this brand new group of diseases, chronic diseases that all seem to be stemming from chronic inflammation.
That's right. I wonder what happens when they give one of those hunter gatherers a cheeto.
Oh dude, they go fuck wild.
Yeah, oh boy, No.
One can turn down a cheetoh. And once you have a Cheetoh, You're like, give me ten more Cheetos and then give me the bag. And now I'm moving to Portland so I can have easy access to.
Cheetos right in street tacos.
Yeah. Good.
By the way, I mentioned, I apologize for Chevy Chase because you're a well known hater of Chevy Chase.
Yeah, it's okay. I've got little bloody half crescent moons in my palm from my fingernails, okay, because I was holding my piece, But I appreciate that.
I just wanted to explain that to newer listeners. They were like, why are you apologizing for Chevy Chase. Guess Josh is on record is not being a big fan.
Well, I was raised to despise Chevy, right.
You're dad didn't like him, right, Yeah, And.
He literally raised me to hate Chevy Chase.
That's really funny. What was his beef again? Was it just he thought he was a which is what he was was a cocky sort of sob yeah jerk.
I'm sure he said SOB two probably so yeah. So yeah, that was it. And my dad saw right through him, apparently, because even at a time when Chevy Chase was beloved and could star in like pretty big movies. My dad was still like, Nope, that guy, he's not a good guy.
You know what is not bad, believe it or not, is that new Fletch movie with John Ham.
I can imagine. So I could see it.
It was pretty good. Yeah, it was very under the radar.
Yeah, I noticed. I was like, when did that come out? It just kind of showed up in Amazon Prime Movies. Will think You'll like, I don't know about that Amazon Prime.
I think it's one of these that the studio kind of just bailed on for some reason and didn't do any marketing, which I don't get because John Ham's a, you know, a big name, and Fletch is a big name and it was a good movie.
Yeah, I don't understand it either.
It was very fletchy. All right, So let's talk about some of these you talked about industrialization in the world that we live in and these risk factors in our environment. One is, you know, you don't have to be a smoker to affect your lungs because you're walking around every day as a human on modern earth, breathing airborne pollutants that are doing some of the same things that smoking does. On a lower level, you are eating microplastics. You are
if you're using the wrong soaps and shampoos. You can have some nasty chemicals like the lights, slates, thelates, thollates. Let I say, I said they lights to begin with.
Yeah, I mean it's all very melodic. All of them are fine.
Well, when you start a word with p H, T H anyone.
You're just being a jerk at that point.
But all of these things are just in our body from walking around in the world unless you live like a really clean lifestyle, which is you know, a great thing to aspire to, and you're still like breathing air exactly right.
You just you can't get away from it. And like they're finding more and more, like microplastics are everywhere. I can't remember what they're called forever, chemicals like teflon, they're everywhere. It's just everywhere. This to me, if I'm going to make another bet in this episode, this is the one that's responsible for the most chronic disease. Microplastics, chemicals, industrial toxins, air pollution. I think it's going to plant, it's going to pan out to be plastics. We're going to find
the smoking gun because get this chuck. Industrialization has produced one hundred and fifty thousand chemicals so far, and we're adding two thousand new chemicals each year to our toolbox to produce everything from food to paint. And the FDA has a mandate to test these things before they approve them, and it just isn't happening. I've read it would take centuries for the FDA to test to catch up, and
they're just not ever going to. So these chemicals just make it out and no one has any idea, especially at first, whether they're harmful or not. We just kind of find out the hard way.
Yeah, the food we eat obviously, you know, fried food, sugary sodas, refined sugars, refined carbohydrates, trans fats, meat secured with nitrates, booze, some people gluten, some people dairy. This you know, this is going to create inflammation. That's called an inflammatory diet. If you want to avoid that stuff, then you know, the Mediterranean diet is a great place to live. I was about to say start, but kind
of start and stay. Olive oil, lentils, tomatoes, leafy greens, fatty fish, cigarettes for cigarettes, blueberries, strawberries, cherries, apples, almonds, walnuts, those things are anti.
