The REAL Triggers of Chronic Inflammation (Hint: It's Not Specific Foods Like Seed Oils) | Ep 336
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Tired of the inflammation fear-mongering? Stop obsessing over "toxic" foods and learn what actually drives chronic inflammation in your body.
While fitness influencers point fingers at gluten, seed oils, and nightshades, the real culprits are hiding in plain sight... and they're not what you think.
This episode dismantles the myths surrounding inflammation and reveals the true drivers of this misunderstood health concern. While we're scrutinizing ingredient labels and avoiding specific foods, the actual causes of chronic inflammation are hiding in plain sight... and they have little to do with what's on your plate.
Discover how to engineer an anti-inflammatory lifestyle using systems thinking instead of food perfectionism.
Main Takeaways:
Acute vs. chronic inflammation are completely different systems requiring different solutions
The #1 driver of inflammation isn't foods
One organ functions as your body's natural anti-inflammatory pharmacy
Specific lifestyle factors matter more than eliminating specific foods
Western dietary patterns drive inflammation, not individual ingredients
Episode Resources:
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Timestamps:
0:00 - The inflammation myth
2:16 - Acute vs. chronic inflammation
3:39 - The real drivers of inflammation
5:31 - Why specific foods don't matter
8:42 - Engineering an anti-inflammatory lifestyle
12:13 - The anti-inflammatory organ you can develop
14:47 - Systems approach to inflammation
The Real Causes of Chronic Inflammation (and What Actually Reduces It)
“Cut out gluten.” “Ditch seed oils.” “Sugar is toxic.” If you’ve spent any time on health and fitness social media, you’ve seen these fear-based headlines. Influencers make inflammation sound like a mysterious food sensitivity waiting to explode, and they’ll sell you any restrictive diet or supplement to fix it. But here’s the problem: they’re solving the wrong problem.
In this episode of Wits & Weights, we go beyond the noise and ask a better question: what actually causes chronic inflammation, and how do we reduce it for good? The answer isn’t about chasing foods. It’s about understanding systems.
Let’s break it down.
What Is Inflammation, Really?
To understand inflammation, you need to separate acute from chronic.
Acute inflammation is your body’s immediate immune response. Think swelling after a cut or the soreness from strength training. It’s short-term, adaptive, and essential for healing.
Chronic inflammation is something else entirely. This is low-grade, systemic, and long-lasting. It’s your immune system stuck in overdrive, often without a clear threat. Over time, it’s linked to nearly every major chronic disease: heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and more.
The fitness industry often treats them as the same, leading people to avoid harmless or beneficial foods in the name of “inflammation” without addressing the deeper issue.
The Top 5 Real Drivers of Inflammation
Instead of pointing fingers at sugar or canola oil, we need to look at the major contributors to chronic inflammation. Most of them have nothing to do with food.
1. Visceral Fat (Abdominal Fat)
Your belly fat isn’t inert. It’s an active endocrine organ that secretes inflammatory cytokines like interleukin-6, TNF-alpha, and CRP. These messengers keep your immune system in a heightened state, promoting inflammation around the clock.
If you want one target that will dramatically lower inflammation, it’s body composition. Losing fat, especially visceral fat, can lower CRP and other markers even without changing your diet.
2. Physical Inactivity
When you’re sedentary, your immune system can become dysregulated. Daily movement and resistance training release myokines, anti-inflammatory messengers that help reduce systemic inflammation.
Muscle is more than just for looks or strength. It is your body’s built-in anti-inflammatory tool. The more you train it, the more resilient your system becomes.
3. Poor Sleep and Chronic Stress
Sleep deprivation and unmanaged stress raise cortisol and suppress recovery. Over time, this increases systemic inflammation. Even if your diet is “clean,” high stress and poor sleep will keep your inflammation levels high.
You cannot out-diet a high-stress, low-sleep lifestyle.
4. Environmental Toxins
We often forget how impactful this category can be. Smoking is the most obvious culprit, but air pollution, secondhand smoke, and long-term chemical exposure also contribute. While we can’t control everything in our environment, we can make simple changes that add up.
Minimize what you can control, like not smoking, reducing alcohol, and being aware of the products you use in your home.
