Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The Real Cause of INFLAMMATION Killing Your Fat Loss and Muscle | Ep 336

Transcript

The Real Cause of INFLAMMATION Killing Your Fat Loss and Muscle | Ep 336 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: Cut out gluten, eliminate sugar, stop eating those toxic seed oils.
• 0:05
  Philip Pape: You hear it all the time from fitness influencers who are obsessing over specific foods that they call inflammatory.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: But while we are scrutinizing these ingredient labels, the actual drivers of chronic inflammation are hiding elsewhere.
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: They are not exotic foods or mysterious toxins.
• 0:23
  Philip Pape: They're lifestyle factors that most people are ignoring.
• 0:26
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 0:58
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 1:01
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 1:25
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: It's not going to get you anywhere when it comes to inflammation.
• 1:38
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: Just text this show to a friend.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: That's all I'm going to ask for today, and with that let's get into it and start by defining the system.
• 2:05
  Philip Pape: Talk about what inflammation actually is.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: We can't solve a problem until we understand what it is and what you're dealing with, and inflammation is highly misunderstood.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: There's really two processes going on here.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: There's acute inflammation, and that's your body's immediate response system.
• 2:22
  Philip Pape: Think of it as like your biological emergency response.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: You cut your finger, you twist your ankle, you get an infection and boom, you get pain, heat, redness, swelling, right.
• 2:32
  Philip Pape: This is a very well understood aspect of acute inflammation.
• 2:35
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: Training where you have an immediate response to the stimulus you place on your muscles and the inflammation process causes them to adapt.
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: This is all normal, this is essential, this is a good thing.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: The high alert system is just stuck on for months or even years.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: It is a silent killer, it is systemic.
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: It is linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, alzheimer's, metabolic dysfunction, you name it.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: You know fear-mongering over specific foods, which is why I'm making this episode.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: So let's go back and step back a bit and look at the root cause.
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: When most people think about inflammation, they immediately jump to foods, especially when you hear about things like seed oils.
• 3:50
  Philip Pape: They're inflammatory.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: But the data actually doesn't support this.
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: It's not just sitting there looking sad.
• 4:06
  Philip Pape: It is an endocrine organ.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: It pumps out inflammatory cytokines and we're going to get into, we're going to explain these a lot.
• 4:14
  Philip Pape: This is part of the blood markers of inflammation.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: You can have Interleukin-6, tnf-alpha and C-reactive protein.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: You've probably heard of the last one.
• 4:21
  Philip Pape: It gets discussed a lot CRP, c-reactive protein.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: These are inflammatory markers that can be measured in the bloodstream.
• 4:27
  Philip Pape: Invisceral fat is actually the number one driver of those byproducts, those inflammatory cytokines.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: So that's the first one.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: The second one is physical inactivity, sedentary behavior.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: It also creates a pro-inflammatory state, because when you're not moving your immune system gets, we'll say, confused.
• 4:54
  Philip Pape: It starts attacking your own tissues.
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: You're not living like a human should live.
• 4:58
  Philip Pape: You're essentially wasting your life being sedentary.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: Meanwhile, exercise, training, movement produces myokines that actively reduce inflammation, so that movement and training is anti-inflammatory.
• 5:12
  Philip Pape: The third driver is chronic stress and poor sleep.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: You're in a more inflammatory situation.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: The fourth driver is environmental toxins.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: So, as much as I don't really talk about these too often, I've had some guests on that talk about them.
• 5:38
  Philip Pape: Um, smoking is the big one.
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 5:51
  Philip Pape: Uh, but also things like air pollution.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: You know the chemicals, the things that we're exposed to in a lot of our products.
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: You know some we're discovering, some we're maybe not aware of, and any other exposure that triggers inflammatory cascades.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: These are real, but especially something like smoking and air pollution.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: It's the dietary patterns, not the individual foods, that drive inflammation.
• 6:26
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: It's not specific foods, it's the whole pattern.
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: It disrupts your gut microbiome, you have large swings in blood sugar, you've got more oxidative stress.
• 6:47
  Philip Pape: You've got all the conditions that contribute to obesity, mainly through over consumption.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: Right, it has nothing to do with seed oils?
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: Okay, it's overconsumption, it's the gut health, right it's.
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: You know, the misuse of insulin through blood sugar spikes, because you're not acting, you're not lifting weights.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: Because it's not the individual foods, it's a dietary pattern as well as a lifestyle.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: So if you remove individual foods, it's not going to impact systemic inflammation, unless you have a specific intolerance to those foods.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: Right, the whole nightshades, oxalates, gluten-free for everyone approach.
• 7:34
  Philip Pape: There's no evidence that those reduce inflammation in healthy people.
