Here are three things to do to get rid
of that stubborn inflammation that just
won't go away.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com,
and this is Chris Masterjohn Lite, where
the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're going to talk about
resolving inflammation.
This episode assumes that you have
done the work to get rid of chronic
triggers of inflammation, and we're
addressing the clean-up process.
So, there are many potential triggers to
chronic inflammation. Three that would be
very common would be: dysbiosis, meaning
your gut microbiome is altered in a way
that is causing inflammation; obesity
because although everyone has their own
personal level of body fatness that they
can handle without triggering an
inflammatory cascade, every single person
on the planet will develop inflammation
in response to crossing whatever that
threshold is, and many of us have
inflammation because we are overweight;
and then the third thing is eating foods
that you don't tolerate. Trying to ferret
out the changes in the microbiome and
the foods you don't tolerate could be very
complicated. All of that is well beyond
the scope of this episode. You probably
need to be working with a knowledgeable
healthcare practitioner to take care of
those, and then of course there are more
severe diseases that could cause
inflammation that you definitely would
have to be working with a qualified
healthcare practitioner to address.
Here, what we're talking about is, let's say we
have done everything that we can to stop
causing inflammation, how do we make it
go away? And I think there is epidemic
proportions of inflammation that has not
gotten resolved, and we're still doing
research to try to figure out why, but
there's a few things that I can suggest
in the meantime while we're trying to
figure it out. So, first of all, as I said
in the last episode, you want to have
arachidonic acid levels and DHA levels
that are high enough in your tissues
because those are what you use
to resolve inflammation. And you can test
those. The simplest test to get would be
the Quest test. I'll relink to that test
as well as the panels that are included
in the description of this episode.
You want to make sure that your arachidonic
acid and DHA levels are on the higher
end of the spectrum. If arachidonic
acid is not high enough, you want to eat
more egg yolks, and you can take an
arachidonic acid supplement. I'll link to
one in the description. If your DHA isn't
high enough, you want to eat more fish,
you want to take more fish oil
or cod liver oil, or you want to—
you want to take—you could take
algal oil DHA as a supplement. That is
a vegan supplement. And to some extent if
you consume pasture-based animal
products, you will have a pretty good
balance of those. In other words,
egg yolks from chickens that are raised on
pasture that are eating grass and
insects have both arachidonic acid and
DHA in them. If you're eating animal
products that are grain-fed, they are not
going to be good sources of omega-3
fatty acids. So that's number one.
Manage your diet and supplements to get
your arachidonic acid and DHA levels on
the higher end of the spectrum. If that
alone isn't sufficient, then you might
want to jump-start the process of
resolving the inflammation. The gentlest
way to do that, and to be honest
everything in the rest of this video
should be considered pharmacological, not
nutritional, but arguably the best way to
approach this in a way that has the
least probable side effects would be to
take a fairly new supplement out from Metagenics
called Specialized Pro-resolving Mediators.
What this supplement is
is basically you're eating the
chemicals derived from those fatty acids
that jumpstart the resolution of
inflammation, and there's just not the
research to really say this will work,
but there's the basic science
of how this works that allows us
to say this might work, and it's something
that you could try.
It's on the expensive side, so if you can
just get these fatty acids to
where they should be nutritionally, and
that helps, then you can avoid the expense
of that. If that doesn't work, or you
don't want to put down the money, then
I would try what I suggested
four episodes ago about aspirin. And briefly, that
protocol is, number one, you want to take
bicarbonate on an empty stomach
at doses and at frequency that will
maintain your urine pH around 7,
possibly as high as 8, before you
start using the aspirin. You do not want
to take bicarbonate and aspirin within
30 to 60 minutes of each other because
you could get stomach problems from that.
Then you want to take aspirin with
glycine. The glycine doesn't have to be
exactly at the same time. It could be at
the nearest meal, but basically three
grams of glycine for every dose of
aspirin that you take. You want to take
the aspirin according to the label.
You want to clear that it's okay
to take aspirin with your doctor and
start at a lower recommended dose and
titrate up as you need it. And along with
this, you could take some fish oil to get
not only the DHA but also the EPA in the
presence of aspirin, and only in the
presence of aspirin, the EPA will help
resolve inflammation. I would not use
high doses of fish oil like 5 or 6 grams
of omega-3 fatty acids because
the EPA can have negative effects in
blocking the enzymes involved, so I think
you want to get low doses, maybe up to a
gram per day of EPA and DHA total.
So, get a fish oil that says exactly the
yield of EPA and DHA that take the sum
of EPA and DHA, go up to a gram in that.
You could experiment with going higher
over time, but if you do, I would do so
very slowly and give yourself some time.
Give a week or two taking the lower
dose with the aspirin
to make sure that you have to go up
higher before you actually shoot up
there into the higher dose range. Again,
aspirin is not without its side effects,
and so I would use that as the last
resort rather than the first resort and
make sure that the higher you go up in
each step—just getting the
fatty acids normal is totally nutritional;
you don't really need to
clear that with anyone. As you go up to
step two and step three with the
Specialized Pro-resolving Mediators and
then the aspirin, you're getting more and
more out of the nutrition zone and into
the pharmacology zone, so it becomes more
and more important to let your, the
healthcare practitioner that you work
with know about this and get clearance
for especially the aspirin but
maybe even for the other products involved.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
This has been Chris Masterjohn Lite,