5. Dietary Patterns (Not Specific Foods)
Here’s the truth: no single food causes inflammation in healthy people.
What matters is the overall pattern, not the seed oils, not the gluten, not the occasional dessert. A Western dietary pattern, high in ultra-processed foods, refined carbs, and low in fiber, contributes to poor gut health, blood sugar swings, oxidative stress, and eventually weight gain. But the mechanism is overconsumption and metabolic dysfunction, not the food item itself.
Seed oils, for example, improve health outcomes when replacing saturated fats, according to meta-analyses. Gluten and oxalates don’t cause inflammation unless you’re sensitive to them. The problem isn’t specific foods. It’s when your diet and lifestyle as a whole stop supporting health.
Engineering an Anti-Inflammatory Lifestyle
So if we move away from restriction, what should we do instead? Think of it as a systems upgrade. These are five levers to engineer a less inflammatory state.
1. Improve Body Composition
You don’t need to get shredded. Even moderate fat loss improves inflammation. Build and maintain muscle while reducing visceral fat, and your inflammatory markers will improve.
2. Strength Train and Move Daily
Lift weights at least two or three times a week and stay active with walking and movement breaks throughout the day. Every muscle contraction produces myokines that reduce inflammation and improve immune function.
3. Sleep and Recover Intentionally
Recovery is not a luxury. It is the foundation. Prioritize seven to nine hours of sleep, manage your stress through physical outlets or mindfulness, and avoid overtraining.
4. Optimize Your Dietary Pattern
Forget food perfectionism. Prioritize:
Whole foods
Plenty of fiber
Protein at every meal
Diverse nutrient intake
Flexible dieting that supports satiety and performance
This gives your gut the inputs it needs while keeping inflammation at bay, without moralizing or obsessing over every ingredient.
5. Minimize Environmental Exposure
Don’t stress over every chemical, but do focus on the big ones:
Don’t smoke
Limit alcohol
Reduce unnecessary exposure to household toxins when possible
These are systemic contributors, not isolated triggers.
The Muscle and Inflammation Connection
Your muscle tissue is the most underappreciated tool in the fight against inflammation. It’s your built-in pharmacy. Every time you lift weights, your muscles release anti-inflammatory compounds that interact with your immune system, fat tissue, liver, and brain.
And this works even when controlling for body weight. In other words, people with more muscle and more activity have less inflammation regardless of how much they weigh.
Building muscle is not just for aesthetics. It is a biochemical strategy to reduce disease risk and stay healthy.
Inflammation Is a Systems Problem
Inflammation is not caused by one food. It is not about sugar or oils or carbs. It is the cumulative result of multiple lifestyle decisions that create a chronically inflamed environment in your body.
The fix is not another elimination diet. It is strength training, sleep, muscle, movement, recovery, and a sustainable way of eating that supports your goals.
You do not need to chase symptoms or cut out foods. You need to engineer the system. The same system that builds your physique will also reduce your inflammation.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
Cut out gluten, eliminate sugar, stop eating those toxic seed oils. You hear it all the time from fitness influencers who are obsessing over specific foods that they call inflammatory. But while we are scrutinizing these ingredient labels, the actual drivers of chronic inflammation are hiding elsewhere. They are not exotic foods or mysterious toxins. They're lifestyle factors that most people are ignoring. So today we're going to break down what is inflammation, why your anti-inflammatory diet might not solve the problem, what are the lifestyle factors that are more important than food choices when it comes to inflammation, and how to engineer your approach to address the root causes instead of chasing symptoms.
Philip Pape: 0:58
Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're engineering our way through one of the most misunderstood topics in health and fitness, and that is inflammation, the dreaded I-word, the misused I-word. The fitness industry has turned inflammation into a boogeyman, convincing people they have to eliminate foods, they have to buy expensive supplements, follow restrictive protocols. But when we apply a little bit of systems thinking to inflammation and look at the science, we discover that the conventional approach is solving the wrong problem entirely. It's not going to get you anywhere when it comes to inflammation. Now, before we get into it, if this episode opens your eyes to how inflammation really works, I just want you to do me a favor and text it to someone who's been struggling with some of these topics and the confusion and the misinformation in the industry, who's curious about inflammation, inflammatory issues or anti-inflammatory foods. Just text this show to a friend. That's all I'm going to ask for today, and with that let's get into it and start by defining the system. Talk about what inflammation actually is. We can't solve a problem until we understand what it is and what you're dealing with, and inflammation is highly misunderstood.
