Living A Full Life

Conquering Chronic Inflammation for Lasting Health

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 3 • Episode 6

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Unlock the secrets to a healthier life by understanding the silent threat of chronic inflammation with Dr. Enrico Dolcecore. Has your body been whispering warnings through lingering aches and fatigue? Learn how acute inflammation, like a goose egg on the head, acts as your body's natural healer, while its chronic counterpart insidiously contributes to diseases like heart disease and diabetes. We promise to guide you through the maze of modern lifestyle choices that fuel this fire and share strategies for extinguishing it through mindful eating and movement.

Navigate the holiday season without succumbing to the sugary traps that exacerbate inflammation. Dr. Dolcecori and I discuss transforming your health with anti-inflammatory lifestyle habits, from eliminating processed foods to embracing the power of omega-3s, turmeric, and probiotics. Want to feel empowered, not overwhelmed, during the festive months? Discover practical tips for maintaining accountability and involving your family in the journey towards better health. This episode is your roadmap to a life with reduced pain and enhanced well-being, so you can thrive all year round.

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Speaker 1:

Hello, I'm Dr Enrico Dolcecori. Welcome to another week of living a full life this week. Inflammation we keep circling back yearly about inflammation. It's such an important topic to talk about and we need to understand how it impacts our life. Many of us live inflamed a lot. Did you know? Chronic inflammation is linked to nearly every major disease, from heart disease to diabetes and even cancer. It's a link, it's the foundation to pretty much all of disease.

Speaker 1:

You know, hundreds of years ago, philosophers and health advocates said you know, let food be thy medicine. It comes from thousands of years ago, from ancient Greece Let food be thy medicine for a deeper understanding that good food helps you live healthier. It's not really the food in itself. Of course, nutrition and good food plays a vital role in overall health, but eating healthy food minimizes inflammation. Most of our inflammation comes from the stuff we put into our bodies. So we need to understand why this is so critical for everyone to have a baseline and understand how to stay as minimally inflamed as possible. So when we start talking about inflammation, we need to.

Speaker 1:

There's two types of inflammation. There's acute inflammation and there's chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation are things that we can kind of wrap our head around. We get hit with a hockey puck in the elbow. We look at it. It starts to bruise, it starts to swell. Or maybe a goose egg on the head. Right when we get hit whatever with a baseball on the head, whatever may happen, and it immediately swells up and you get that goose egg. That's an acute inflammation response. You can see it. It's very visible. It can be painful. It can happen anywhere in the body. You can have an onset, let's say gout. Gout attacks the joints in the feet, mainly feet, knees and automatically swell up because of an internal inflammation response in there. That's an acute reaction, something that happens very quickly and it starts to set off the healing process in the body. That's what inflammation does. It's a perpetual forward motion of healing that happens in an acute situation.

Speaker 1:

That inflammation is a trigger for the body to rush whatever is needed to the area that's being inflamed. So let's say a goose egg on the head. It's going to rush white blood cells. It's going to rush everything to minimize the inflammation and to see what is going on in the area gives the body a few seconds or minutes to analyze what happens. Is it a bacteria? Is it a virus? Do we need macrophages, white blood cells. What do we need to send to the area to analyze what happens? Is it a bacteria? Is it a virus? Do we need macrophages, white blood cells? What do we need to send to the area to see what's happening? If it's a goose egg, it's blunt trauma to the head, it's a crushing of red blood cells, crushing of skin cells, crushing of epithelial you know whatever it may be damaged cells. So now the body sends in some macrophages, doesn't send an immune response to the area, and starts cleaning up the dead cells that were all killed in that mass attack from a baseball that hits you in the head, and it removes that over time. They take a day or a few days. The swelling goes down, those cells are removed and whatever damaged tissue was there and the bruising gets pulled up and the red blood cells get pulled up and it repairs with new and healthy cells and tissue.

