On the flight from London to Rome I read an article on the immune system and cancer. It got me to thinking about the immune system and a whole lot of other health problems.

It’s sunrise in The Eternal City right now. I’ve been up early watching the dawn break over St. Peters, which is a couple of miles below the hotel. I figured everyone was getting tired of travel disaster stories, so I thought this would be a good time to sketch out my views on the inflammatory basis of heart disease.

If you read enough in the medical literature you will perceive a change in outlook on the underlying cause of many of the so-called diseases of civilization, especially heart disease. Most authors – mainly, I suspect, out of desire to keep their academic positions and reputation with their peers – throw a bone to the lipid hypothesis before admitting that it probably isn’t the only cause of coronary artery disease. Over the last decade or so the progression has been thus: elevated cholesterol causes heart disease – elevated cholesterol and maybe a little inflammation cause heart disease – elevated cholesterol and inflammation cause heart disease – inflammation along with elevated cholesterol cause heart disease – and now, among the more enlightened – inflammation causes heart disease. In my opinion, it probably is inflammation by itself that is the driving force behind the development and progression of most cardiovascular disease.

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Research published in the most recent issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition shows that a modest daily dose of krill oil markedly reduces inflammation and reduces the pain, stiffness and functional impairment associated with rheumatoid and osteoarthritis within one week.

I posted last summer on the regimen I had put together for my own golf-related aches and pains to replace the large doses of Advil (ibuprofen) I had been taking. In the same post I discussed a study published in Surgical Neurology showing that patients with severe back pain who opted to take fish oil instead of NSAIDS (Advil-like drugs) could, for the most part, achieve equivalent pain relief. This study was one in which the doctors gave a number of patients the option to switch from NSAIDs to fish oil, so the study wasn’t really hard science, but kind of soft science in that, as I wrote at the time, it was not a double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

Now, a Canadian researcher has published a very nice double-blind, placebo-controlled study using Neptune Krill Oil (NKO) that shows some pretty impressive results.

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A few days ago I posted on a fish oil/krill oil/curcumin regimen that I’ve been using to treat joint and muscle soreness after golf. I had a number of comments wanting to know about krill oil and why I made it part of the treatment protocol. Your wish is my command.

Krill oil, logically enough, comes from krill, which are small, shrimp like crustaceans that inhabit the cold ocean areas of the world, primarily the Antarctic and North Pacific Oceans. Despite their small size–one to five centimeters in length–krill make up the largest animal biomass on the planet. According to Neptune Technologies, the Canadian company that holds the patent for krill oil extraction, there are approximately 500 million tons of krill roaming around in these northern seas, 110,000 tons of which are harvested annually.

A krill, in profile

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I came across this article about cherries that is riddled with misinformation. I like cherries as much as the next guy – in fact, I love them – and wolf them down whenever I have the chance, and I know cherries to be a wonderfully healthful, relatively low-carb fruit, but I can’t let something like this that appeared in newspapers all over America go unchallenged.

The first disingenuous statement is that sour cherries

are recently renowned for relieving the aches and pains of gout, arthritis and other inflammatory ailments. Scientists credit cherries’ huge antioxidant values – higher than prunes, blueberries and strawberries. Cherries also inhibit the COX-2 enzyme, which causes inflammation.

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