A message from Dr. Cathy Kim on COVID-19
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Dr. Cathy A. Kim, MD, APC

The What and Why of Anti-inflammatory Diet

Anti-Inflammatory Diet Lecture

The What and Why of Anti-inflammatory Diet

In this lecture, I help you understand what inflammation is and why all of us should care about an anti-inflammatory lifestyle. 

Transcription:

Thank you for coming to my Zoom lecture today. I’m Dr. Cathy Kim and I’m a Body Function Specialist. 

In my Functional Medicine practice, I address metabolic and structural imbalances and my content often focuses on the structural imbalances, but today I wanted to focus more on the inflammatory side of things.

I hope you can find some new information that you have not thought about before regarding this topic. I did a search on Amazon, as most of us would do, to look for resources.  And when you do a search for “anti-inflammatory diet” on Amazon, just recently I got over 4,000 results, for books on this topic. Obviously, there is no scarcity of  information on this topic of anti-inflammatory diet . . . what possibly could I find helpful to you beyond these 4000 results on Amazon?

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Obviously, this time of inflammation is on everybody’s mind because of COVID-19. This is a great illustration, from a New England Journal of Medicine article, that shows this red bar, which is the amount of inflammation going on in the disease process, correlating to the severity of the illness. So when people are asymptomatic mild, up in the first two columns, they have very little inflammation going on, and as they get to be moderate to severe then they have a lot more inflammation.

This is an article from way before COVID-19 was on our minds; it’s originally from June of 2014, then updated in November 2018. And it’s talking about anti-inflammatory foods . . . what does an anti-inflammatory diet do?  The immune system, it says, becomes activated when your body recognizes anything that is foreign. And it lists these things and it lists why . . . what happens to you when you are inflamed day in and day out. This is linked to a lot of chronic disease. They packaged it again for August 2020; so that’s 2014, 2018, and now 2020, the same exact information. Obviously, it’s needed out there, for people to understand what foods they can use to fight inflammation.

I found in my work with patients that it might be that, maybe WHAT to do, is not so much the information-hurdle out there — it’s maybe, WHETHER OR NOT it applies to you. Obviously there’s so much out there about it. What if there is so much out there about it, but if you don’t believe it applies to you, then you might not take that information in? And I thought that this stumbling hurdle might be for people: what exactly is inflammation, what does it mean to them, and are they even susceptible to it themselves? If they don’t feel susceptible, then they’re not going to be receptive to the information.

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I like this slide because I thought it shows really well how we really, most of us out there, are thinking about what inflammation is. This is a model of the skin on the surface, I circled “injury infection” and so that’s the damage to this perfect skin: it gets a red bump, it’s warm, red, and swollen. This is our traditional view of what inflammation is. And then over here finally, in this other oval, the skin is healing. We know what that looks like on the outside. This diagram shows what is going on, on the inside, under the skin, that you can’t see. It’s at the level of all this molecular biology — all the stuff that is making it possible for that red swollen inflamed area on the surface to heal. This under-the-surface part, in this diagram, is what they’re talking about, about why we’re inflamed, and so this is what I would seek to explain in this lecture. 

Inflammation is a response to injury. It’s meant to be a temporary way to cope with things when we are injured, and we hijack, or we kind of change, our processes, just temporarily, so that we can get back on our feet, like what happens after a flood or a hurricane or tornado. You could cope with “it” being closed and no electricity. You cope with those things, but you expect everything to return to normal. 

So if inflammation is a response to injury, and you don’t feel that you’re being injured, maybe what we should look at is what could be injuring you, or us. 

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This is an impressive slide — impressive to patients when I show them this information about cancer in general, which is also an inflammatory condition. But the cause of cancer, (because most of us believe that cancer runs in your family, which it does,when we see that anecdotally from friends and family) but only 5 to 10% of those are purely genetic . . . the other 90 to 95% are caused by environmental and lifestyle factors. Underneath this group then, 30 to 35% of that is dietary. When you look at this list, the two areas you could do something about, that you most could take action on, would be under tobacco and the dietary. 

Hence now, this term called the Exposome; this was coined in about 2005. It was a little take on the word chromosome. So this is the Exposome, the combination of these external environmental factors, including diet, that are affecting your gene expression in your chromosome. So it’s affecting your gene expression and then this ultimately impacts your health. So they have lists of the Specific External Environment in the circle above here, in the bottom level, General External Environment. 

