Ultra-Processed Foods & Inflammation — What Science Says | 2026
Ultra-Processed Foods & Inflammation — What Science Says | 2026 There's a phrase that keeps surfacing in metabolic health research with increasing regularity, spoken quietly at first in academic literature and now appearing in mainstream health conversation with the kind of frequency that suggests it's moved from hypothesis to something closer to established signal: chronic low-grade inflammation. Not the acute inflammation everyone recognizes — the hot, swollen ankle, the fever that arrives with an infection, the red welt around a cut. Those are visible, purposeful, temporary. The body mobilizing its defenses in response to a specific threat and then standing down when the job is done. Chronic low-grade inflammation is different in almost every dimension. It's invisible from the outside. It doesn't announce itself with pain or obvious symptoms. It sits in the background of the metabolic system like a car engine idling at slightly too high an RPM — not stall...