Inflammation Reduced by Antioxidants, Study Shows

Antioxidant Info Week continues with a fantastic study showing just how powerful and far-reaching the effects of antioxidants can be.  In this study, levels of NF-kB (Nuclear Factor- “kappa” B; sorry, I don’t have Greek symbols at my disposal) were significantly reduced within five days of supplementing with pycnogenol.

Levels of who, were what, by hunh?  Let me explain.

NF-kB is basically a chemical on/off switch for inflammation inside the cell.  If this stuff gets activated by something, pow, you get inflammation.

Inflammation is pretty important business.  It kicks off the healing and immune response in the body; without it, you’d never fix yourself when you got hurt. I don’t just mean that in the sense of, if something is inflamed and painful, you’ll avoid using it and let it rest and heal.  While that’s true, it goes way beyond that.

The inflammatory response actually physically signals and kicks off the chemical changes in the body that we call healing and the immune system.  So as a short-term response to injury, inflammation is absolutely vital.

The problem arises when inflammation becomes chronic.  Now we run into situations where we’re getting all inflamed over nothing.  Arthritis?  Chronically inflamed joints.  Crohn’s Disease?  Chronically inflamed intestines.  Asthma?  Chronically inflamed breathing tubes.  The list goes on and on, but the bottom line is, you don’t want to have All Inflammation, All the Time.

How does NF-kB fit in?  Think of NF-kB as a trigger, that sets off inflammation, just like the trigger of a gun, sets off… well, the gun.  Something bumps against the trigger of a gun, and boom, you get a discharge.  Something “bumps” into NF-kB, chemically speaking, and boom, you get inflammation.

Just like any other trigger, NF-kB varies in how sensitive it’s going to be (how easily it’s “activated”).  Ever hear of a hair trigger?  That’s a gun trigger that is so sensitive, the tiniest bump sets it off.  Guess what?  Same thing can happen in your cells.

If NF-kB is super-sensitive, the tiniest little jolt from the surroundings will set it off, and start up the inflammatory process.  So over-active NF-kB, is like the hair trigger of a gun for you to swell up and get inflamed.

Can you see how that could lead to chronic inflammatory diseases like asthma?  If the cells lining your respiratory system get all excited and inflamed at the drop of a hat (chemically speaking), the littlest bit of pollen or mold or dust or whatever is going to set off the hair trigger, time and time again.

Chronic inflammation has other consequences, too (I’ll be posting a video on its role in weight problems tomorrow), and NF-kB does more than just regulate inflammation (it’s involved in cancer too) but I don’t want this post to turn into an 800 page textbook on biochemistry, so let’s just stick with this:  NF-kB is the trigger for inflammation, and if it’s too sensitive, it “goes off” super-easy and leads to chronic inflammatory diseases.

So, it stands to reason that we want to keep NF-kB under control, right?  Not TOO much, mind you… if we can’t EVER pull the trigger, we’d have no inflammation at all, and remember, we do need SOME inflammation to stay alive and healthy.  We just don’t want a hair trigger.

Well, a really cool study shows that antioxidants can help keep NF-kB from becoming overly sensitive.  Actually, there’s a bunch of studies showing this, but this one is my favorite.  The researchers took some folks and measured how active their NF-kB levels were, before and after five days’ worth of supplementation with pycnogenol, which is a pine bark extract and super-duper antioxidant.  After only five days, the average inhibition of the trigger NF-kB was 15.8%.

Remember, we don’t want 100%!  That would be a complete immunosuppressant worse than HIV!  We just want to dial it down a notch, which is exactly what pycnogenol supplementation did.  And after only five days!

Imagine what the effects of this would be for someone suffering from asthma or allergies!  This is just one of the many, many reasons I advise anyone with a pulse to take antioxidants.  They offer so many powerful, far-reaching benefits, it’s literally staggering.

If you want to know more, I discuss more about antioxidants in my free guide to choosing supplements, which you can download if you take a look at the upper right hand sidebar on this page.

Oh, and the article citation for this reference is “Grimm et al., J Inflamm 3:1-15, 2006” in case you have a burning desire to look it up.

Did you find this article helpful?  Spread the word and send it to your friends!  Questions or comments?  Post them below!

Stay healthy!