Hi Byte Wellness Fam!

This summer we are diving deep into resetting our systems of wellness resilience. For our Wellness Reset, we’re focusing on cutting chronic inflammation. Join our private community to get in on all the extra tips, weekly workshops and side conversations!

Why? Chronic inflammation is the biological root cause of the lifestyle-related chronic diseases that are killing Americans (and causing disproportionate suffering in Black communities).

These are diseases we’ve all heard of: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity and type 2 diabetes leading to heart attack, stroke and increased risk of many cancers.

How does chronic inflammation do all this? Okay, let’s break it down.

Acute inflammation is meant to do one of two things:

• heal wounds

  and

• fight infection

  When inflammation turns on, we go into life-saving mode. Our other normal body functions turn off. We stop controlling our blood sugar and blood pressure, and we don’t think as clearly about complicated tasks. If this life-saving mode continues for weeks to months, we have “chronic” inflammation. Ironically, that increases our risk of losing our lives.

Studies increasingly show that higher levels of inflammation are linked to higher levels of stress. And a growing body of research suggests a complex relationship between the two. Studies show that stress actually causes increases in inflammation, and increased levels of inflammation might interfere with our ability to respond to stress in productive ways.

According to the theory of social genomics, ramping up short-term inflammation in response to stress might have been an evolutionarily protective strategy. For our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago, psychological stress might have signaled an incoming physical threat. We see some animal or human predator, and we start to feel stressed out. Then our immune system reads this as a physical threat and prepares to heal a potential wound… by ramping up inflammation! With a balanced immune system, this inflammation doesn’t last more than 24-48 hours. It gets shut off, and we go back to our normal functioning.

Now, in our modern day, we have tons of social and psychological threats that aren’t linked to physical harm. For Black women, these include racism and sexist/patriarchal systems.

That means, the systems of marginalization that affect our everyday lives put us at risk for developing chronic inflammation…which is a risk factor for developing otherwise preventable diseases. Wild, right?

As expected, a growing body of research has linked the experience of racism to higher levels of inflammation- both for interpersonal racism (like discrimination or microaggressions) and for structural racism (like residential segregation). For example one study found that higher levels of lifetime perceived discrimination predicted higher levels of an inflammatory marker called fibrinogen over the 5-year study period.

So, we Black folks, women, Black women (especially) need to live in ANTI-INFLAMMATORY ways. This summer, in our Wellness Reset, we’ll talk about what anti-inflammatory sleeping, de-stressing, eating and moving looks like.

Stay Tuned!

Happy Healthy Living,

Dr. Wuse