Of course, I’m focusing on diet today. I thought it was kind of helpful to break those two circles down into lists. It’s a little easier to see those. And I put under General Specific, on the right here; we’re gonna look at diet. As an aside, I thought it’s important to note that under Consumer Products, a lot of the things that we’re consuming are actually packaged. These Consumer Products they’re talking about — packaging like Health and Beauty aids is the packaging. But under diet, we also are having packaged things in plastic, plastic water bottles. Food is packaged in plastic, and these chemicals are leaching into our diet. But I’m mostly focusing on what’s just purely in our food.

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I thought it was helpful to talk about diet, as if it were medicine. So when I prescribe medicine, I prescribe the Dosage, the Frequency, the Strength of the medicine, and then there’s this fourth component, the Toxin/Additives, the non-food aspects of diet, that are really in our food.  And to be honest, they’re in our medicines also. Many of these medicines have additives to make them bind together.  These are inflammatory actually, and same for the coloring that they use to make them attractive and to sell better. 

Okay, so we’ll focus on Dosage first. The concept on Dosage I thought that patients might not understand well, is that they believe that everything they’re taking is “in moderation.”  And that is true, I do believe they’re practicing that, or we all try to practice that. But I think our concept of moderation has been changing rapidly in modern times.

I use this glass of orange juice to represent that the glass size for orange juice has steadily increased from the days of your grandmother or great-grandmother. The days of using elbow grease to juice an orange with the home setup are over. Machines can do this very well, and since the ease of obtaining large amounts of orange juice has increased, then of course it’s easier to pour more, and buy in large quantities, and the containers have gotten bigger. It takes 3 medium-sized oranges to make 8 ounces of orange juice. 

But I would say most people’s serving of orange juice is a lot more than 8 ounces. When you’re going to have 8 ounces of juice or more with a sandwich, it’s probably difficult to eat three oranges . . . three apples. Or, in this case, because these are the containers that are larger containers at the Subway, these probably represent about 5 oranges and 5 apples. So it would be really hard to eat 5 oranges or 5 apples with your sandwich, but it’s much easier to drink just the pure juice, without the fiber and all the other nutritious parts of the fruit. 

This lemonade is probably at least 20 ounces. And it is not made out of only lemons; it is made out of cane sugar. But the point is, that all of these carbohydrates meant to be consumed distributed within the fiber of the fruit, is delivered all at once. This is an injury to the body –because it’s a stress to the body to handle that load all at once. A little bit like what happens when we have too much rain or you try to water a garden with soil that’s really tough — you can put a bunch of water on it, but the soil can only absorb so much at once and then there are problems when you have way too much water that you can’t handle, for instance.

So going on to moderation and the idea that it’s changing, the sizes changed now of things like soda, which was never really natural, of course, to begin with. And so it goes from a 12-ounce can, now we have it in a 20-ounce bottle. This is pretty standard for what people think is a serving size. So 12 ounces is already a hefty load of carbohydrates at once and now 20 ounces is going to be that much more. 

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These pictures illustrate where we’ve come from, in terms of the problem of moderation. These are just examples of what they looked like thousands of years ago, before these were domesticated and altered by our own ingenuity. This watermelon, which was full of seeds and not very much fruit, and then of course, compared to a modern watermelon. And that’s true for the banana; it’s true for the eggplant; this shocking difference between the original carrot and this juicy sweet carrot we have, and the same for corn and modern corn. These carrots and corn are much more loaded with carbohydrates than their ancestors, and carrots are one of the sweetest vegetables consumed, even though it is good to have. 

I use a lot of sources from the internet, that are easy to pick up from the internet, because I want you, the viewer . . . patients, to be able to find this information on your own and not feel like you can’t find it yourself to research it or help your own understanding. Dr. Mark Hyman, he is very visible on Facebook and Instagram. He is the director of Functional Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, where people are coming from all over, who have failed conventional medicine and are being given this information about metabolic inflammation and about how to make the choices that affects their diet, that affects their health. So this information is being presented there, and he’s popularizing it, putting out this information to us. And I’m here, helping you understand why it could be relevant to you. In this one post, he’s commenting about a 20-ounce (this HFCS means High Fructose Corn Syrup), so this one 20-ounce soda in a bottle, has the equivalent of 17 teaspoons of sugar, and in our ancient ancestry we only consumed 20 teaspoons in a year. 

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I think I made my point about how the Dosage has changed over time. How about looking at the Frequency, how this has changed over time. I would say now that no limits exist. Before we are waiting for seasons, so we kind of had to wait, but now you can fly everything everywhere. And even though we’re trying to pay attention to the carbon footprint of fruit shipped from Peru, we still like what we like. 

