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

Chilton, Floyd H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743269659 ISBN 13: 9780743269650

Verlag: Atria, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

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.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0743269659
• ISBN 13: 9780743269650
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 321
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande