Chronic Inflammation

Why it matters

Gout, arthritis, psoriasis, long COVID and several others look like separate problems. Yet the same short list of everyday things keeps turning up behind them. That is why people with very different diagnoses are often given the same advice — and why, for some conditions, that advice misses the point completely.

Key insights from this synthesis

• Eating little fibre weakens the gut wall. Fragments of gut bacteria then leak into the blood, and the immune system treats them as something that should not be there. That reaction shows up later as heart disease, diabetes and memory problems.
• Food is the most repeated answer on this page. But about a third of these conditions start somewhere else — with an infection the immune system never fully switched off.
• Two of our own topics give opposite advice on the same everyday choice: what to cook with.
• Three of the conditions listed here argue that inflammation is not what causes them.