What you're naming all the foods.
That's not all the foods, that's all the good foods.
It's true.
You didn't hear me say twinkie and fried chicken.
Oh, it's true.
Just avoid those refined foods. Eat real foods. But those foods that I listed out are literally anti inflammatory. So they're not only just good for your body in general and good for your heart and stuff like that, but they have anti inflammatory effects.
Pretty neat and the opposite of the Mediterranean diet, that Western diet, another name for it is the standard American diet or SAD. And one other thing about it is not only plentiful and things like fried foods and sugar, it's also really low in fiber, which is a huge problem too. And a lot of those foods that you just listed off are very high in dietary fiber, which is something that if you wanted to figure out where to start, increase fiber in your diet and it will help a lot.
Yeah, big time. Me with my gut issues, I've been I've been trying to eat as much fiber as possible.
Good for you, man. The problem is is I hope you're rich, and I hope you have a lot of time to cook, because it's really tough to avoid ultra processed foods otherwise. And that's really sad. That's a sad state of affairs. Yeah, but that's kind of how it is right now.
Agreed.
So another one is sedentary lifestyle physical activity, right, Like, I didn't know this, but when you exercise, when your skeletal muscles contract, they actually release anti inflammatory proteins that go throughout your entire body. Did you know that?
I didn't know that. But like, full stop, that's all you need to say.
Yeah, because well I'm going to say some more.
Yeah.
The point is it's not sitting around that causes inflammation. It's not exercising that allows inflammation to go on unchecked. That's the kind of the explanation of that one. And there's a lot of people who are not physically active. Fifty percent of American adults aren't physically active. They get less than one hundred and fifty minutes of moderate aerobic activity each week.
Yeah, so like if you're I mean, I don't know a lot of people that make a case against exercising, but I have heard people say stuff like Oh, you know, you go out and you you walk for forty five minutes and all that that just burns up. Like they just look at like how many calories that burns And you know it may not be a ton of literal calories. But there's so many other benefits to exercising totally beyond just burning calories.
Yeah. And I mean we've talked about it before, like exercise is not for weight loss, if that's what you're trying to do. Exercises for things like anti inflammatory release, your mental health. Yeah, all the other benefits you are talking about anything basically butt.
Weight loss, yeah, plus plus a little bit of calorie production or calorie burning.
But speaking of weight loss, another problem of a sedentary lifestyle is excess weight and at a posts tissue, a visceral adipost tissue, which you would call like belly fat, your body says, okay, here's it. This is a normal level, and if you exceed the normal level, your body takes it as problematic and that causes inflammation in and of itself.
I know, man, that belly fat is no good.
No, it's true.
Any other kind of fat on your body, yeah, uh, And there's something I'm working on I've lost fifteen pounds.
By the way, Hey, congratulations man, wow wee wait, yeah.
It's it's just a start, but I feel like, I don't know, this feels more real than before.
Are you taking a long view of it?
I'm taking a I don't want to die view of it, and I want to I want to look better at you.
Yeah, that's great, man. One thing I've been trying to do the same thing, and one thing I've come up with is anytime I'm like frustrated or impatient or I just am not where I want to be, I've learned to just tell myself, like, this is where I am right now. I'm not always going to be here. I'm going to have setbacks, I'm going to have advances, but this is just what I am right now. And that's fine.
Man. That's a very healthy way to be.
It's helped me a lot, like a lot.
That's great.
It's helped get me through some real like problematic valleys.
Good good advice too.
Thanks.
We're just doling it out today. We totally are lose weight, support yourself, quit smoking. Don't say that about my friend. Quit smoking.
Yeah that's another one too.
