- [Rhonda]: So exercise is something that, I think you had even published some studies,
or a study, talking about the effects of exercise on, what was very interesting to me, what
you had called the inflammatory response that was induced post-prandial, so after you eat
a meal.
- [Charles]: Oh, yes.
That’s a big...
- [Rhonda]: It is.
What’s interesting to me is I’ve only really, I’ve heard one other person, one
of a colleague of mine who’s brilliant, his name is Mark Shigenaga.
He is a gut expert, so he studies the gut, gut health, microbiome.
He talks about how this postprandial inflammatory response occurs, because food is hard on the
gut and...
- [Charles]: It’s a foreign substance, the risk.
I mean, thousands of people die every year from eating out in the United States.
- [Rhonda]: Yeah, that’s true.
But even in addition to that, in addition to the bacteria that can, you know, come along
with eating some bad food, is that just that the gut itself, the gut barrier is sort of
to some degree, gets compromised with every meal, you’re releasing a little bit of endotoxin
in the bloodstream, because your immune system is activated.
- [Charles]: Leaky gut.
- [Rhonda]: Yeah, and so there is an inflammatory response that occurs, insulin, you know, in
itself, the insulin response and all that.
So I thought it was very interesting that you were looking specifically at that, and
the effects of exercise, that exercise had on that.
- [Charles]: No, I don’t think that that...
But we’ve written about this phenomena.
- [Rhonda]: Oh, you’ve written about it?
Okay.
- [Charles]: Well, you know, and the other thing is when you eat, it kind of gives you
fever.
Do you know about diet-induced thermogenesis?
So every time you eat, your body temperature elevates.
It’s why people sweat after they eat, you know, because it’s not a fever per se, because
I don’t think it is...
I don’t know whether upper regular is a thermal related set point, but we’ve known
for years that, and again you think about well why, partly because you’ve got to burn
off the energy, but it may also be that again hyperthermia has antibiotic effects, right?
So it is true that when you, it is, you know, any time a foreign substance comes in contact
with a vulnerable entry point into the body, there’s a risk of infection and death, right?
There’s a risk of infection and death, there’s a risk of pathogen manipulation, there’s
all sorts of things.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that that happens, nor should it be surprising that
fasting has a powerful anti-inflammatory effect.
There’s some beautiful data in animals, but also beautiful data in human too.
There was a study in 19 normal volunteers, and they looked at the effect of a, like a
24-hour fast on something called the NLRP3 inflammasome.
It’s the intercellular thing that connects up and it activates inflammation, turns on
this thing called IL1 Beta.
So you fast, and that the expression, the gene expression for that complex, just goes
down, down, down, down, down.
Then they let the people eat again, it goes up, up, up, up, up.
And they look at sort of leaky gut, and you find that eating sort of opens the gut up
to leakiness too.
Which may be just a bummer, that may just be that we can’t be built better than that.
Or it may be an evolved adaptive mechanism to kind of activate a little bit of inflammation,
you know, that when you kind of get things kicked up in your body, you look around.
I think the core idea here, and we’re talking about this in terms of the evolution of depression,
is nature is really smart.
It’s a compromise, it’s not perfect.
But, you know, you go, “Geez man, that’s bad.
You get a leaky gut when you eat.”
Well yeah, but across millions of years, if that was so bad, the gut would have figured
out a way not to do that.
It probably is an evolved strategy that every time you are exposed to death by an infection,
the body responds with a little bit of pre potent inflammatory response, just to get
everything kicked up and to deal with it, you know.
And of course, yeah, you pay a little bit of a price in terms of tissue damage, but
it’s a smoke alarm principle.
That little bit of damage is more than outweighed for the one time you don’t do it then you
die.
- [Rhonda]: Yeah, right.
So it totally makes sense, because the gut is what is exposed, the internal environment,
I mean.
So that’s...
- [Charles]: I mean, when you think about it, that’s the big one, right?
- [Rhonda]: Right.
- [Charles]: I mean, the skin is a much more robust protector against...
Any membrane that’s wet, it’s just bad news in that way.
But it has to be for us to survive to eat, and it’s sort of the compromise that we’ve
evolved.