Jan 29, 20214 min read

The unexpected food that may be adding to your inflammatory load

Things are about to get a bit biochemical here so if you have an aversion to biochemistry or things named with a selection of letters best to skip to the end. However, if you are like me and love a bit of biochemistry then sit back and let me entertain you…

Inflammation is important, essential actually. Your body, in all its infinite wisdom, ‘inflames’ in order to alert your immune system of damage and/or pathogens. Your clever innate immune system detects the signals, moves to the area, cleans up the mess, carries fragments to your adaptive immune system to ‘memorise’ and the adaptive immune system heads off to ‘attack’ the pathogen or cell containing that biomarker that it has memorised. Without this inflammatory process we would die.

However, chronic inflammation is a whole other story. You do not need to be chronically inflamed. In fact, if you are you are at risk for all manner of diseases and disorders. Most chronically ill people are chronically inflamed. That is a topic for another day. Today let’s focus on that food I referred to in the title.

There is a food that is consumed world wide that directly impacts your inflammatory process. There is a food that has a substance in it called phytohemagglutinin, or PHA. Why do we care about PHA? Here is where the biochemistry comes in…

PHA is a lectin that has many actions in the body. For this post we are going to focus on the actions that pertain to inflammation. PHA stimulates the activation of NFkB and is a T-cell activator. T-cells are one type of cell in your adaptive immune system that ‘memorise’ the protein portions presented to them and then go out to attack anything matching that protein portion. This is great if your protein portion is coming from a pathogen, not so great if it is coming from food. Any form of immune cell activation is inflammatory in its nature, however, this T-cell activation is not the action of greatest concern for the purpose of this blog post. It is the activation of NFkB that we are more concerned about.

NFkB (Nuclear Factor kappa B) is sitting in your cells, happily unactivated. When PHA comes along it triggers a reaction that activates NFkB. The active form heads into the nucleus of your cell, attaches to the kB portion of your DNA and turns on the production of a multitude of inflammatory markers, two of which are TNFa (Tumour Necrosis Factor alpha) and IL-1B (Interleukin - 1 beta). Both TNFa and IL-1B are activators of NFkB. The names and all of these confusing letters are not what is important here what you need to understand is this — PHA activates NFkB which turns on production of multiple inflammatory chemicals including TNFa and IL-1B. Both TNFa and IL-1B activate more NFkB which produces more inflammatory chemicals including TNFa and IL-1B. This becomes a vicious cycle. In research, this cycle is referred to as the amplifying loop of the inflammatory process.

Here is a handy little diagram to illustrate what I mean. Note the TNFa and IL-1B (circled in yellow) that appear at the top of the diagram showing the stimuli for activation of NFkB and at the bottom showing the production of them as a result of activation of NFkB.

Oh, and once you have this cycle activated, as it is self perpetuating, it is easy to keep it going by layering on stress, not getting enough sleep, contracting an infection, etc, because guess what? PHA is not the only thing that triggers the activation of NFkB.

Here is another handy diagram to illustrate this amplifying loop.

Now what is this mystery food that could potentially be adding to your inflammatory load? If you had to guess what would you say?

Red meat?

Dairy?

Wheat?

Sugar?

They all have a reputation for being inflammatory so would be good guesses. However, it is none of the above.

The foods causing the highest levels of PHA in your diet are (drum roll please) beans. Yes, beans. With the kidney bean being the biggest culprit. Those lovely little fibre nuggets could be adding to your inflammatory load.

PHA is highest in raw or dried beans. There is enough PHA in 4-5 raw or dried kidney beans to make you seriously ill. However, with proper soaking and cooking you can reduce the levels of PHA in the beans before consumption. It is worth noting that a slow cooker may not get to a high enough temperature to destroy the PHA and under cooked beans are even more toxic than raw, up to 5 times more.

I would like to make it clear that I am not advocating everyone taking beans out of their diets. PHA also has other actions in the body, some of which are positive. I am simply saying that there is a lot to know and understand about our bodies and how they interact with and use the foods we feed them. If something just won’t shift for you, it is best to consult with a professional that knows the intricacies of the human body and can see patterns that you might not have noticed yourself. If you are struggling to shift something and would like a free 15 minute exploratory chat please get in touch.

In the meantime, if you are under the weather, maybe lay off the beans.

To wellness!

April