A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet, and Disease
-
-
4.3 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Fascinating.…[Ravella’s writing] breathes life into biological functions.” —Grace Wade, New Scientist
A riveting investigation of inflammation—the hidden force at the heart of modern disease—and how we can prevent, treat, or even reverse it.
Inflammation is the body’s ancestral response to its greatest threats, the first line of defense it deploys against injury and foreign pathogens. But as the threats we face have evolved, new science is uncovering how inflammation may also turn against us, simmering underneath the surface of leading killers from heart disease and cancer to depression, aging, and mysterious autoimmune conditions.
In A Silent Fire, gastroenterologist Shilpa Ravella investigates hidden inflammation’s emerging role as a common root of modern disease—and how we can control it. We meet the visionary nineteenth-century pathologist who laid the foundation for our modern understanding of inflammation, the eccentric Russian zoologist who discovered one of the cells central to our immune system, and the dedicated researchers advancing the frontiers of medical and nutritional science today. With fascinating case studies, Ravella reveals how we can reform our relationships with food and our microbiomes to benefit our own health and the planet’s.
Synthesizing medical history, cutting-edge research, and innovative clinical practice, Ravella unveils inflammation as one potential basis for a unifying theory of disease. A paradigm-shifting understanding of one of the most mysterious, buzzed-about topics in medicine and nutrition, A Silent Fire shows us how to live not only long but well.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Hidden inflammation, which once lived in the margins of medical literature, is far from benign, and uncovering it... has been a process as slow and sinuous as the disease itself," writes gastroenterologist Ravella in her impassioned if disjointed debut. She defines inflammation as "our natural protection from harm in the context of immunity," and writes that while the typical American diet—replete with processed foods—fosters an aberrant immune system, eating whole foods (those "closest to their natural state") reduces systemic inflammation and helps fight disease and aging. "The immune system responds poorly to... substances in animal foods," she writes, and the most crucial "anti-inflammatory nutrient" is fiber. Ravella begins her comprehensive history of diet and inflammation in 1845, with a vivid profile of doctor Rudolf Virchow, whose work in hospitals "laid the foundation for our modern understanding of inflammation." She also outlines the work of surgeon John Harvey Kellogg, "one of the first physicians to tell patients that food played an important role in health." But as the book progresses, Ravella's writing gets more textbook-like, riddled with academic jargon and scientific terms. Though Ravella attempts to break up the science with personal anecdotes from her clinical practice, they feel too superficial to stick. This one doesn't quite come together.