Speaker 1:

That's an acute situation. Chronic inflammation means that whatever the body is doing to try and assess the situation, it can't get on it, it can't get on top of it, it can't heal it as quickly as an acute situation. So chronic inflammation is something that stays along for more than three weeks and it can last years. It can be many different things that happen with chronic inflammation and it can happen all over the body. And to grasp the goose egg versus the total inflammation in the body are two separate concepts that we need to understand. The goose egg is a blunt trauma. It's a quick inflammation or even a gout response, or something that we need to understand. The goose egg is a blunt trauma. It's a quick inflammation or even a gout response, or something that we eat and have an allergic reaction to, or a reaction to hives. Whatever it is is inflammation. The body assesses it.

Speaker 1:

Inflammation is pretty much the alarm bells. Or think about a fire station unleashing all the trucks all at the same time. I don't know if you've ever stopped in traffic and seen this and they all just go out. The sirens are on full blast, they're going down the road, everyone's getting out of the way. That's what acute inflammation is. It's the body sending out the entire city's fire department because of some mass response and they'll tackle it because they're great. But when you have something that outnumbers the amount of fire stations in the city, whatever it may be a mass threat I don't know politically what could happen, but a mass threat that happens and it outnumbers the amount of fire stations that you have in the area and the fire is out of control, then you don't have the resources to help mitigate it. All you're doing is chronically shooting water onto this mass fire without enough manpower or immune power to help decrease that inflammation because of a chronic stress. And in a fire, that chronic stress is continued oxygen, a breeze, dry conditions, everything that makes and fuels a fire to continue to burn, and what we need to do is snuff out the fire.

Speaker 1:

And so we need to understand what causes chronic inflammation, and the most popular, the absolute reasons why we run into chronic inflammatory states, is number one poor diets. Poor diets lead us and propel us into a perpetual inflammatory state. The number two reason is a lack of movement. We like to use the word exercise, but it's really movement. We've turned into very stagnant species. We sit at desks for long hours. We've made this the norm. We think sitting around. We have comfortable sofas, we've recliners, we got comfy mattresses, we got leather seats in the cars with air conditioning and heated seats. We're just designing our environment to sit on our butts and we don't really get moving. So that's really what it is. It's a lack of movement. It stagnates circulatory systems, both blood, respiration, cerebral, spinal fluid and lymph. It just slows it all down. And when you slow this all down you set up a beautiful dry condition for a forest fire to get out of control.

Speaker 1:

Then number three is environmental toxins. These are just kerosene that we throw onto a fire. So if we put men have a poor diet, we don't move much and then we ingest toxins or get exposed to toxins. Cosmetics, skin products, perfumes, colognes, shampoos, conditioners, lotions, foods, preservatives, aspartame, artificial sugars, artificial coloring dyes the list can go on to toxins. Now we're just throwing kerosene onto a fire. And then number four is the unaddressed health conditions that we may or may not know about that are underneath all of this, maybe developing because of the inflammation or concurrently with the inflammation, that just create an entire mess of health.

Speaker 1:

And some of you may be listening and be like man. I think that's me. Or you may be like man. I don't want that to be me and that's the whole point of the podcast. We need to dive into inflammation, understand what we need to do to reverse it.

Speaker 1:

Prevention is always the easy topic to talk about on a podcast because we're like do this, do that, don't do this. Prevent issues. It's a beautiful thing, it's a thing you can teach your kids to do. You know they're fresh off the press, they get a chance to live a healthy life and prevent. But for many of us, we talk about prevention, we talk the talk but we don't walk the walk. We talk about preventing but we're in a chronic inflammatory state and we're doing nothing to get out of it. That's the point of this podcast.

