Is this behind nearly all chronic disease?

Scott: What role does inflammation play when it comes to cancer? I know that's touched on a little bit in your book. Can you explain that?

Helayne Waldman: Yeah, inflammation is now considered to be, sort of the back drop to all chronic disease and there's a master inflammatory switch called NF-kappaB and when that is turned on by bad food and bad air and bad water and bad thoughts and all that, it releases sort of a flood of inflammatory chemicals called cytokines, all different kinds of cytokines, and those cytokines actually aid and abet the tumor from doing what it needs to do. So they help it to invade neighboring tissues and they help it metastasize and help it to spread and they just are part of the, shall we say cheering squad, the boosters.  They help the tumor do its thing.

So we want to keep those inflammatory cytokines as low as we possibly can. I measure that with my clients by looking at their C-Reactive protein; it's a nice marker of inflammation and the nice thing is that through diet and some supplements we can manager inflammation quite well.  It's not something that really needs pharmaceutical intervention, most of the time. We just need to know which foods and most of those are going to be your nutrient dense, whole foods with healthy fats and your packaged standard American diet.