In this picture of the grocery store, this is of course all these Little Debbie treats . . . I grew up on these. They’re all just different forms of the same processed carbohydrate formula of a refined grain, mixed with some sugar source, something to bind them together, and then different seasonings, and this HFCS over here in liquid form. 

This is to demonstrate that you could really eat a whole day of this food: cereal, pasta or sandwich, pizza, . . . I should have (also) said cereal or bagel. You can have a whole day of these foods and think that you had some diversity. But when you break it down by what it came from, they’re really all just sources of processed grain, and very little of the actual fiber and the nutrition of the fruits and vegetables, the produce that we need. I explain to patients that this is kind of like eating Play-Doh™. Our food, modern food, is a lot like Play-Doh™ — where you take the same Play-Doh™ and you press it into all these forms. You can set the table in your little dollhouse with bananas, and grapes, and hot dogs. And they’re really all the same food, just pressed into different shapes and textures. 

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Let’s address the Potency factor now of things in our diet. This one is about how we can see the ingredient list, and these look “all natural,” but is the quantity actually natural for us? This is partly Dosage also, because obviously I was saying that when we drink orange juice, we’re drinking the juice of many oranges. When you’re having all of those choices, the frequency (that) you’re having all the carbs at different times of day seems like choices. This Potency will address a slightly different area, which is about things you normally would not eat in great quantity at all. 

This one is about carrageenan, which is a natural ingredient. It naturally occurs in red seaweed. You might recognize this from some seaweed salad in a Japanese restaurant, for instance. They found when it’s extracted, though, and added to foods like yogurt, ice cream, pudding, you could get a really nice great texture out of it. The problem is, that the amount that you need “to get that texture” turns out to be bad for us. It’s been associated with getting cancer and stomach problems. This Dr. Tobacman, has published many articles about finding that it’s in processed food causing Inflammation. That, of course,is related to these chronic diseases. And it’s actually so reliable to cause Inflammation, that she writes that researchers use it to make Inflammation happen, so they could test their anti-inflammatory drug.!

It even will cause, (we don’t have to just focus on cancer) . . . apparently mice exposed to this low concentration of carrageenan, just for 18 days, develop profound glucose intolerance and impaired insulin action — which of course means that they’re headed towards diabetes, after 18 days of exposure to this carrageenan. 

What else are we getting in unnatural quantities? This is another post by Dr. Hyman about gluten. Apparently there’s a lot of us out there who are genetically unable to process gluten very well. But you take that with the problem that now we’ve engineered wheat to have much more gluten than even the regular original forms of the wheat that they’re having . . . domesticated in Europe. He’s calling this “super gluten”, and this gives the bread even a lighter fluffier texture that we all love and adore, and he says now it’s infected nearly all the wheat in America. 

Okay so, HFCS is also something that you would think is natural, because it comes from corn. And it’s fructose which is also natural, but it is not natural in its concentrated form. And interestingly, when I looked up about HFCS, I had always thought that it came from corn that was squeezed, a little bit like making orange juice. I thought that it was made out of corn, squeezed and you kind of dehydrated it, the way you do maple syrup, to get it dense and sugary. It turns out that it’s made out of cornstarch that they add chemicals to, to reconstitute it, break bonds, and make it into this syrup that they use now to add to syrup, drinks, food, baked goods. Apparently it contains a lot of mercury. This FDA researcher requested a barrel of this, and she ran it through the chemical analyzer. And it had toxic levels of mercury because of the manufacturing. And it had these other chemical peaks that she couldn’t identify what those were. 

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Moving on to other non-food items that would affect us in our diet, that could cause us injury,  non-food Toxin/Additives. This was an impressive post. This came a few months ago, that glyphosate, which you might know is Roundup™ — I’ve seen commercials about “do you want to participate in a class action lawsuit about Roundup™ if you’ve used it as a weed killer?” The problem is, all of us would have to jump on that lawsuit, because it is used all over the world for these food crops, especially on our grains . . . wheat, corn, and soybeans, which is used as the feed for the animals. 

You can tell where I’m going with that . . . is that now, it’s in the feed . . .  the animal eats it. Now it’s in their flesh, and then you’re eating glyphosate in the end . . . when you eat meat that’s been fed these crops. It’s amazing that a bowl of Cheerios™ has more Roundup™ per serving, than vitamins D or B12!  And that is an impressive comparison that brings it to the forefront . . . why . . . why we are all getting injured by these nonfood Additives in the diet, Toxins and Additives.