Speaker 1:

So the health risks of chronic inflammation this should scare the poop right out of you. The chronic inflammatory poop right out of your tummy is what should happen here, because the short-term effects of chronic inflammation may or may not be pain, swelling and fatigue. These are typically the first things that happen. If you just notice yourself getting tired, it's not because you're 47. It's not because you're 55. It's not Stop using age as an example for this. It's because the effects of chronic stress mainly that we're talking about inflammation is bringing you down in fatigue. And then there's swelling. I mean people are like, oh, my legs are swollen, my ankles are swollen, my hands get swollen. This is a sign of chronic inflammation, a sign of lymphedema or lymph not working properly. Going back to the heart circulatory issues. It could be just the first symptoms that we hear about. But remember, when do the fire trucks get dispersed in an immune response? It happens immediately when inflammation starts. So chronic inflammation means this. It started a while ago.

Speaker 1:

The fire departments have been out there for months or years, however long you've been inflamed, and they've been just standing there trying to put out this fire. I grew up in Western Canada. Very dense brush, all of Canada has very dense brush. But once you get to the Rocky Mountains and into British Columbia, it's forest, gorgeous forest, it's thick, and some of the fires that have happened through my lifetime took months for the fire department, the national guard, to fight. You'd hear about it. A week would go by. You kind of forget about it because it's too far from your home, so you really don't care. You see the smoke, and the smoke would be for months.

Speaker 1:

And we turn on the news. We're like are they still fighting that fire? They're like, yes, it's on to these. How many thousand hectares that's burning? And you're like they've been fighting for three months. Like how are they? How are they must be exhausted. How are they fighting this fight? And that's it.

Speaker 1:

This is where I got this analogy from is your firemen, your fire trucks, your fire departments have all been out there for months, if not years, fighting this and now you're starting to get pain, swelling and fatigue. Yeah, no, no, no, schnucks, sherlock, that's what ends up happening. So you now catch this and determine that I need to do something, months, if not longer, down the road. So just the point of this is remember, you're already too far into this. Something needs to be done immediately. That's the short-term risks pain, inflammation. The long-term risks are now that inflammation and fatigue is going to start to break down systems cardiovascular systems, like heart disease, type 2 diabetes. We can run into neurodegenerative disorders, conditions, brain fog, short-term memory loss, Alzheimer's a whole bunch of stuff can happen from there. I'm going to stop with the scary stuff.

Speaker 1:

And then autoimmune diseases. This is predominantly the number one thing that ends up happening. The autoimmune disease is such a huge umbrella of inflammation and degenerative conditions that happen that we really don't understand. Underneath the umbrella of lupus, underneath the umbrella of joint disease, inflammatory disease, thyroiditis, endocrine systems, it can spread across so many different things and we call it autoimmune, meaning that the immune system has been fatigued for so long. It is now attacking everything. It's like the seven-year war by the seventh year. They're now just shooting anything that walks. They don't care if they're on the same team, the opposite team, from another country. They're just like I'm tired, I want this over. We're fatigued. We're just going to attack everything, including your good cells Could be your thyroid, could be your adrenals, could be, whatever it may be. And that's where we get autoimmune responses and this can accelerate the aging process dramatically, making it poor quality of life.

Speaker 1:

So this is the importance of inflammation is being on top of it, and, for Pete's sakes, taking some turmeric is not going to save you. What we need to do is really get to the source of the inflammation. We got to get to the root of the forest fire. That's happening. So fighting inflammation naturally is a process. It's a lifestyle. You have to get to the root of the forest fire. That's happening. So fighting inflammation naturally is a process, it's a lifestyle. You have to commit to this. There's no other options. You've got to burn the boats here. Actually, you've burned the boats. You have so much inflammation You've burned the boats. There's nowhere to go. You're on an island. This is all you have. I mean drugs, and there is no surgeries for inflammation until you have, you know, organs that start to fail. But these are your goals.

