Is Inflammation Really the Enemy?

article by Ancestral Nutrition

If you spend any time in the wellness space, you’ll notice one word comes up again and again: inflammation.

It’s often positioned as the root cause of almost everything, fatigue, joint pain, skin issues, brain fog, weight gain, chronic disease, even ageing itself. The message is usually simple and absolute: inflammation is bad, and the goal is to eliminate it.

But biology is rarely that simple.

So it’s worth pausing to ask a quieter, more uncomfortable question:

Is inflammation actually the enemy, or have we misunderstood its role?

How Inflammation Became the Villain

To be fair, inflammation didn’t earn its reputation out of nowhere.

Chronic, low-grade inflammation is associated with a long list of modern health issues, from cardiovascular disease and insulin resistance to autoimmune conditions and neurodegeneration. Elevated inflammatory markers often show up alongside poor metabolic health and declining resilience.

From that lens, it makes sense that inflammation became something to fear, and something to suppress.

The wellness response followed quickly: anti-inflammatory diets, supplements, protocols, and food lists designed to “calm” the body at all costs.

But in focusing so hard on reducing inflammation, we may have blurred an important distinction.

Not All Inflammation Is the Same

Inflammation isn’t a flaw in the system, it’s a biological process, and an essential one.

Acute inflammation is what allows the body to:

Heal wounds
Fight infections
Adapt to exercise
Repair tissue

If you lift weights, inflammation is part of how muscle grows. Training causes small amounts of tissue damage, which triggers an inflammatory response that signals repair and adaptation. Without that response, progress stalls.

The immune system works the same way. Inflammation helps it learn, adapt, and remember.

In these contexts, inflammation isn’t harmful, it’s necessary.

The real issue is chronic inflammation: inflammation that lingers, never fully resolving, often driven by repeated stressors without adequate recovery.

The problem isn’t inflammation itself. It’s inflammation without relief.

When “Anti-Inflammatory” Goes Too Far

Once inflammation is framed as something inherently bad, the natural instinct is to try to shut it down immediately and aggressively.

But suppressing inflammation indiscriminately can sometimes work against the body rather than with it.

Research has shown, for example, that high-dose antioxidants taken straight after exercise can blunt training adaptations. Anti-inflammatory medications, when overused, may interfere with tissue repair. Even immune suppression can increase vulnerability when the body actually needs a response.

The body relies on stress followed by recovery. When we dampen the stress signal itself, we may also dampen the adaptation that comes after it.

This doesn’t mean anti-inflammatory strategies are wrong, it means context and timing matter.

Why So Many People Feel Chronically Inflamed

If inflammation plays such a vital role, why do so many people feel inflamed all the time?

Often, it’s not one food or habit driving the issue. It’s a stacking of stressors the body never quite recovers from.

Things like:

Poor or inconsistent sleep
Psychological stress without nervous system down-regulation
Under-eating or micronutrient insufficiency
Metabolic dysfunction
High training load with limited recovery

In these situations, inflammation isn’t doing its job and resolving, it’s hanging around because the system never gets the chance to reset.

Inflammation, in this sense, is less a cause and more a signal.

Inflammation as Information

One of the subtle downsides of modern wellness culture is how moralised inflammation has become. It’s often framed as something you’ve caused by making the “wrong” choices.

But inflammation is better understood as feedback.

It tells us something about:

Recovery capacity
Energy availability
Stress load
Immune demand

Suppressing that signal without addressing what’s driving it can be like turning off a warning light without looking under the hood.

Sometimes the most supportive thing you can do for inflammation isn’t adding another supplement, it’s sleeping more, eating enough, reducing training volume, or creating space for recovery.

Diet, Inflammation, and Context

Diet is usually where inflammation conversations land, and for good reason.

Dietary patterns rich in whole foods, fibre, and essential nutrients are consistently associated with lower inflammatory markers. Ultra-processed diets tend to show the opposite.

But inflammation doesn’t respond to single ingredients in isolation. It responds to the whole picture: diet quality, energy balance, metabolic health, and lifestyle context.

For a healthy individual, occasional exposure to less-than-ideal foods is unlikely to be the deciding factor. For someone already metabolically stressed, the same exposure may land differently.

The more useful question isn’t “Is this food inflammatory?”
It’s “What’s my body dealing with right now?”