He makes another post about the top 10 foods with the most pesticides. I find it helpful . . . I suggest to patients that they make a list of this because it’s really hard to commit to memory. When you’re faced with a “special” at the grocery store, it’s really hard to remember what was on that list. 

Here’s pictures of when you would be in a produce section of the store, and you’re overwhelmed with how pretty and natural everything is. But, now you have to temper that with the knowledge that there is a concept of the 10 foods with the most pesticides. 

There’s another list out there called, The Dirty Dozen. That Dirty Dozen list changes every year, but not by much, it’s mostly the same.  These are the produce items that have the heaviest doses of pesticide applied. And when I say heaviest, I don’t mean that they have one. I mean if you looked at what was on them, they have several pesticides at once. 

These pesticides, because they’re meant to kill the bugs, they have some neurotoxin ability. So if you ingest those, and they accumulate in your body, then this might affect your thinking or nerve function — brain, or other nerve function. But they also have other properties as well, they can stimulate enzymes for susceptible people. They can stimulate enzymes to make you make fat. And they also can make you more resistant to your insulin, same as that carrageenan. This is how someone could be religiously . . . be a diabetic and eating salad really diligently, or someone trying to lose weight and eating salad diligently, and not finding that they’re losing weight, because these pesticides would actually be preventing them from losing weight. 

My experiences, when I am at the grocery store shopping, are definitely more heightened than yours would be, because I see patients who are affected by this. One of my patients had not lost a pound in 13 years of trying. When I introduced her to these concepts and the idea that it’s not her fault if her body’s enzymes are provoked into making fat when she eats certain pesticides, she ate “clean,” and when she ate “clean,” she lost 35 pounds over a year. But she had limited funds, so whenever her diet would get “dirty” for a short period of time, her weight loss would plateau.

Here’s another Additive/Toxin that we’re exposed to — these are the artificial colors. The main one I wanted to point out is Red Dye 40. Although he points out that there are 3000 food additives out on the market, I’m sure I know the name of only a handful. The average one of us is eating 5 pounds of this additive a year. I explain to patients that these artificial colors are made out of petroleum, which we all understand is what we use to make gasoline and oil. So it’s clearly not a food; it’s a fossil fuel. But it can be processed into something that we can use to make pills look more attractive, like prescription pills, but it’s also in NyQuil™ and Pepto-Bismol™ or over the counter medicines, I believe it’s in Theraflu™ . . . then there’s red velvet cake and those beautiful frostings that we like to decorate with. 

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Okay, now we can regroup a little.  That injury is prompting a crisis repair, and this crisis repair is what inflammation is, what was happening under the surface of the skin of the red inflamed bump — the injury is what’s provoking this. Hopefully now, you could feel somewhat open to the idea that you might be getting chronically injured by your food, of all things — mostly what’s added to the food or how man has changed our food throughout agriculture . . . and made it sweeter in general, sweeter mostly, and bigger. And this chronic injury leads to chronic inflammation.  

This chronic “911-we’re-only-going-to-get-through-this-for-a-little-while,” this chronic inflammation is what creates the environment that activates disease . . . again to drive home the idea that it’s a response to injury meant to be only temporary. 

Okay, if it were that simple, now we can understand it . . . we maybe believe that we are inflamed, that we don’t have to look in the mirror and think “I look inflamed.” We actually believe that under the surface of skin we are inflamed, because there are things injuring us. Why wouldn’t everyone who actually understands this concept, follow an anti-inflammatory diet? 

Based again on my experience with working with patients, I feel it falls into two main categories: Beliefs and Behavior. 

And this is for the people who could see that, but they still can’t change. (There are many people who understand that or have learned that and then they change. Sometimes it’s only in response to when they get sick, but they do change.) 

This belief is the Erroneous kind of beliefs (under knowledge deficits), or knowledge deficits is what’s causing Erroneous beliefs. I call them Erroneous Popular Beliefs — “that I’m doing okay because I’m doing everything in moderation.”

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We talked about that so far already, about how fossil fuel and mechanization makes supernatural quantities available — in terms of the quantity of juice, the frequency of baked goods, the frequency of snacks. How much we can consume in products like meat and dairy products and livestock? Because some of these things take a long time to make, but if there are huge factories putting out large quantities, we can have it whenever we want.