• 7:38
  Philip Pape: Same thing with seed oils.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: In fact.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: We know adding in seed oils or replacing saturated fats with seed oils improves health outcomes.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: It is definitively demonstrated in the research.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: There's no argument about that and regardless of the processing, people talk about shelf rancidity.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: No, none of that is actually borne out by the evidence as being a concern based on the outcomes.
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: In fact, there's a study that found a pro-inflammatory lifestyle predicted poor fitness.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: But diet alone didn't significantly affect the outcomes.
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: The lifestyle factors are doing the heavy lifting, and so inflammation isn't caused by eating a specific food.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: It's caused by the cumulative effect of multiple lifestyle factors that create a pro-inflammatory environment in your body.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 8:33
  Philip Pape: But we could also engineer an anti-inflammatory lifestyle for ourselves.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: We can optimize the system rather than these individual components that don't actually have an impact.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: So first we should address the biggest lever, which is body composition, when I mentioned, visceral fat is the largest driver of chronic inflammation.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: We wanna lose our visceral fat, and that removes the primary inflammatory factor in your body.
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: It doesn't mean you have to get shredded.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: That's not what it means.
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 9:11
  Philip Pape: Not everything, and it's not about scale weight.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: It's more about body composition, right, more about losing fat, holding on and building muscle and losing fat.
• 9:18
  Philip Pape: So that's the biggest lever right there, which is everything we talk about on this show for the most part.
• 9:23
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: So just having muscle is highly anti-inflammatory.
• 9:49
  Philip Pape: The third thing is you're going to have to improve your sleep and stress.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: It is a legitimate physiological outcome of having too much stress and not enough sleep and not enough recovery.
• 10:11
  Philip Pape: Recovery is not optional.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: The older we get, the more important recovery gets by leaps and bounds.
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: It is a foundation.
• 10:19
  Philip Pape: The fourth tip I have here out of five is optimizing your dietary pattern.
• 10:24
  Philip Pape: So here's where people will hear me and say how can you tell people to eat seed oils?
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: So we're not talking about food perfectionism.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: We're not talking about specific foods to add in or avoid.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 11:16
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: Obviously it's hard to quit smoking for those who are addicted, but it's an obvious lever.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 11:43
  Philip Pape: That's not my area of expertise, to be honest.
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: That's very personalized and I don't wanna fear monger over that.
• 11:48
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: So, to summarize, it's body composition, movement, sleep and stress, aka recovery your dietary pattern and minimizing environmental toxins.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: Now, I alluded to this briefly, but I want to hit it home.
• 12:16
  Philip Pape: Okay, your muscle tissue isn't just for strength, it isn't just for aesthetics or function.
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: It's your primary anti-inflammatory organ.
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 12:42
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: Every time you lift weights, every time you move with intention, you are programming your body to be less inflammatory.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: Right, it's just like you're adding more calorie-burning tissue to your body and that just operates 24-7.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: Same thing here.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 13:15
  Philip Pape: So we have to have the body composition, but we also have to be training and building muscle.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 13:52
  Philip Pape: So the fitness industry they want you to believe.
• 13:55
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 14:01
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 14:09
  Philip Pape: Ignore it, unfollow, right the out why you shouldn't eat this and shouldn't eat that.
• 14:19
  Philip Pape: Ignore it, unfollow, right?
• 14:19
  Philip Pape: The truth is that inflammation is a systems problem, with systems solutions.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: Stop obsessing over individual foods and start optimizing the lifestyle factors.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 14:33
  Philip Pape: And sometimes that's support and motivation as well, through whether it's coaching or community or just listening to the show you know.
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: Reach out, join our Facebook group If you need some more help.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: If you need a community, I've got coaching options as well If you need that.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: I want you to build muscle to create your body's anti-inflammatory pharmacy.
• 14:49
  Philip Pape: Build muscle to create your body's anti-inflammatory pharmacy.
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: That's your pharmacy, no supplements.
• 14:54
  Philip Pape: I want you to move regularly to keep your immune system balanced.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: I want you to manage your stress and sleep to prevent cortisol-driven inflammation.
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: It is designed to maintain balance, to maintain homeostasis when you give it the right inputs, and so work with that, work with that.
• 15:18
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: That's how I'm gonna put it.
• 15:27
  Philip Pape: It's not specific foods, it's really about lifestyle.
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: So the same lifestyle that improves your physique going to put it, it's not specific foods, it's really about lifestyle.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: So the same lifestyle that improves your physique, your body composition, your health, will also give you less inflammation.
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: Maybe they don't yet understand that the solution isn't to restrict more you know to do, carnivore, something like that.
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 15:58
  Philip Pape: So I really encourage you to text it with a friend.
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: Let them know about the episode as a bonus, post it to social media, to your story or to your feed, and tag me.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: I'm at Wits and Weights on all platforms and that's it.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: Inflammation the more you know, right.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 16:22
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.