Episode #119: The Root Cause of Inflammation

In the last episode, we dove into the insulin effect and how that root cause is so impactful and such a big part of PCOS, but there are so many myths around it. And in this episode, we’re going to get into the next root cause as we move up the pyramid of PCOS root causes and talk about inflammation. So without further ado, let’s dive in. 

You’re listening to the PCOS Repair podcast, where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek, and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset, and our environment, and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at the root cause.

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair podcast, where today we are continuing our mini-series about hormones and the root causes of PCOS and their connection to how you experience things in your environment and your Lifestyle and how all of these things are very intertwined to create the symptoms that you are experiencing on the surface. As we dive into today’s topic of inflammation, I just want to recap a few things. One, if you haven’t listened to the last couple of episodes, make sure you do so because they all build off of each other. Then secondly, this terminology is all my own. Yes, it has words that you hear in other medical office, maybe that you’ve googled, that you’ve heard on social media when it comes to PCOS but when I talk about the root causes, these are my a specific terminology because the way I group things is a little different than other people. It’s because we’re working in a pyramid of hierarchy of where do we really need to address first and how do we move things up, and then also recognizing where your body is struggling the most in that ascension, as well as really truly naming what the problem is.

We saw this last week if you review last week’s episode in the Insulin Effect. It really emphasizes the fact that we’re not talking about insulin resistance. Your PCOS doesn’t show up as soon as you develop insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes. The actual production of insulin on a routine dietary meal or snack basis is enough to elevate those androgens, especially if you are consistently over time having meals that are highly elevating that insulin. The genetic component that comes into that, and also we’ll talk about this in regards to inflammation, is that women with PCOS have genetics that just make them more sensitive. For someone else who could just wake up in the morning and eat a bunch of fruit without anything else, for someone with PCOS who’s highly sensitive. Again, our genetics are going to vary. Some people are going to be really sensitive, some people are going to be more sensitive than someone who does not have PCOS but that someone who’s really, really sensitive, a handful of grapes in the morning be enough to shoot their blood sugar way up to 175. I’ve had that happen to me before. You’re like, Oh, my gosh, I only eat 10 grapes.

Now, if I eat that after exercise, if I eat that in other context of my day, it may not have that drastic effect but on this particular morning, I was wearing my continuous glucose monitor, so I was able to see that just a small handful of grapes while I was getting ready for something for the schools for my kids. It was like I was just washing and doing grapes and gave to my kids for breakfast. I also ate some, hadn’t eaten anything else. So empty stomach, handful of grapes, shot my glucose up. You can only imagine what that would do to my insulin. My insulin is going to mirror what my glucose does. If my glucose all of a sudden goes really high, my insulin is going to go, Oh, my goodness, we have work to do. It’s going to secrete a lot of insulin into your system, or your pancreas is going to secrete a lot of insulin into your system. If you’re constantly doing that, your ovaries are being constantly bombarded with the signal of insulin to produce more androgens. This is why, and I go back to this over and over, because this is a concept that most women with PCOS are very confused by, thanks to the terminology we use in medicine and how we diagnose things and how we have a spectrum disease that we don’t call a problem until it reaches a certain point.

Well, it’s been growing in problem the entire way. We’ve just been ignoring it until it reaches a certain marker, and now we call it a problem. This is why I refer to things as the insulin effect but again, long story to try to illustrate. This is my terminology. It’s not necessarily what you’re going to find in scientific journals or textbooks. Doctors not going to know what you’re talking about when you use my terminology, but it’s all based in the same science and pathophysiology that I learned in physician assistance school and the doctors learned in medical school, but it’s just different ways of labeling things for our own conversation purposes here on the podcast and in my courses and when I work with women. What we’re actually talking about is a lot more clear that we’re just talking about insulin in general. We’re not talking about whether or not you’ve reached a specific point on a spectrum of disease. The other thing that I want to point out is the pyramid. We’ve been reviewing the pyramid of root causes. That’s what this mini-series is all about. If you’ve missed any of the previous last now three episodes, go back and listen to those because this all builds off of each other.

In the pyramid of root causes, this is what’s going on in all humans, probably animals, but I’m not as familiar with animal physiology and anatomy, but for humans, we all have this pyramid of hormonal response. When it comes to PCOS, we see this happen at a younger age, at an age where other people are not struggling with weight, where other women are not struggling with fertility issues, we’re seeing this become more of a problem, but this is the same reason why, as a culture, we tend to be heavier in this generation than in previous generations. It’s the same pyramid of hormones, but when it comes to PCOS, our genetics make us even more sensitive to our environment, so we see this in heightened response. At the base of our pyramid, we have cortisol. As we move up the pyramid, we have insulin. As we move up the pyramid further, we have inflammation, which is what we’re going to be talking about today. The reason the inflammation is a little higher in the pyramid is two things. One, it be caused by secondary medical conditions, we’ll talk about that. Then also, it can actually be a result of what’s happening below it.

As we start to see high levels of stress, if those high levels of stress are chronically, consistently present in our life, our body is frequently perceiving stress and again, we talk about what constitutes as perceiving stress and what constitutes as stress in two episodes ago. So make sure you go listen to that one, but as we chronically dealing with that or chronically dealing with high levels of insulin circulating our system, again, not insulin resistance, not diabetes, but just high levels of constant insulin, those states create inflammation. Stress creates inflammation, High insulin response or high exposure to insulin because it’s in our system a lot creates inflammation. Excess body weight creates inflammation. PCOS, just the baseline of the genetics of PCOS, creates a higher tendency towards inflammation. Then you can add into that our environment. We can add into that other medical conditions. We’ll come back to environment in a second, but other medical conditions that we may be dealing with can be something like asthma, allergies, skin disorders such as psoriasis. We can have autoimmune disorders such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. There’s all sorts of inflammatory disorders. When we combine those, they’re not mutually exclusive, and they’re also not necessarily always found together but as humans, we get to have the whole array of how things are basically aligned in our genetics. We can end up with PCOS and an autoimmune disorder, and they can be completely separate, but at the same time, play off each other.

