Chronic Disease

How does someone develop a chronic condition? One way to understand it is epigenetics. Epigenetics is the understanding that our surrounding environment is continuously interacting with our genes to influence our biology. When a person is exposed to a threat, such as a virus, a toxin, or some form of stress, inflammatory genes get switched on. This is because short-term inflammation is required to resolve threats. If, however, the exposure is prolonged, or greater than a person’s ability to resolve it, the inflammatory genes do not get switched off once the issue has resolved. This leads to a state of chronic inflammation, contributing to conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, depression, cancer, autoimmune conditions and more.¹

The place that chronic inflammation generally begins is in the gut lining. This is because it is the location where the external environment comes into the most contact with the internal, and the majority of the body’s immune and inflammatory cells are located, ready to alter gene expression in accordance with environmental demands, impacting the entire body.

With this knowledge, research is beginning to identify that targeting the gut is one of best ways to switch off chronic inflammation, and switch on anti-inflammatory gene expression.² See the next post to learn more.

¹ Li, D., Li, Y., Yang, S., Lu, J., Jin, X., & Wu, M. (2022). Diet-gut microbiota-epigenetics in metabolic diseases: from mechanisms to therapeutics. Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, 153, 113290. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopha.2022.113290

² Hoefer, C. C., Hollon, L. K., & Campbell, J. A. (2022). The role of the human gutome on chronic disease: a review of the microbiome and nutrigenomics. Clinics in Laboratory Medicine, 42(4), 627–643. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cll.2022.09.015