Genetic engineering has made it . . . what is a moderate amount of gluten to have? That has changed drastically. Also, what is a moderate amount of fruit? The size of the fruit has changed a lot. What is the moderate amount of chemicals? When you understand there are 3000 food additives . . . mercury in the High Fructose Corn Syrup. These additives, some of them natural but in supernatural qualities, other ones are clearly non-food — what is a moderate amount of these? 

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And another belief is that exposure to chemicals makes your body stronger. That is a joke often thrown around, but maybe deep down it reflects a little belief in there also. I want to clarify that people might be confusing immunity to bacteria and viruses, which is part of the natural world, with toxins which are from the man-made world. 

Bacteria and viruses have a lifespan and body battles them constantly. We are living organisms locked in a life-or-death fight, and these stimulate the immune system. But toxins that are man-made accumulate in the body and ultimately weaken the immune system. Some of these pesticides or additives, a lot of these pesticides and chemicals, they enter your body and some you might get rid of in a few days, other ones take weeks, months and a few of them don’t leave you for years. Every time you have them, you’re keeping that for a few years. 

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And then we come to Behavior. Why are we having a hard time? Even if we know, “that this is not good for us,” we can’t change our Beliefs . . . or . . . where we don’t know enough knowledge to change your Beliefs . . . or know enough information to change our Beliefs . . . or we are controlled by our craving habits and desires, so that we can’t change our Behavior.

About 95% of all that we think and feel and learn, these are all happening without our being aware. And that is where our Behavior, our hitches, are happening on changing our Behavior. And this is also capitalized upon by marketers, because a lot of the products that we’re talking about, that we are consuming, need to be sold to us. We have to feel that we need them and want them. 

This field in the 20th Century, is the field called neuromarketing, and it was pretty much started around 1929. Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and he read his uncle’s writings and he thought that he could use that information about the unconscious mind to help market goods that he was using in his work. He even had written a book about propaganda and he thought, well, these concepts didn’t have to be just used for the government, you could use them for marketing. 

There’s many examples of his kind of approach to advertising, but here is one of them:  he was approached to increase the market of women smokers. He recognized there was an unconscious desire that women wanted to have male power. They thought cigarettes symbolized this. There were women smoking then, but it was more of a taboo thing to do in public. So his solution was to have Lucky Strike make a campaign called, “the Torches of Freedom” campaign. This changed smoking’s image from sexual promiscuity, to one of power and independence. (I did read, as an aside, that his own wife was smoking and he understood that it was bad for her health so he was trying to convince her to stop smoking, while he was working on this ad campaign.) 

This is a very famous example of his use of his uncle’s theory. He was asked to increase the market for bacon. The problem was, in this post depression-era, everybody was really habitually leaning on black coffee and toast. He recognized there was an unconscious desire to be healthy. So what he did was, he surveyed doctors and asked them, “do you recommend to your patients a light breakfast or a hearty breakfast?” And of course, most of them suggested a hearty breakfast, and then this is how the hearty, bacon-and-eggs American breakfast was born. I should note that of course this idea of having a hearty breakfast is now . . . we’re understanding that fasting is better.  Intermittent fasting is better and so I want to make sure people understand it. Just because this is a cultural truth about America, we don’t have to stick with the hearty American breakfast. 

How has this changed now for the 21st century? Now marketers can use: EEG (the tracings of the brain wave activity on people), focus groups (when they show them their product or have them consume their product, to understand what part of the brain gets stimulated). They can detect the guilt center of the brain. They can detect what parts light up for memory and motion — motion, for instance, to be excited to go out and buy the product. They could also wire you up to machines to measure: if your sweating increases, if you get goosebumps, if your heart rate goes up, and how fast your eyes are moving back and forth. These are examples of how they can use this.  This is a way to appeal to your unconscious mind, to your brain activity, what you’re not aware of, to help direct what they want you to do, or what you do respond to. 

Frito-Lay focus groups found that the matte beige bags that had potatoes and healthy ingredients on them did not trigger the guilt area of the brain, unlike just their shiny bags with just straight pictures of chips.  They’re not going to pay for this information and do nothing. They, of course, changed their packaging. And Cheetos™ found out that consumers love that sticky orange dust that gets all over the people.  This lights up a certain section of the brain that shows that they love this texture.  

So how does produce, (we’ll take out for the moment that this has been genetically engineered to be bigger, and greener, and heartier than the ancestors), but how can plain produce now compete with these packaged, targeted, engineered products geared towards what we can’t resist?