Philip Pape: 2:16
There's really two processes going on here. There's acute inflammation, and that's your body's immediate response system. Think of it as like your biological emergency response. You cut your finger, you twist your ankle, you get an infection and boom, you get pain, heat, redness, swelling, right. This is a very well understood aspect of acute inflammation. You could even get acute inflammation from positive practices like strength training, where you have an immediate response to the stimulus you place on your muscles. Training where you have an immediate response to the stimulus you place on your muscles and the inflammation process causes them to adapt. This is all normal, this is essential, this is a good thing.
Philip Pape: 2:51
But then we have chronic, low-grade inflammation, which is the one that we are actually concerned about, and this is like having your emergency system stuck in the on position right the fight or flight. The high alert system is just stuck on for months or even years. It is a silent killer, it is systemic. It is linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, alzheimer's, metabolic dysfunction, you name it. And so here's where our engineering mindset comes in, in that these are two completely different systems with different inputs, different processes, different solutions, and most people are trying to solve chronic inflammation using an acute inflammation style logic, and that's where we fail in the process, especially when it comes to foods. You know fear-mongering over specific foods, which is why I'm making this episode.
Philip Pape: 3:39
So let's go back and step back a bit and look at the root cause. When most people think about inflammation, they immediately jump to foods, especially when you hear about things like seed oils. They're inflammatory. But the data actually doesn't support this. It tells us a very different story, and that is that the number one driver of chronic inflammation is visceral fat, your belly fat is you know. It's not just sitting there looking sad. It is an endocrine organ. It pumps out inflammatory cytokines and we're going to get into, we're going to explain these a lot. This is part of the blood markers of inflammation. You can have Interleukin-6, tnf-alpha and C-reactive protein. You've probably heard of the last one. It gets discussed a lot CRP, c-reactive protein. These are inflammatory markers that can be measured in the bloodstream. Invisceral fat is actually the number one driver of those byproducts, those inflammatory cytokines.
Philip Pape: 4:35
So that's the first one. The second one is physical inactivity, sedentary behavior. It doesn't just make you weak and lazy and unfit and causes you to eat more and do all the other things we don't want to do. It also creates a pro-inflammatory state, because when you're not moving your immune system gets, we'll say, confused. It starts attacking your own tissues. You're not living like a human should live. You're essentially wasting your life being sedentary. Meanwhile, exercise, training, movement produces myokines that actively reduce inflammation, so that movement and training is anti-inflammatory. The third driver is chronic stress and poor sleep. When you're chronically stressed, when you're sleep deprived right, and sometimes they go hand in hand, we know this affects our cortisol your immune system tends to overreact and then inflammation becomes your default state. You're in a more inflammatory situation.
Philip Pape: 5:31
The fourth driver is environmental toxins. So, as much as I don't really talk about these too often, I've had some guests on that talk about them. Um, smoking is the big one. We don't think of that as environmental toxic, but it really is, and I'm glad I don't have to walk around in clouds of secondhand smoke Like I did in the eighties when they had, you know, smoking sections in the restaurant, smoking sections even in an airplane at one point. Uh, but also things like air pollution. You know the chemicals, the things that we're exposed to in a lot of our products. You know some we're discovering, some we're maybe not aware of, and any other exposure that triggers inflammatory cascades. These are real, but especially something like smoking and air pollution. Now notice what's missing from that list Specific foods, specific foods are missing, and this is where we have to separate the signal from the noise, because, yes, diet affects inflammation, but not the way you think.
Philip Pape: 6:21
It's the dietary patterns, not the individual foods, that drive inflammation. A Western dietary pattern which is high in ultra-processed foods, high in sugar, high in refined carbs, high in trans fats, is going to create inflammation through multiple pathways. It's not specific foods, it's the whole pattern. It disrupts your gut microbiome, you have large swings in blood sugar, you've got more oxidative stress. You've got all the conditions that contribute to obesity, mainly through over consumption. Right, it has nothing to do with seed oils? Okay, it's overconsumption, it's the gut health, right it's. You know, the misuse of insulin through blood sugar spikes, because you're not acting, you're not lifting weights. It all compounds together because, in fact, somebody who has a much improved lifestyle can, I'll say, get away with a somewhat poor dietary pattern versus someone who doesn't, for that very reason.
