What Is Inflammation?

Mark Sisson explains what inflammation is and eleven ways we induce it in our bodies.

Inflammation is one of those words that people use without really thinking about its actual meaning. So today we’re going to take a bit of a break from the blood lipid series to cover inflammation. In later posts, I’ll dig deeper into how the inflammatory response works with stuff like exercise and heart disease, but for now, I’ll just get the basics out there.

Existence is suffering, according to certain schools of thought. I don’t know that I’d go quite that far, but I would emphatically state that anyone who spends a modicum of sentient time in the space time continuum we call existence is gonna experience some unpleasantness. A bump on the knee, a bacterial infection, an acute injury, a persistent illness, a death of a loved one, a broken heart. It’s a big and often angry world that doesn’t necessarily care about you, and something’s gotta give. When that happens and the sanctity of our bodies is interrupted by pain, injury, or illness, our bodies respond with inflammation. Read more