It’s important to avoid conflating localized or temporary inflammation and systemic “dry” inflammation. Temporary and localized inflammation is by all means healthy and necessary. When your body is combatting an infection, it involves an inflammatory process. Nobody is proposing to dampend that. Exercise involves temporary inflammation - and we know that trying to tamp down that (through anti-inflammatories or antioxidants), removes a lot of the benefits of exercise, so we don’t do that. Nobody is claiming that the temporary inflammation of exercise is anything but good. That type of inflammation is necessary and beneficial. We don’t try to combat this. That’s not at issue.
What’s at issue is something completely different. It’s a process where the inflammation is constant without an inciting cause - generalized inflammatory state, frequently associated with mTORC1 that doesn’t turn off, but keeps revving the inflammatory process. That’s systemic inflammation - a very different proposition, and here, unlike temporary or localized inflammation we do want to tamp down the process, and no, there are no benefits to this type of inflammation. In Western individuals, this inflammation is commonly associated with aging - called inflammaging. Now, to revisit exercise - why is the inflammation in exercise generated in the first place? In order to rev up the body’s natural mechanism to tamp down on overall inflammation - systemic inflammation - in the process of hormesis. That right there neatly illustrates the distinction - the good temporary inflammation that leads to less systemic inflammation. That’s part of the benefits of exercise - less inflammaging.
So, yes, temporary and localized inflammation that is part of a natural defense mechanism - is GOOD, and should not be tamped down. Systemic “dry” inflammation is NOT GOOD, and yes, it should be tamped down by whatever means we can - lifestyle, diet, exercise, drugs. One of the ways in which rapamycin inhibiting mTORC1 works beneficially is by allowing to tamp down on the destructive continuing revving that apparently happens in old age. Now, maybe there are nuances in how that works in non-Western populations, but I respond to this in the following way: LOOK AT THE ANIMAL DATA.
If we take animal models, anti-inflammatories and mTOR inhibitors WORK. They prolong lifespan and healthspan. And the animals don’t suffer many of the Western lifestyle issues, like sitting around watching TV and eating chips. It works in animals all over the world. Good enough for me. I don’t actually care as much why it works, but that it works. And so, I’ll continue to take rapamycin and anti-inflammatory agents that work against systemic inflammaging, and I let the people in jungles or other cultures find their own ways to slow down aging… and may I add, that longevity records for humans on the whole are reached in the world built on the Western model, including the purported “blue zones” like the Loma Linda in the USA. Somehow they don’t have jungle tribes where people live into their 90’s on average and large numbers are centenarians and some even supercentenarians. Oh, and my cat reminds me, that companion animals living in the rotten West tend to live a great deal longer than their feral brethern who are untouched by the evils of civilization - it’s as if somone needed a reminder of what Thomas Hobbes observed about life in the state of nature without the benefit of civilization: life that is “nasty, brutish and short”. Thanks, but no thanks, I’ll take my pills and go read a book. No inflammaging for me, thank you, but to each their own. YMMV.
