Inflammation has a bad reputation. It gets blamed for nearly everything, and the market is full of products promising to “fight” it. But the truth is more interesting, and getting it right changes how you think about your health: inflammation isn’t inherently bad. It’s one of your body’s most essential protective responses. The problem isn’t inflammation itself — it’s inflammation that doesn’t switch off.
When you get an infection or an injury, your body mounts an acute inflammatory response: immune cells rush in, clear the threat, and clean up the damage. Then — and this is the crucial part — the response is supposed to resolve. The inflammation winds down, and repair takes over. Acute inflammation that resolves is health working exactly as designed.
Redox signaling is woven through this whole process. Research shows the reactive signaling molecules your cells produce help control both the initiation and the resolution of inflammation — they’re part of how immune cells coordinate the response and, critically, part of how the body knows when to shut it down. The signaling isn’t just involved in starting inflammation; it’s involved in ending it.
Chronic inflammation — the kind linked to so many age-related problems — is largely a failure of resolution. The response doesn’t switch off, the redox balance in the tissue stays disrupted, and a protective process becomes a damaging one. Researchers increasingly describe chronic inflammation as a redox-balance problem at its core.
This reframes what “support” should mean. The goal isn’t to blunt all inflammation — you need the acute response. The goal is a signaling system that can coordinate both the response and its resolution. That’s why I focus on supporting redox signaling rather than simply suppressing inflammation across the board.
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