I’m hoping that’s what you’re thinking, because I am here to suggest what you can do to help yourself become more savvy about what is going on out there in terms of your Behavior. I suggest that we all need to work on being more mindful, more aware . . . so let’s be more mindfully aware of things that are going on . . . what’s natural . . . be aware of your Belief system. Because if you’re aware of these things, then it’s harder to be manipulated by them because you’re just responding to what your emotions, or as we saw here, your subconscious is telling you. 

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I put this slide here, of nature and fire, to remind us of a couple things. When we’re in the natural world a lot more, interacting with it, within it, living with it — adjusting our consumption based on how much it rains because our water comes from the rainwater we collect or firewood because this is what we can have when the trees die naturally in the woods and we don’t fell any trees — then we’re more in touch with the ebb and flow in the timing of supply and demand. But when we live in an era where everything that you do is subject to a switch on and off, we can actually mistakenly believe that things in our own body work that way also: they just turn on and off, they don’t have a “tail” on it. For instance, the fire when it goes out, we all understand  that we douse it with some water and the wood is going to stay hot for quite a while. It’s going to take a long time for the ember’s to die out. When you have a flood, and the water recedes, Hurricane Katrina, for instance, the mud is there for a long time, it takes a long time to dry up.

This is what’s happening when we eat and consume these substances and foods that are injuring us. We can eat this inflammatory, injuring food yesterday and think that we’re “all cured and good” the next day when we eat our salad, but the “tail” on that, like the heat of the fire, takes a long time to die down and we do not function, our bodies, like these switches. 

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I propose then that we should name this diet an “Anti-Injury Diet,” because I think that would help everybody remember what it’s for. If you can’t remember that Inflammation means that you’re disrupted underneath the surface, at least it’s a little more clear.

So what would you do on an Anti-Injury Diet? Well, you try to avoid getting injured. You would want to avoid high Dosages of things that are inflammatory, which are in unnatural amounts or Frequency or Strengths. And you also would try to avoid these Toxins/Additives, which are sometimes natural and sometimes very, very synthetic. And you would try to prevent injury.

This is where everyone . . . those other resources . . . were focusing on . . . on helping you understand about eating anti-inflammatory food — the cabbage family, this darkly pigmented produce . . . these are the ways that you could prevent injury. The important thing to understand about preventing injury is that you have to do it in proportion. I liken it to using Scotchgard on your suede shoes or boots. You’re going to do that and put the Scotchgard on to help it be resistant, in the case of splashing or a little bit of rain. But if you’re going to go walk in two feet of water with those Scotchgard boots, I would propose that that’s really not going to protect those shoes for long. 

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I put this list together of common conditions because most everyone, if they don’t already have it themselves, have someone that they know or family member who has these conditions in many different organ systems of the body:  heart disease, high cholesterol, psoriasis, diabetes, hyperthyroidism, obesity, these are inflammatory bowel diseases, dementia, Parkinson’s, cancer asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. I took a little sample of all of them, and of these, I wanted to point out which one of these are caused by chronic inflammation, and yes, the answer is, they all are. 

Some people will have this problem with chronic inflammation and then they will get these when they’re 20 or really young at 30, or some won’t get it till they’re 70. That all depends on the Exposome, the diagram here where these External Environmental factors have to act on your genes . . . turn on genes . . . gene expression. The combination of that . . . and who is susceptible to which things . . .  that’s so individual. And that’s why you can have people who have this problem starting very young, and some who don’t have it until they’re older. And we’re not sophisticated enough to be like, “oh you’re going to have it” . . . maybe one day.

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So I wanted to help you understand — that the resources are out there for you to find something, a plan that you could stick with, about how to reduce the injury that’s happening in your lifestyle . . . in the area that you can do the most, the biggest, something about . . . which is of course in the diet. And I think it would help if you could practice Informed moderation. My lecture was aimed at helping you on that path, so that whatever road that you’re on for healing, however fast you’re traveling on it, that this could help you even more. 

This is a very helpful slide.  This is from a Instagram post by Dr. Hyman. “People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and treated by the health industry which,” I’d like to say, “which up to now, pays no attention to food.” But it is definitely a different time now — the Institute of functional medicine and the Cleveland Clinic, committing to having a center there.  And so I would say, “which are treated by the health industry, which up to now, pays no attention to food.”

Thank you so much for listening, and I hope if you have any comments or questions you can put them in the Comments section when it’s posted on YouTube. Thank you.

Dr. Cathy Kim

Dr. Cathy Kim

Dr. Cathy Kim is a Board-Certified Family Medicine physician and Body Function Specialist. She practices in Camarillo, CA and specializes in complex cases.

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