Why Is My Body Inflamed?
If you only have a minute, here is what I want you to take from this:
If that raises more questions than it answers, that is exactly what the rest of this article is for.
If you have been told your inflammatory markers are a little raised, or you have spent months trying to work out why you feel tired, achy, foggy or just not quite right, you have probably heard the word “inflammation” more than once. It gets used so often, for so many different things, that it can start to feel almost meaningless. You are told your body is inflamed, but nobody quite explains what that means, or why it is happening to you.
Inflammation is the smoke. To understand why it’s happening, we first need to find the fire.
Kate Troup, Naturopath
That idea sits underneath everything in this article. Inflammation itself is rarely the problem. It is usually a sign that something else is going on underneath, something asking for your attention. If we only treat the inflammation, without asking what is driving it, you can end up feeling like you are managing symptoms indefinitely rather than actually getting anywhere.
Inflammation isn’t the enemy
Before we go any further, I want to be clear about something. Inflammation is not a fault in your body. It is one of the most useful protective responses you have.
If you cut your finger, twist an ankle or come down with a virus, your immune system sends signalling molecules and immune cells to the area. Blood vessels open up, tissue can become a little swollen, warm and red, and that is inflammation doing exactly what it is meant to do. It helps clear damaged cells, defend against pathogens and start the repair process. Without it, even a small injury could become a serious problem. This is called acute inflammation, and it is designed to switch on quickly, do its job, and switch off again within a few days.
The difficulty comes when it does not switch off.
When the response doesn’t settle
Chronic, low grade inflammation works quite differently to the acute kind. Instead of a short, obvious response to an injury, it can run quietly in the background for months or years, often at a level you would not notice from day to day, but high enough over time to place ongoing strain on your tissues and systems.
You might think of acute inflammation as a smoke alarm going off because there is an actual fire. It is loud, it is obvious, and once the fire is out, it stops. Chronic inflammation can feel more like an alarm with a wiring fault. It keeps sounding quietly in the background, sometimes for years, and many people simply learn to live around the noise rather than ask why it has not stopped.
In my experience, this rarely happens for no reason. Something is often still feeding it. That might be an unresolved gut issue, a lingering infection, blood sugar that is not being regulated smoothly, a stress response that has not settled, poor sleep, or a genetic tendency towards a stronger inflammatory reaction. This is the fire we are actually trying to find.
Why this can matter well beyond your joints
Most people connect inflammation with joint pain or arthritis, and that makes sense, since it is probably the most visible and most talked about example. But chronic inflammation is a whole body process, and its effects can show up in places that are not always linked back to the same underlying pattern.
Fatigue. Inflammatory signalling molecules act directly on the brain, and one of their more consistent effects is making you feel tired, foggy or low in motivation, even when your bloodwork looks reasonable enough on paper. This is sometimes called sickness behaviour, and it is the same mechanism that makes you want to lie down when you have the flu, just running at a lower and more persistent level.
Cardiovascular health. Inflammation plays a significant role in how plaques form in the arteries and how stable they remain. This is one of the reasons cardiologists now look at inflammatory markers alongside cholesterol, because the story of heart disease is often as much about inflamed vessel walls as it is about fat in the blood.
Metabolic health. Chronic inflammation and insulin resistance tend to feed each other. Inflamed fat tissue can release signalling molecules that interfere with how your cells respond to insulin, which over time may contribute to weight gain around the middle, less stable blood sugar, and eventually type 2 diabetes in some people.
Gut disorders. The lining of your gut is one of the most immunologically active tissues in the body. When it is irritated, whether by food sensitivities, an imbalance in gut bacteria or a compromised gut barrier , inflammation can become ongoing, and in turn make the gut lining even more reactive. This can create a loop that is hard to break without addressing what started it.
Mood. There is a growing and genuinely interesting body of research linking chronic inflammation with low mood and anxiety. Inflammatory molecules can alter neurotransmitter production and brain signalling in ways that resemble, or worsen, depressive symptoms. This may be part of why some people with persistent low mood do not respond fully to standard approaches until the inflammatory piece is also considered.
None of this means inflammation causes every case of these conditions. It means inflammation is often part of the picture, sometimes quietly, and rarely the whole story on its own.
What your blood tests can tell you, and what they can’t
When I am trying to understand someone’s inflammatory picture, a few markers tend to come up.
CRP, or C-reactive protein, is produced by your liver in response to inflammatory signals elsewhere in the body. It can rise quickly when there is active inflammation and fall away quickly once things settle, which makes it useful, though it also means it mostly reflects what was happening around the time of the test. A more sensitive version, high sensitivity CRP, is often used specifically to pick up the low level elevations relevant to cardiovascular and metabolic health, rather than the larger spikes seen with acute infection.
ESR, or erythrocyte sedimentation rate, measures how quickly red blood cells settle at the bottom of a test tube. Inflammatory proteins can make them clump together and fall faster than usual. It tends to be a slower, steadier marker than CRP, changing over days rather than hours, which can make it useful for tracking longer running inflammatory processes, though less useful for catching something acute.
IL-6 and IL-1B gene variants offer a different kind of information. Rather than measuring inflammation happening right now, these look at your genetic tendency to produce more, or less, of these particular inflammatory signalling molecules in response to a trigger. Someone carrying a more reactive variant is not destined to develop chronic disease, but they may mount a stronger inflammatory response to the same stressor than someone without it. This can help explain why two people with a similar gut issue, injury or infection might have quite different experiences.
“But my bloods came back normal”
This is one of the situations I see often, and I understand how frustrating it can feel. You have real symptoms, and a set of results that look entirely unremarkable.
There are a few honest explanations for this. CRP and ESR are both reasonably good at flagging significant, active inflammation, but low grade chronic inflammation can sit below the threshold that standard reference ranges are built to detect. The test is not wrong, it may simply not be sensitive enough to pick up what is going on for you. Inflammation can also be localised, active in the gut lining or a particular tissue, without necessarily raising markers that show up clearly in a general blood test. Because CRP in particular can shift quickly, a test taken on a good day may miss a pattern that shows up more on the harder days.
Normal bloods are still useful information. They help rule things out. But they do not automatically mean there is nothing worth investigating. This is where the genetic variants can be a helpful, complementary piece, since they do not fluctuate day to day and can help explain a predisposition even when a snapshot blood test looks clean.
Finding the fire
This, to me, is the heart of it. Inflammation is a signal, not a diagnosis. It may be your body telling you that something, somewhere, needs a closer look. That could be a gut that has not settled, a stress response that has not switched off, blood sugar that is swinging more than it should, an infection that never fully cleared, or a genetic tendency that means your body reacts more strongly than most to ordinary triggers.
The aim is not to chase the smoke with more anti-inflammatories or more restrictive changes, hoping something eventually helps. It is to ask, patiently and logically, what might actually be driving it. Once that becomes clearer, the inflammation itself often settles as a result.
If you have been living with fatigue, pain, gut symptoms or low mood that you cannot quite explain, and your test results keep coming back within range, that does not need to be the end of the conversation. It can be the beginning of a more useful one. Inflammation is the smoke, and in my experience, it is almost always worth finding the fire.
If this sounds like your experience, I would be glad to talk it through with you and look at what testing might genuinely help build a clearer picture for your situation.
