Inflammation Nation: The First Clinically Proven Eating Plan to End Our Nation's Secret Epidemic - Softcover

Floyd H. Ski Chilton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743269659 ISBN 13: 9780743269650

Publisher: Atria Books, 2006

Synopsis

Protect yourself against our country's most alarming health crisis.

In Inflammation Nation, internationally renowned scientist Dr. Floyd H. Chilton exposes the root cause of a host of seemingly disparate diseases, such as arthritis, heart disease, obesity, eczema, lupus, Alzheimer's, and emphysema: unbridled inflammation. The average American diet (even when we're making what we think are healthy choices) is inflaming our immune systems. But with Dr. Chilton's revolutionary, all-natural dietary program, you can learn how to choose foods that will help prevent, treat, and reverse the effects of this secret epidemic in as few as seven days.

The Chilton Program includes:
-Easy-to-follow meal plans developed in collaboration with a world-class medical school
-A new food pyramid that charts which foods you should enjoy or avoid
-The Inflammation Index, which gives you the inflammatory potential of more than 250 foods

Backed by twenty years of research, and by an unprecedented six clinical trials, Dr. Chilton's anti-inflammatory regimen is a must-have for the nearly 100 million Americans diagnosed with an inflammatory disorder and for the rest of us who must protect ourselves from this growing health crisis.

About this title

About the Author

Floyd H. "Ski" Chilton, Ph.D., has served on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, where he is a professor of physiology and pharmacology. He has authored more than 110 articles and textbook chapters, and holds thirty-two issued and seventeen pending patents. He lives in Winston-Salem, N.C., and is the father of four children.

Laura Tucker is the coauthor of several health and medical books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Inflammation Nation

The First Clinically Proven Eating Plan to End Our Nation's Secret EpidemicBy Floyd H. Chilton Laura Tucker

Fireside

Copyright © 2005 Chilton Health Technologies, LLC
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-6965-9

Introduction

A silent plague is sweeping America, and the vast majority of us are at risk. It has taken the form of a statistically significant and incalculably devastating series of epidemics - an "epidemic of epidemics."

I believe this plague is largely preventable, and yet we are doing little to stop its spread. On the contrary, we're actually encouraging a tidal wave of disease. At best, these illnesses compromise our quality of life; at worst, they can be painful, debilitating, and fatal.

Consider the following:

Seventy million Americans suffer from arthritis - or one in every three adults. That's twice as many arthritis sufferers as there were two decades ago.

More than 20 million Americans have asthma today. It is the sixth most common chronic human disease.

More than 50 million Americans suffer every year from allergies, a number that has doubled in the past twenty years. There has been a 100 percent increase in the prevalence of hay fever in developed countries in each of the last three decades. Allergic dermatitis affects us at triple the rate in 1960. Ten percent of our young children are affected by allergic dermatitis.

There were 18.2 million people in the United States with diabetes in 2002, a 49 percent increase from ten years ago. This debilitating disease contributes to about two hundred thousand deaths in the United States each year.

Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of Americans. Almost 64 million Americans have it in some form, and it killed almost a million people in 2001.

Eczema is the most common skin condition in children under eleven; an estimated 15 million people in the United States suffer from the symptoms of this disease. One million Americans have inflammatory bowel disease.

Anyone would agree that these numbers are overwhelming. But they're even more devastating when you realize that this isn't just a random laundry list of conditions. In fact, these diseases all share a single underlying cause.

What's the common denominator linking these seemingly disparate diseases, and other serious ones, including lupus, Crohn's disease, and psoriasis? The answer comes from a surprising quarter: the body's own self-defense system. These are all inflammatory diseases, diseases that occur when the body's own defense system turns against itself.

And our bodies are turning against themselves in record numbers. Each one of these diseases, taken individually, represents a serious health problem in this country. Taken together, as a category of diseases, this can only be seen as a pandemic. It is true that some of these diseases overlap, like allergies and asthma, which makes it difficult to make an accurate estimate of the full scope of the inflammatory disease problem in this country. But even with that overlap, I don't think I'm overstating the problem when I say that inflammatory diseases affect as many as half of the people in this country.

The Inflammatory Cluster

You're probably familiar, from the news and movies like Erin Brockovich, with the phenomenon called the "cancer cluster," when people in a community or a profession develop related types of cancer in disproportionately high percentages. It's an absolutely terrifying occurrence.

When a cluster is identified, researchers immediately look for a proximate cause, a cancer-inducing agent to which every one of the patients has been exposed. When that proximate cause is uncovered (a factory dumping toxic chemicals into the groundwater, for example), the rest of us thank our lucky stars that it didn't happen in our neighborhood.