Speaker 1:

Nutrition, lifestyle changes and natural supplements have to be part of your life. So, when it comes to nutrition, you have to follow an anti-inflammatory diet. Anti-inflammatory diets, the most anti-inflammatory diet you can eat, the best one one I absolutely think is the best Mediterranean whole 30 type diet. But let me tell you the exact foods. Leafy green vegetables, berries and fatty fish are the most anti oxidative foods on the planet. That's it. The leafy, deep green vegetables, the dark, dark berries, strawberries, blueberries, acai vegetables, the dark, dark berries, strawberries, blueberries, acai these types of things are just chock full of antioxidants and you need to get antioxidants from whole, fresh foods. You have to. There's no other way to get a high dose of it and you need to eat these in large quantities, which means you need to eat them daily. You need to eat them daily so they build up in your system over time, not for 30 days, not for 60 days for 75 years. You need to be eating this stuff continuously to build up this antioxidant and eliminate free radicals that are a side effect of inflammation. Then you have turmeric, ginger, all the other natural roots that are out there that help supplement and help with inflammation, but they're not your saving grace by going and stopping by Chick-fil-A and then taking a turmeric pill, a turmeric supplement, later that evening and feeling good about yourself. It doesn't work that way.

Speaker 1:

We have to avoid foods. This is even more important than the leafy green vegetables. We have to avoid the kerosene. We have to avoid processed foods, refined sugars and trans fats. I hope the new administration and RFK can remove trans fats from all restaurants across America. That would be a dramatic movement forward for Americans. Moving forward, it'd be absolutely fantastic. But don't rely on the government to stay healthy, because if you do, you'll look like the typical American. So don't do that. What you want to do is take control of your own health. Eliminate the processed foods Comes in a box and has more than four ingredients.

Speaker 1:

Don't buy it. Refined sugars again. Sucralose, aspartame, xylitol all the extra additives that they add to things to make them taste sweet. Forget it. Just have some maple syrup. Aspartame, xylitol all the extra additives that they add to things to make them taste sweet. Forget it. Just have some maple syrup and some cane sugar in your house and you'll be at it yourself. You'll be better off doing that that way.

Speaker 1:

Then we got to talk about lifestyle changes. We have to exercise. We have to move every single day Yoga, walking, stretching, strength training, jogging, whatever it may be, stair, stepper, biking every single day. Vigorous exercise for 20 minutes every day or light exercise for one hour every day. That's the rules. I didn't make them.

Speaker 1:

Science did Stress management. Stress can immediately create inflammation. When you get stressed in a moment, your blood pressure can go up. You can control in a moment what ends up happening to your body and it's a natural response to get you ready for whatever's happening in that stressful situation. It's just in our life right now finances and our bank accounts and our kids and Christmas presents and whatever that comes up, relationships that come up and cause stress.

Speaker 1:

Your paleolithic brain, your primal brain, thinks primally. It thinks okay, where's the lion, where's the threat, where's the crocodile coming after us to kill us? Right, that's what's happening. So we're just programmed that way and that's why we get the blood pressure, the vasodilation and everything ready to run and climb up a tree, but you can't even do a pull-up. How the heck are you going to climb a tree and get away from the crocodile? Right, you're going to say well, I don't need to do a pull-up to get away from my bank account. That scares the crap out of me and my financial stress. Well, I know it's an analogy, but we have to be able to get away from the stress.

Speaker 1:

So, using these things in stress management, you can use meditation, mental therapy. Mental therapy is so great Therapists and psychologists. They're absolutely wonderful to bring into your life and use them accordingly. It can be a huge leap forward for your mental stress. And quality sleep and maintaining a healthy circadian rhythm is really important and you can just search these now. We have hundreds of podcasts now. I can't believe I've done so many with our team that you can just put in circadian rhythm and we have a podcast on it. You put into maintaining healthy sleep we have a podcast about that, so you can always go back and listen or reach out to us and we're more than happy to help you out. Then we have the natural supplements we want to bring in and these are must-haves must-haves for every single family, in every single household. You must budget this small investment every single month for your family and yourself.