Philip Pape: 7:17
Because it's not the individual foods, it's a dietary pattern as well as a lifestyle. So if you remove individual foods, it's not going to impact systemic inflammation, unless you have a specific intolerance to those foods. Right, the whole nightshades, oxalates, gluten-free for everyone approach. There's no evidence that those reduce inflammation in healthy people. Same thing with seed oils. In fact.
Philip Pape: 7:39
We know adding in seed oils or replacing saturated fats with seed oils improves health outcomes. It is definitively demonstrated in the research. There's no argument about that and regardless of the processing, people talk about shelf rancidity. No, none of that is actually borne out by the evidence as being a concern based on the outcomes. In fact, there's a study that found a pro-inflammatory lifestyle predicted poor fitness. But diet alone didn't significantly affect the outcomes. The lifestyle factors are doing the heavy lifting, and so inflammation isn't caused by eating a specific food. It's caused by the cumulative effect of multiple lifestyle factors that create a pro-inflammatory environment in your body. So if we know this, the good thing is it gives us a little more freedom and flexibility than we might have thought a more flexible diet, for example. But we could also engineer an anti-inflammatory lifestyle for ourselves. We can optimize the system rather than these individual components that don't actually have an impact.
Philip Pape: 8:42
So first we should address the biggest lever, which is body composition, when I mentioned, visceral fat is the largest driver of chronic inflammation. We wanna lose our visceral fat, and that removes the primary inflammatory factor in your body. It doesn't mean you have to get shredded. That's not what it means. Even just modest fat loss will significantly reduce inflammatory markers, and this is why you know fat loss, weight loss, whatever you want to call it, simply having a lower body weight in and of itself actually solves a lot of the health markers and health issues that people have. Not everything, and it's not about scale weight. It's more about body composition, right, more about losing fat, holding on and building muscle and losing fat. So that's the biggest lever right there, which is everything we talk about on this show for the most part.
Philip Pape: 9:23
Uh, the second thing is implementing regular movement, not just training, but also moving throughout the day, walking but also not sitting for long stretches to keep your muscles producing the anti-inflammatory myokines Myokines, you know, I forgot how to pronounce these and strength training is very powerful here because muscle tissue actively fights inflammation. So just having muscle is highly anti-inflammatory. The third thing is you're going to have to improve your sleep and stress. That's just always the thing we need to be doing, and if you are running on low sleep, running on high stress, high perceived stress, psychological, physical, whatever that is creating a highly inflammatory state for you. It is a legitimate physiological outcome of having too much stress and not enough sleep and not enough recovery. Recovery is not optional. The older we get, the more important recovery gets by leaps and bounds. It is a foundation.
Philip Pape: 10:19
The fourth tip I have here out of five is optimizing your dietary pattern. So here's where people will hear me and say how can you tell people to eat seed oils? How can you tell people to eat like so many carbs and fat, and they say, no, I'm not telling people you know how much or what to eat. I'm asking you to optimize your diet for you based on a variety of factors based on your satiety, eating guilt-free, supporting your performance goals, supporting your energy needs, and so what that looks like for people to be able to do it sustainably is prioritizing whole foods, fiber, diversity of your diet, which means proteins, fats and carbs, and nutrients, of course, that are gonna support your gut microbiome. So we're not talking about food perfectionism. We're not talking about specific foods to add in or avoid. We're talking about the overall dietary pattern through a variety of foods that you choose that meet these needs, and that's the flexibility part that makes a huge difference.
Philip Pape: 11:16
And then, fifth and finally, we want to minimize environmental toxins when you can control them, and that's easy when it comes to smoking, not easy, I mean. Obviously it's hard to quit smoking for those who are addicted, but it's an obvious lever. Limiting or eliminating alcohol and then all the other chemical exposures, to whatever degree, makes sense for you in your life, depending on where you live, depending on what products you use, whether you microwave foods in plastic I'm not gonna get into those details. That's not my area of expertise, to be honest. That's very personalized and I don't wanna fear monger over that. But the accumulation of these does create a level of inflammatory load that your other healthy habits are basically counteracting, and if you want to just further improve that inflammatory state, you have to consider those All right. So, to summarize, it's body composition, movement, sleep and stress, aka recovery your dietary pattern and minimizing environmental toxins.