Stress is a big deal. Obviously, if you are chronically stressed, many many bad things will happen, but it is an inflammatory trigger. The cortisol levels in your body, you know, being sustained like that are really gonna mess with your body as a whole, but definitely mess with their ability to regulate, regulate inflammation and you know, trauma. They've even found that, like childhood trauma much later in life can be really tied to inflammatory markers.
Yeah, like we've we've always been like a well people like eat to cope later on from like a childhood trauma and more complicated. Yeah, it actually may be more complicated.
That might maybe that you have, you know, markers that set you up to to have excess weight that it's really difficult for you to lose because of inflammation because you have a genetic code programmed in you from an early age epigenetically and epigenetically it can also be passed along from mom and dad to kid and set them up without any childhood trauma, but their parents had trauma that encoded it into their genes that they now passed along to their kid who's going to struggle with weight
all of their life because their parents were neglected when they were young.
Combine that with can your grandfather's diet affect what was it affect your weight?
The name of that one weight or something I don't remember, but it was just if you just look up grandfather's diet, which, by the way, you should tell everybody at long last. I think the soft opening is over soft opening, not two words that should go together. But we just updated with the help of our great friend Brandon Reid announcing Yeah, you are you ready, because if not, we can edit it out.
No, no, no, let's do it.
What we just unveil the brand new, updated Way to Go version of stuff youshould know dot com.
Yeah, and as in brand new, it's sort of the first time we've ever had a real website pretty much. Yeah, you're fifteen years in, let's get a website.
Yeah for sure. So all of the episodes are there, all of them, all fifteen hundred plus. You can just keep scrolling until your eyes start bleeding.
The search is much better.
Yes, you can also search grandfather's diet and it's going to bring up that episode. Also, there's like tour dates about us. It's real like paired rounds, but it's got everything that you need.
Yeah, we asked for something sort of simple and clean and big. Thanks to Brandon, he killed it.
Huge, thanks to Brandon. Thanks a lot, man.
It's great speaking of websites and looking at them on a screen, like how I did that? I do screens can disrupt your sleep. All the artificial in our modern worlds disrupts our sleep. Certainly if you have a shift work job where you're alternating day and night or just completely flipping and working nights only, this is going to mess up with the natural circadian rhythm that Took Took and our uncontacted friends have, which is it's dark, so we sleep, it's light, so we wake up. And this
all effects and promotes inflammation. They've even done studies where just shift work alone is a risk factor for cardiovascular cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, obesity, different kinds of cancer. And that's just if you do shift work.
Yeah, And it's because your circadian rhythm is so intimately tied to your immune system that if it gets out of whack, your immune system gets out of whack real quick.
Yeah.
Aging also, I mean we talked about it earlier. We also talked about in the free radicals theory of aging episode. But one of the other ways that aging can create chronic inflammation is something called immunosinescence, where your immune system just stops functioning properly, opens you up to infections more. But also your immune system goes haywire a little bit too, and your t helper cells start turning on your healthy tissue, which can also trigger chronic inflammation.
Isn't it interesting how much more you think about this stuff as you get hold her. Yeah, totally remember thinking about any of this stuff when I was in my twenties.
No, but hopefully we have some like twenties and thirties people who are listening right now and are like, oh, I'm going to take care of myself earlier than Josh and Chuck started it.
Yeah, you two will age. Yeah, there ain't no stopping it, so get ready.
Yeah. That reminds me of that Simpson's in the House of Horrors. Lisa's going through. There's an old lady in a rocking chair and she goes, behold the ravages of age. I thought that would get a better response.
Well, was that the punchline?
Yeah, she was going through like a house of horrors and like that, I got you one of the things.
Was to be like a monster and then the rabbage get it. That is the punchline.
I didn't do a good job of explaining it. No.
I thought she was going to say they're ravages of age, and then she would reveal something or something.
But she's just sitting in a rocker's she in herself.