Speaker 1:

It's omega-3 fatty acids. There's just no way to eat enough fatty fish to get the source that you need. Remember this is every day For 75 years. We said we're going to eat like this all the time and to eat salmon every single day. It becomes cumbersome, hard to get, depending where you live. If you're in Alaska or British Columbia, you probably have access to salmon as much as you like for a reasonable price, but anywhere else it's pretty tough to get healthy fatty fish. So omega-3 fatty acids play a great role in inflammation. You need to have this. You need to take it every day 1,000 to 1,500 milligrams per day. Tumeric and curcumin absolutely. You can have a pill that you take every single day. For that it doesn't hurt. It's a root, it's great.

Speaker 1:

And a probiotic, a good probiotic 5 billion or up. And you've got to change your probiotics every 90 to 120 days. You want to change the manufacturer, you want to change the strain, you want to change everything. Don't buy the same one over and over again and I like cycling our probiotics. So you take them for 90 days, take a break for another 30, 60, 90 days, buy a new one, buy a different one, because you'll react differently to each and every probiotic. Some will help you with your gut motility. Some will make it a little bit worse those first few days, some will make you feel bloated. It all depends on your gut flora and we can dive deep into gut flora and why we're pulling back from probiotics immediately as a as advice off the bat, we used to say take a probiotic for everyone, but now we're caution, cautionary around it, because we want to actually check the gut flora before we prescribe a high dose probiotic for most patients. So you want to take a look at that first. If you've had trouble with probiotics, it's probably because you have some dysbiosis in the gut.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and then, of course, find yourself a fantastic functional medical provider. Functional medical providers can be a medical doctor, a DO, a nurse practitioner, a chiropractor, anyone that has taken additional training in internal medicine. Really, that's what it is internal medicine. Anyone that has done that is making a decision as a healthcare provider to treat people in a natural way. They're like you know what? Forget mainstream pharmaceuticals. We are going to go this route, and it could be a medical doctor. You could find a nurse practitioner that said you know what? Forget giving everyone antibiotics. I'm going to help people this way. That's typically who you're going to find is someone motivated in the natural way to do this, and that's what functional medicine is. Now that also means that everyone and their dog and their cat has a functional med thing that they put out with no credentialing. So you need to do some background research on these doctors, find out where they get their accreditation for, make sure they're accredited and if it doesn't look familiar, research that or move on to the next, because there's only a few branches of functional medicine out there that you should follow and have some credit to them.

Speaker 1:

Nothing against young doctors, but a 25-year-old doctor that says they do functional medicine, I don't know. Are they going to help you at a 55-year-old with your gut? These are honest things that I'm just saying. Nothing against young doctors. I was a young doctor at one point and I wouldn't have hired myself as a functional medicine doctor. I would have hired myself as a chiropractor. I was great. I am great. But just honestly, real, real honest questions when it comes to this.

Speaker 1:

Find a good provider that can help you. If you're stuck because inflammation is that important, you need help. And if you're stuck because inflammation is that important, you need help. And if you go to your primary care, that's in the primary model. They're going to say here take this anti-inflammatory or an NSAID, which is horrible. Advice leads to ulcers, stomach bleeding and kidney failure later in life. You can't take an NSAID every single day for the rest of your life. It doesn't work and it's not going to help you combat inflammation. And I think it's the main premise of why America is so sick. Is they're like oh, I'll just keep going through the drive-thru and take my NSAID and take my statins. Well, okay, enough there. Segment yep.

Speaker 1:

The next segment is creating an anti-inflammatory lifestyle. You ready? Start the day with an anti-inflammatory smoothie or tea, or even warm or water with a squeeze of lemon juice right into it. Start your day with that habit Moving forward. If you like tea, do tea. If you like water, put some lemon in it. And if you like smoothies, make a healthy smoothie with berries. Right, the antioxidants Build habits like meal prepping to avoid unhealthy choices.

