The Inflammation Lie: And the Truths Worth Keeping
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The Inflammation Lie: And the Truths Worth Keeping
Inflammation is everywhere on the internet right now. It's blamed for fatigue, brain fog, stubborn weight, skin problems, gut issues — and there's always a supplement, a protocol, or a course ready to fix it. The problem is that the version of inflammation being sold online doesn't really reflect how inflammation works in the body.
Dr. Lara Baatenburg actually went to TikTok to see what's out there. What she found is worth unpacking — because there's just enough truth in it to make it convincing, and just enough distortion to make it expensive.
What inflammation actually is
Start here, because this part matters. Inflammation is your immune system doing its job. When there's an infection, an injury, or damaged tissue, your body sends immune cells to the site to clear debris and begin repair. Redness, swelling, heat, pain: those are all signs the process is working. Acute inflammation is self-limiting, necessary, and a sign that your body is functioning correctly.
You do not want to eliminate inflammation. You want to not have the things that trigger it unnecessarily.
There are also real inflammatory conditions — rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, MS, lupus, and IBD. These are autoimmune diagnoses with specific clinical presentations and testing. They are serious, and they are not what most people posting about inflammation on social media are referring to.
The version that's being sold to you
Dr. Lara pulled up a TikTok account. The whole account was about inflammation. That alone, she notes, is a red flag — if your entire identity is built around fixing inflammation, why do you still have it?
The post she looked at listed the signs your body may be dealing with inflammation: constant fatigue, digestive issues, skin problems, joint pain, and brain fog. Then the fix: whole foods, better sleep, stress reduction, gentle movement.
Here's the problem. Those symptoms can point to a dozen different things — thyroid disease being a major one. And the advice? That's just what your doctor has been telling you for years. The difference is that when a physician says, "Eat better and sleep more," patients are frustrated. When an influencer says it under the banner of inflammation, it gets thousands of likes.
As Dr. Lara puts it, that post is essentially blaming the person for feeling crummy while selling them the same recommendations medicine has always offered — just with a more compelling story attached.
What the labs actually tell you
Patients ask for inflammatory markers regularly. Dr. Lara is straightforward about what those tests can and can't do.
CRP and ESR are the common ones. High-sensitivity CRP is useful as a cardiovascular risk marker, not as a confirmation that you feel inflamed. White blood cell count goes up with infection. These tests are designed to detect disease. They are not a readout of whether you feel off.
In her experience, patients who come in convinced they have elevated inflammatory markers because they're fatigued, stressed, and not feeling right almost never do. Feeling inflamed is not a diagnosis. It's a feeling — and one that deserves investigation, but through the right tests for the actual symptoms, not a panel of inflammatory markers that won't tell you anything actionable.
Where the partial truths come in
This is the part that makes the influencer narrative so hard to push back on. Some of it isn't wrong.
Fat tissue is metabolically active. It releases inflammatory cytokines. More fat mass means more of those cytokines circulating. So yes — losing fat genuinely does reduce inflammatory markers. But the influencer playbook flips the cause-and-effect. They're not saying you lost weight. They're saying you lowered your inflammation, and the weight followed. That's backward, and it matters because it reframes a straightforward caloric process as something more exotic that requires their protocol.
The Mediterranean diet has real evidence behind it — it reduces certain inflammatory cytokines, and it's probably the dietary pattern with the strongest research support. But it's doing a lot of things simultaneously: helping with weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. To say it works because it reduces inflammation is a short-sighted reading of the evidence.
Omega-3s come up too. There is some evidence that a specific dose, in specific populations, lowers inflammatory markers. But the clinical data on supplementation for general wellness are not strong. David walked through a pitch he recently received from a network marketing company selling blood tests that measure the omega-6-to-omega-3 ratio. The mechanism sounds reasonable. The jump from "mechanism makes sense" to "here's the product you should buy" skips a lot of steps — and those steps are where the actual science lives.
A physician said it well in a podcast Dr. Lara mentioned: " Don't fall in love with the mechanism. Just because a pathway in the body seems logical doesn't mean we understand it well enough to sell a supplement against it.”
The things that are just noise
Celery juice. Detox protocols for the liver and kidneys — which, for the record, are already detoxing your body constantly and do not need help from a $12 cold press. Alkaline water operates on a fundamental misunderstanding of human physiology: your blood pH is one of the most tightly regulated systems in your body. If it drifts outside a narrow range, you are not "acidic" — you are in a medical emergency. Drinking alkaline water does not shift your blood pH. It just costs more.
Turmeric has some evidence of lowering inflammatory markers. How clinically significant that is remains an open question. Gluten elimination without a celiac diagnosis or a clear personal response is probably unnecessary — though if you genuinely feel better without it, that's worth paying attention to.
What actually matters
The behaviors that support health also happen to reduce whatever real, low-grade inflammatory burden most people carry. Weight management, regular movement, adequate sleep, not smoking, limiting alcohol, and eating more whole foods — these are not anti-inflammatory protocols. They're just how you take care of a body. The inflammatory benefit, where it exists, is a downstream effect of doing the basics well.
If you have symptoms that genuinely concern you — joint pain, specific gut issues, rashes alongside other symptoms — that's a conversation worth having with your physician. Those presentations can point to real autoimmune conditions with real testing and real treatment. Your doctor is not going to tell you to buy a supplement. They're going to figure out what's actually going on.
And if someone leads with a dramatic before-and-after and credits their transformation to lowering their inflammation — David has a pretty clear take on that. They don't know what they're talking about.
Vitals & Values is the podcast of Concierge Medicine of West Michigan, hosted by Dr. David Roden and Dr. Lara Baatenburg. New episodes available wherever you listen.