Philip Pape: 12:13
Now, I alluded to this briefly, but I want to hit it home. Okay, your muscle tissue isn't just for strength, it isn't just for aesthetics or function. It's your primary anti-inflammatory organ. When you contract your muscles during exercise, they release compounds, in the moment called myokines, that communicate with your fat tissue, your liver, your brain, your immune system, and they actively suppress inflammatory pathways and they promote healing throughout your body. Right, and the funny thing is, lifting weights is a hormetic stressor, it's an acute stressor, it's an acute level of inflammation, but it benefits your chronic inflammation tremendously. Every time you lift weights, every time you move with intention, you are programming your body to be less inflammatory. Right, it's just like you're adding more calorie-burning tissue to your body and that just operates 24-7. Same thing here. You're creating a less inflammatory environment and that's why people who strength train consistently have lower inflammatory markers in their blood than sedentary people, even when controlling for body weight. So we have to have the body composition, but we also have to be training and building muscle. The muscle itself is actively fighting inflammation at the cellular level and it gets stronger the more you use it and the more you train, the more anti-inflammatory your body becomes. So there's nothing more apropos than you know this show, wits and Weights, using your brain to understand that inflammation comes from lifestyle, and then lifting some weights, knowing that muscle and strength and all of that is the biggest anti-inflammatory impact here. And I've talked to otherwise healthy people who don't strength train and they're leaving a lot on the table because they're making it a lot harder than themselves in multiple ways, especially as they get older. So the fitness industry they want you to believe.
Philip Pape: 13:55
Inflammation is complicated, that you have to have special diets, you have to buy their supplement to control it, you have to cut out these foods. You know, you look at the reels of these idiots in the grocery store pointing out why you shouldn't eat this and shouldn't eat that. Ignore it, unfollow, right the out why you shouldn't eat this and shouldn't eat that. Ignore it, unfollow, right? The truth is that inflammation is a systems problem, with systems solutions. Stop obsessing over individual foods and start optimizing the lifestyle factors. It's not easy, it takes effort, it does, it takes patience, but you have all the information at your fingertips on how to make it happen and now it's just a matter of the right level of commitment and action. And sometimes that's support and motivation as well, through whether it's coaching or community or just listening to the show you know. Reach out, join our Facebook group If you need some more help. If you need a community, I've got coaching options as well If you need that.
Philip Pape: 14:47
I want you to build muscle to create your body's anti-inflammatory pharmacy. Build muscle to create your body's anti-inflammatory pharmacy. That's your pharmacy, no supplements. I want you to move regularly to keep your immune system balanced. I want you to manage your stress and sleep to prevent cortisol-driven inflammation. I want you to focus on the dietary pattern and the flexibility, not food perfectionism and restriction, because your body's very sophisticated We've hidden this point many times. It is designed to maintain balance, to maintain homeostasis when you give it the right inputs, and so work with that, work with that.
Philip Pape: 15:18
All right, this episode's kind of short, but I think it hit on the main points that inflammation is a systems-based lifestyle choice. That's how I'm gonna put it. It's not specific foods, it's really about lifestyle. So the same lifestyle that improves your physique going to put it, it's not specific foods, it's really about lifestyle. So the same lifestyle that improves your physique, your body composition, your health, will also give you less inflammation.
Philip Pape: 15:35
If this episode changed how you think about inflammation, I want you to text it to someone who's been caught up in the hype, in the anti-inflammatory hype. Maybe they don't yet understand that the solution isn't to restrict more you know to do, carnivore, something like that. It's just a better system and a better lifestyle and information like this can literally change someone's relationship with food and their health and then it can change their life. So I really encourage you to text it with a friend. Let them know about the episode as a bonus, post it to social media, to your story or to your feed, and tag me. I'm at Wits and Weights on all platforms and that's it. Inflammation the more you know, right. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember, when it comes to inflammation, engineer your lifestyle system, don't chase the symptoms or specific foods. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
