Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're discussing inflammation. I hear this word a lot from guests on the Zoe podcast. It's always coming up when I ask about health conditions like Alzheimer's, cancer or heart disease.

It's clearly very important.

However, many of us still don't fully understand what inflammation really is.

Professor Philip Calder is here to break down inflammation and share tips on what we should eat to keep it in check.

Can you explain in simple terms what exactly is inflammation, how it's different from immunity

and why you're saying it's not necessarily always a bad thing?

Yeah.

So immunity, our immune system, is the way we defend ourselves against harmful things in our

environment, particularly things like bacteria and viruses. Now, immunity is very complicated, very

complex, it's very sophisticated, and it involves many different things happening in the body,

many different cell types and events occurring.

Inflammation is the first little part of the immune response.

So immunity is sort of like an umbrella of very complicated but joined up events.

And inflammation is just part of what's under that umbrella.

So we shouldn't mix up inflammation and immunity. Now, because inflammation is part of immunity,

it's actually designed to help us. It's designed to be part of our protective mechanism.

So inflammation is really the first thing that

happens when we get exposed to something harmful. And that could be an infection. It could be an

insect bite. It could be, you know, a paper cut. So the things that people experience when they get a

paper cut or even a more serious cut,

you know, the pain, the redness, the swelling, that's inflammation.

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