When I began my research into the connection between diet and inflammatory disease, I was simply searching for something to help people who suffered from advanced and chronic inflammatory disease. I wanted to find a natural, dietary solution that would alleviate symptoms in people who had otherwise exhausted their options. But I came to realize, as I hope you will over the course of this book, that the problem of inflammatory disease was much, much bigger than I had thought - and the stakes much higher as a result.

In fact, the soaring rise in inflammatory disease in this country is nothing less than a cluster in its own right. It's a nationwide cluster, a cluster without walls, unbounded by the typical limits of geography or demographics. You can't breathe a sigh of relief that you live outside the radius of the toxic-waste spill, because there is no "outside." There is no localized danger zone, no limited area that can be cordoned off and sanitized.

It is when we begin to look for the proximate cause of this tremendous, nationwide epidemic that the terrible gravity of the situation hits home: the answer may in fact be right on our dinner plates. I believe that a major component driving these diseases is our diet, and the "toxic-waste spill," to continue the metaphor, is our very food supply. There is no safe house, no place to hide, unless we fundamentally change the way we eat, in the ways prescribed in this book.

This disaster has sneaked up on us, but not overnight: the circumstances leading up to it have been brewing for a century or more. The staggering number of Americans suffering from these painful and debilitating diseases are, horribly, acting as the canaries in the coal mine. Their agony is sending a message, loud and clear, to those of us who have so far managed to dodge the bullet. This book isn't about the division between people who have inflammatory disease and people who don't. It's not about "who has it" and "who doesn't"; instead it's about "who doesn't" and "who will?" Every single one of us has pulled a chair up to this contaminated trough - which means that every single one of us is at risk.

"Why Haven't I Heard About This?"

You're probably wondering: if out-of-control inflammation is a silent plague threatening all of us, and not just a rare and exotic condition that affects the unfortunate few, why don't I know about it?

In fact, you know more about inflammation than you think. Like oxygen, inflammation is essential to our continued survival. When the inflammation system goes off course, we quickly turn to medication; I'd bet that there isn't a soul among us who doesn't have a bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet. This wonder drug quiets pain, soothes fever, and reduces swelling, like several of the other very effective anti-inflammatory drugs on the market.

Sometimes, however, our system becomes chronically inflamed. Why this happens is a puzzle. But we've been gathering the pieces of this puzzle for a while. Pharmaceutical companies have played an important role in uncovering the mysteries of how the inflammation system works. In fact, I like to refer to the inflammatory pathway that is the subject of this book as "the billion-dollar pathway," because it has absorbed more time and research - and research dollars - than almost any other area of medicine in the last thirty years. Soon, you will know it by another name: the AA Pathway (more about this later). The ability to block the AA Pathway is the magic behindblockbuster drugs like Celebrex and Singulair, as well as aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). The AA Pathway is also the magic behind the Chilton Program, a whole new all-natural way of thinking about inflammation.

Why the Stakes Are So High Right Now

The shockingly high number of people who have been diagnosed with inflammatory disease is one reason that we must come to terms with this plague. The fact that every single one of us is potentially in the line of fire is another. But out-of-control inflammation looms large as a public health issue for a variety of other reasons as well:

Inflammatory diseases are debilitating and, in many cases, fatal. And there is no cure for these diseases. Although in most cases, we've gotten better at treating their symptoms, treatment often means expensive, long-term medications with side effects that can be as damaging as the diseases themselves, and even the best medications don't work all the time, or for everybody.

More diseases have inflammation at their root than we think. Inflammation, it turns out, is the culprit behind many of the life-threatening conditions we thought were closed cases. For instance, ten years ago, cardiologists thought elevated blood lipids like cholesterol and triglycerides were the primary cause of heart disease, so we categorized atherosclerosis as a lipid-storage disease. Now we believe that heart disease, the leading killer of Americans, actually has inflammation at its root. And new research shows that underlying inflammation may be linked to other major killers, like Alzheimer's and certain types of cancer.

Other human conditions have a significant inflammatory component. Even conditions that aren't strictly categorized as inflammatory diseases frequently have a significant inflammatory component, which is often the root of chronic pain and deforming tissue damage. For example, inflammation is a major driving force behind type 2 diabetes and dementia. In fact, inflammation may play a major role in the category of ailments and diseases we have previously called "aging." Consequently, treating and preventing inflammation can mean a tremendous boon for all of us, often resulting in an enormous increase in function and great relief from pain.

Inflammation isn't the only burgeoning epidemic. Approximately 64 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. Not only does being overweight exacerbate an existing inflammatory disease, but fat cells play a major role in the creation of the messengers that cause inflammatory disease.

More and more people are affected every year. Today's inflammatory disease statistics are alarming. Tomorrow's numbers will be worse. The number of people suffering from these diseases - and dying from them - continues to grow. Our medical systems, medicines, and technologies have never been better or more accessible to many people, and yet these diseases flourish as if we lived in the Dark Ages.

If we hope to see any meaningful relief from this pandemic, we must begin to address its underlying cause; and, to do that, we must investigate why these diseases are happening to us in such disproportionately high numbers, and what we're doing that's causing those numbers to rise.

Tammy's Story: A Personal Crusade

Vital journeys in life often start with the intense desire to help someone whom you love. If almost 50 percent of Americans have an inflammatory disease, then certainly every American's life has been touched by this epidemic, and I am no exception. It was my own personal experience with inflammatory diseases in people whom I cared about that motivated me to dedicate my life to this research.

My sister Tammy was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (RA) at the age of thirteen. I truly believe that if Satan were to design a disease, it would be this one - an opinion that's shared by those who live with RA, and the doctors who treat it. It's truly a monstrous affliction: an incurable disease characterized by excruciating pain and gradual debilitation.

Tammy is one of the bravest people I've ever met. Although she's been suffering from this demon of a disease since childhood, I don't think I've ever heard her complain - but the physical evidence of her disease is written all over her body. By the age of thirty, her hands were so grotesquely deformed that it hurt just to look at them, and her knees were enormously swollen with bony protuberances, places where the chronic inflammation had affected so much tissue that the shape of the joint was permanently damaged.

To control her disease, Tammy had progressively moved up to more and more serious medications. By the fall of 1997, she was taking a medication called methotrexate, originally designed as an anti-cancer drug. It is very powerful and toxic. The immediate side effects included mouth sores, diarrhea, and a loss of appetite, but there was also a long-term threat: taken in high enough concentrations for long periods of time, methotrexate can eventually threaten every major organ system in the body.

The medication was expensive, the side effects made her very uncomfortable, and, as the mother of three small children, she was worried about its effects on her future health. But like many RA patients, Tammy simply didn't have a choice. This drug was her only hope. The worst part was that the methotrexate wasn't even all that effective. Despite this heavy-duty medication, Tammy still couldn't walk up a flight of stairs or tie her own shoes. And no matter what she did, her disease continued to worsen.

After two full knee replacements and five surgeries to rehabilitate and replace the joints in her hands, Tammy was at the end of her rope. She had heard in RA sufferer support groups an excited buzz about "alternative therapies" promising increased function and pain reduction. The possibility of help was tantalizing, but inaccessible - there was absolutely no consensus about what worked! Some sufferers were claiming terrific results from diets that contained supposedly anti-inflammatory foods, and from taking huge doses of antioxidant vitamins and fatty-acid supplements. Dosages varied wildly, depending on whom you asked, and nobody seemed to be all that concerned about science or safety.

Understandably overwhelmed by the contradictory information whizzing back and forth, Tammy called me. At the time, I was a faculty member at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Asthma and Allergy Center and an internationally recognized expert in asthma.

"I need to try something else," she said. "My doctor is telling me I've exhausted my options, but what I'm doing clearly isn't working, and I can't go on like this. Isn't there anything else I can do?"

"I have no idea," I said. "But don't you dare take anything until I do."

That night, I spent the evening at our medical library examining the claims behind these alternative medicines. Tammy had been right: there was a whole culture of people with inflammatory diseases of all kinds, clamoring for help. In almost all cases, their diseases were chronic and progressive. The prescription medications they were taking often had unacceptable side effects, and they were legitimately afraid of the effects these medications might have on their long-term health. Traditional medicine was not providing acceptable solutions for these people, and they were desperate for answers from other quarters.

But if there was help to be found, it wasn't going to be from natural-product companies, which seemed to prey on the hopes and fears of despairing sufferers, trading in great promises that could only end up in profound disappointment. I was appalled by the misinformation about diet and supplements I was reading in the materials I found. At best, the information was useless, the "prescriptions" not much better than snake oil. At worst, the recommendations were downright dangerous - combinations of supplements at dosage levels that could have potentially fatal results, like platelet stickiness and heart attack.

At the same time, I couldn't dismiss everything I found as quackery. As silly as some of the scientific claims were, I could also see the gleam of real treasure there. Sure that I wasn't the only scientist to make these inquiries, I went to Medline, a list of about 11 million references from medical journals, to see what the medical community had to offer. I looked for clinical trials designed to test alternative therapies for inflammatory disease.

Unfortunately, what I found there wasn't much more conclusive. There weren't a lot of studies, and, for the most part, the ones I did find lacked real scientific vigor. Many of them hadn't used a placebo control group, which meant that there wasn't a real standard against which to compare their results. Most of them hadn't taken place in a major medical center setting, where the researchers could ensure strict compliance. And in some cases, there was a question about how the outcomes had been measured. From a scientific perspective, the research was inadequate, to say the least.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Inflammation Nationby Floyd H. Chilton Laura Tucker Copyright © 2005 by Chilton Health Technologies, LLC. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743269659
• ISBN 13: 9780743269650
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320