Stopping Inflammation: Relieving the Cause of Degenerative Diseases Paperback – March 1, 2004

Nancy Appleton, PhD,

earned her BS in clinical nutrition from UCLA and her PhD in health services from Walden University. She maintains a private practice in Santa Monica, California. An avid researcher, Dr. Appleton lectures during the world, and has appeared on a lot of television and radio shows. She is the best-selling author of Suicide by Sugar and Healthy Bones.

Degenerative diseases appear to be caused or complicated by a process few medical researchers suspected until quite recently: inflammation. Scientists have long linked edema, arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease to inflammation, but have only recently implicated the process to diabetes, certain cancers, and other unsolvable degenerative conditions. The latest research links heart disease more to various inflammatory conditions (those ending with ’itis’) than to high cholesterol. Inflammation has all the time played a role in infections. Catch a cold or fever and the nose runs, coughing sets in, temperature rises, and all the other great symptoms that children pray for, as an excuse to ditch school, appear. All of these symptoms are expressions of the inflammatory process. Another form of inflammation has to do with insults to the body, such as parasites, fungi, bruises, broken bones, and smoking. Healthy immune systems use inflammation to right an unbalanced body; when the job is done, inflammation and other symptoms go away.