Speaker 1:

Meal prepping has been I don't know how I got into it so young. We grew up with home-cooked meals growing up and we always had, you know, containers of leftovers to bring to school for lunch the next day. So I think it was there. But then I also got into the gym at a young age playing football and hockey and all that you know, 13, 14 years old, I was at the gym and I started just, it was just easier to have things ready, lunches ready and things. So when I came home, I was eating some chicken and rice rather than, you know, grabbing the pizza, pockets or whatever was in the freezer, warming those up. So build these healthy habits, teach your kids about these healthy habits and get them healthy that way as well. For families, here's a great idea. You know simple swaps. Replace sugary drinks with infused water or herbal teas. So get rid of the sugary drinks.

Speaker 1:

We cannot have high glucose or high fructose. Corn syrup or these syrups which they use as sugars now are so high in the glycemic index. There's so much concentration of sugar in the sodas and the drinks that we have. When we add liquid sugar to something, it's just too high of a concentration of sugar. So nothing should ever be that sweet. I don't know if you've ever had a sweet grapefruit or a sweet banana or a sweet pineapple and you're like, oh, it's just so great. It has a fraction of the amount of sugar that you get in soda. It's unbelievable. It's like grapes, sweet grapes. Those are the highest glycemic index fruits that you can eat. And if you have these sweet red or green grapes and they're super, you know what I'm talking about you crunch them and they're just super sweet. That's why we make wine from them. Those are the highest glycemic fruits. They still don't come anywhere close to a soda, so it's just nuts. So it's crazy how much sugar we've pumped into our foods.

Speaker 1:

And encourage your family to be outdoors as much as possible, because if they're outdoors, they're not inside sitting. That's the win. Get them outside. Every time our kids are acting up or anything, go outside, go in the driveway, do something. They may take out some sidewalk chalk and start coloring. That's not very active, but at least they're outside right and they never last long. They start fighting and start chasing each other. They're running down, tackling each other in the grass. It works well every single time. And then just sustain the lifestyle. That's my biggest advice from this podcast is sustain this lifestyle. Lifestyle that's my biggest advice from this podcast is sustain this lifestyle. All the small changes you made have to become your new normal, which substitute bad choices that you used to make, and that's the only way to move forward. Celebrate every small win that you have and be patient with yourself. Lifestyle changes take time to show results. I know it's all about the result, but they just take time to develop and take time to get there.

Speaker 1:

So inflammation very serious, especially this time of the year. The holiday season has started, and what is the holiday season? The holiday season is telling everyone in October to go buy bags of candy, handing them out to the kids on October 31st, and then it's just a downward slide till Valentine's day. It's just eat all this sugar, eat all this food, eat all this sugar all the way through the holidays and then in January everyone's like let's go to the gym. And then they're like well, here's some chocolates for Valentine's day and then everyone quits. It's just, it's this weird thing that we've done culturally to just move a lot of this sugar content at the end of the year.

Speaker 1:

So chronic inflammation is a hidden health threat, but with the right habits it is manageable. You can manage this and it's only you that can manage this. Make the changes today, make the little things today, those tips that we give you in the morning, starting to move, and make it a goal to reduce inflammation, and you'll save yourself a bunch of chronic issues. You'll save yourself pain, swelling, and you're going to add years to you. You really will add quality to your life. It's amazing what inflammation does and how it can hinder us, but it plays a global response in our overall health and I encourage all of you to take steps to do this and find the support that you need.

Speaker 1:

Whatever it may be. It may just be accountability. It may be other family members that hold you accountable. It may be a team effort as a family to prep meals. It may be making sure lemons are stocked all the time for your morning waters. You're picking your favorite teas. Movement, buying some piece of equipment that you like as a family a treadmill, a bike, a stair step or whatever people are going to use to keep you moving. You know, in the winter months or on a rainy day, it's nice to have something inside, or just joining the gym. Finally, and doing these things a few times a week, I hope that encourages you. I hope that influences you. Have a fantastic week.

People on this episode

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host
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Dr. Crystal Corona

Co-host