When it comes to chronic disorders, the more that we can manage those to reduce their inflammatory response. If we keep ourselves less inflamed in regards to those, typically our PCOS improves to some degree as well. Although, remember, they are not connected. Having asthma and having PCOS is not connected, but if we have uncontrolled asthma and we’re having increased constant pulmonary, so lung inflammation and chronically coughing or having uncontrolled asthma, That is going to increase our base inflammation. That base inflammation chronically is going to worsen our PCOS. Typically, the other direction is less true, although being overweight because our PCOS is uncontrolled and unmanaged can worsen our asthma. There is some crossover the other way as well in certain situations. But typically, if we can manage our inflammatory disorders such as eczema, psoriasis, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, all of those, we typically start to see that our PCOS is a little less vengeful. It doesn’t go away because there may be other components. There may be deeper root causes that may be going on. There may be other things going on as well, but we see that it fights us less. Our body will fight us less if our inflammation is under control.

Then we have other forms of inflammation. These are ones that we invite in, oftentimes unknowingly, through our lifestyle. We already talked about basically dietary can have a huge insulin effect. Our stress and our sleep habits can have a huge cortisol effect. Other things, we can bring in toxins that are inflammatory and disrupting our endocrine system. We can have just other foods that are bringing in a lot of toxic or inflammatory properties that we’re eating besides just raising our insulin. We can have pollutants or poor water sources, poor air sources, etc. You can see there’s lots of things that we can be coming in contact with in our environment, and that’s by no means an exhaustive list, but gives you some of the main categories that can be bringing inflammation into our bodies.

That leads to the question of why is inflammation a problem for PCOS? What is going on where we have to be concerned about inflammation when it comes to PCOS. Basically, when you have a small amount of inflammation in the body, so think acute injury, you cut your finger or you got a cat scratch on your finger and it swells up because you’ve got maybe some microbes in there and there’s this lesion, and your body is trying to protect the rest of your body from being exposed to whatever is going on in this injury. You’ll find that there’s some local redness and irritation. It can get pretty extreme sometimes. Maybe it gets so extreme that it starts to get infected, which is why there’s inflammation there actually. The infection is a secondary response that’s happening, and the inflammation is occurring to help protect your body from being as vulnerable to that point of infection there, but the inflammation is going to clear on its own. What we’re talking about here in this episode is chronic inflammation. You can do lab markers to show chronic inflammation. You can feel really tired, lethargic, weighed down. You can feel puffy. You can feel just like that brain fog can be many, many things.

It can be related to stress and blood sugar as well, but it can also be related to inflammation. If you take the root cause quiz, it helps to differentiate what symptoms are meaning what and gives a little bit bigger picture on that. I will link that in the show notes as well. But when you have this moderate to high level of constant or what we say chronic inflammation in the body, it is working on our ovaries directly to produce more androgens. So similar to insulin, having high levels of inflammation tell our body to produce more androgens, leading to more symptoms of PCOS. So you can see where if you were having stress and inflammation and eating in a way that was creating higher levels of insulin, you’re going to be hitting your ovaries and things from all sides to just be pumping out those androgens. As we start to calm the one that is the most prominent, so that’s what we’re looking at when we take the PCOS root cause quiz is that while, yes, You may have every single one of these root causes in some degree, which is the one that’s contributing the most to that androgen production?

Let’s focus on that one first. There’s a vicious cycle goes between them all. Maybe as we address the one that is the biggest problem, sometimes the other ones ease up significantly, even just with addressing that one. Otherwise, we can go in and do an additional little bit of assistance in our lifestyle to help the other two or other one, if the other as needed. What we see is that we start to feel so much better, which by feeling even just a little bit better, allows us to give that much more care and nurturing to our body to, again, improve our symptoms and to reduce those negative effects. That’s how inflammation works on the body. Having a constant low, medium, or high grade of chronic inflammation is in the same degree. So mild, moderate, or a heavy amount of inflammation is going to tell those ovaries to produce a small, medium, or larger amount of excess androgens. Just to recap, androgens basically means testosterone. We’re raising our testosterone level, which, as we talked about in the previous episode, raises your LH, which messes with your cycle, messes with your other hormones, messes with symptoms. Having high testosterone or LH levels that are off are the reasons for things like acne, Loss of hair on the body, loss of hair on the head, period problems, fatigue, energy problems, sleep problems, and the list of PCOS symptoms goes on and on.

As we wrap up today’s episode, again, go back and listen to the previous episodes. If you have missed those, they all help paint the picture of what’s going on here in your root causes. If you have found this mini-series helpful, please be sure to hit the subscribe button because we have another episode coming next week where we’re going to be talking about a higher level of root cause that is a little bit less clear. I think that a lot of people, especially when they’re younger, are dealing with when things haven’t gotten so far out of hand in their deeper root causes. What is going on there, how to think about it, how to understand it, and how to get a better glimpse and understanding of what’s happening in your body, specifically. Be sure to hit the subscribe button so that you’re notified when that episode becomes available. Until next time, if you have any questions, I’d love to connect with you over on Instagram. You can find me @Nourishedtohealthy. Again, I look forward to hearing from you over there. Until next time. Bye for now.