Yeah, I totally get it now, I'm a little slow on the uptake today. There is a test for inflammation in general, a blood test called HS little HS big CRP. It measures and something we've talked about quite a bit on the show. See reactive protein. It's produced in the liver and if you have a high CRP number, it means you probably have a lot of chronic inflammation. It doesn't pinpoint exactly what is inflamed, but it's still a worthwhile test to have.
Yeah, no, for sure. And that's one of the things that they're trying to crack is there's no reliable biomarkers of chronic inflammation. That one's a pretty good one, but there's not like a whole whole group that you can be like, this is where it's happening, this is why it's happening, This is how to fix it just based on those those biomarkers. But there are some things you can do to keep it from ever happening in the first place, or to get to get it to go away.
I mean, one of the things if you start to make some lifestyle changes, like it can turn diseases around, like you can come out of pre diabetes, you can, you can cure clear up some bowel disorders like it can have like a really pronounced effect if you actually exercise, if you try to maintain a healthy weight, cut out highly processed foods, quit smoking, quit smoking, drink get that good sleep yeah, cut down on drinking yeah. And also
being more social. Apparently this is bad news for the introverts like me, because the more social you are, the less inflammation you should have.
That's right, and then you can live as healthy life as you can and just wait for your family's genetics to kill you.
But that's probably why because the after genetics had some inflammation coded into it, and now it's you know, you can be mad at your grandpa.
I loved my grandpa, Well that's great, But the one that I knew, I'm happy.
For you, I didn't really I knew. Yeah, I guess I knew one of mine. He was great too. I only met one of mine a couple of times, and I was too young to really make an impression of him.
Yeah. Same went. My dad's dad died when I was five or six, and my mom's dad died when I was I think I like, I think I was like twelve and he was great. And it's one of those things where I was like, every once in a while, I'm like, man, I wish I could have known Walter as with me as an adult.
Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah. You and me grew up down the street from her grandparents for years and years and years and like interacted with them. They helped kind of like raise her, like there were a secondary set of parents. And I was like, I'm so jealous of that, you know, like you're so lucky if you're exposed to that as a kid.
Yeah. So here's my last bit of advice. Okay, if you're sort of youngish and you love your grandma and grandpa and you're just gonna think they're always going to be around, they're not, so talk to them and ask them questions.
Yeah, like what we're wearing galoshes?
Like, yeah, we were rubbers.
If your grandpa sounds like that he has neuro inflammation.
That means he's Abe Simpson.
Right, you got anything else?
I got nothing else.
If you want to know more about inflammation and chronic inflammation in particular, just start reading about it. There's a lot of interesting stuff out there. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail, all right.
I'm gonna call this one. It's kind of fun to hear from liners who started young and are now adults. Yes, kind of ties into where we're just talking about. Hey, guys, I remember listening to your podcast with my dad on a long car trips to visit extended family when I was younger. He's always been the type of dad to get us curious about things so we could learn more about what we're interested in. In Your guys show was a great way to encourage that for me and my siblings.
I'm pretty sure the first podcast I listened to you was from twenty thirteen, How Ghosts Work? Wow, And I remember being horrified ten year old agast at Chuck's story of the Old Lady in the Road.
Yeah, that was a scary story.
It was a good one. Now I'm twenty, I'm in college, still tuning in to learn new stuff that I should know. This podcast has been It's always so weird to hear this. This podcast has been a memorable part of my childhood. Who we heard and I wanted to thank you guys for doing what you're doing. I hope you're doing well. And that sincerely is from Kaya Powell.
Thank you so much for that, Kaya, Like we hear that from people from time to time and it's just wonderful every time. Kind of gives you chills, a little bit done at huts.
That's right, like seeing the old ghost lady in the road.
I think about how much life has packed in between age ten and age twenty, and we were there for the whole time of't that neat? Well? Thanks for taking us along your journey, Kaya, And if you want to be like Kaya and write in for any reason whatsoever, you can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
You Know, Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.