Metainflammation, Inflammaging, and Weight Loss

Key Takeaways

• Metaflammation means chronic inflammation driven by metabolic dysfunction and excess body fat.

• Inflammaging means long-term inflammation that damages organs and accelerates disease.

• Fat tissue is biologically active, promoting inflammation that worsens insulin resistance and heart health.

• These processes create a cycle that makes weight loss significantly more difficult.

• Targeted approaches (not NSAIDs) are needed to address the root causes of metabolic inflammation.

• Low dose naltrexone (LDN) may help by modulating inflammation and reducing food-related reward pathways.

Understanding Metainflammation

This is a combination of two words that belong together when a person is carrying around extra adipose tissue (also known as fat). To put it simply, metaflammation describes the inflammation that occurs due to your metabolism being out of whack. This can and usually does involve fat and insulin, but it can often also involve adrenal hormones such as cortisol and sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone. 

It’s important to note that fat is not just an inert blob of substance. In fact, it stimulates the immune and inflammatory system. By speaking through chemical messengers, it ultimately results in inflammation. This leads to insulin resistance and cardiovascular dysfunction, both of which can make weight loss noticeably harder.

So what do you do about metainflammation? Is this the type of thing you should treat with ibuprofen? Absolutely not. We need a precision medicine approach, and ibuprofen does not work like that. But low dose naltrexone (LDN) can! We’ll get to that below. First, let’s define our second new term.

Understanding Inflammation

This one is a little easier to discuss, because now you understand metaflammation. Let’s use both our new words in a sentence. Metaflammation causes type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease through its inflammaging effects on the body. In other words, inflammaging is damaging inflammation. 

But isn’t inflammation always damaging? Not at all. In fact, when it’s acute and well regulated, inflammation can be beneficial, helping the body fight infection, clear damaged cells, and initiate tissue repair. Inflammaging refers to the kind of nasty, chronic inflammation that gradually damages things like vascular tissue, your liver, and your pancreas.  

All this might seem a little technical, but it helps reveal how patients often get stuck in a cycle of gaining weight and becoming metainflamed, which leads to excess insulin, which makes it practically impossible to lose the fat causing the metaflammation. 

Now that we’ve described the problem, we can move onto the fun part: solutions.

Addressing Metainflammation and Inflammaging With Medication

It all starts with low dose naltrexone (LDN), but first we have to explain what naltrexone is. At larger doses, naltrexone is what we call an opioid antagonist, or opioid blocker.  Traditionally, it’s been used to block the effects of opioids such as heroin, morphine, or oxycodone. This can come in handy for a very motivated individual wanting to come off opioids, and bravo to them! 

That said, as pharmacology has advanced, we’d discovered the incredible things naltrexone can do at lower doses. Endorphins are the feel good chemicals our brain makes when we do things like exercise or have sex. We also produce those chemicals in response to addictive behaviors (hello, emotional and binge eating). So if we can block that chemical high, we can begin to undo the emotional attachment to foods. 

This is part of the reason we put naltrexone in our weight loss formulation, Crave Away, which also includes a serotonin booster. This product gives us a targeted way to address one of the root causes of weight gain and retention. 

But the potential benefits of LDN don’t stop there.

LDN and Inflammation

Perhaps LDN’s most impressive feat yet is its ability to modulate the immune system’s inflammatory responses. This brings us to another patented product of ours, Quell Caps. 

This formulation contains two tried and true ingredients: phentermine and topiramate. When taken in a specific combination, these ingredients have been clinically proven to result in up to 11% weight loss. You read that right. 

Phentermine helps suppress appetite. And while topiramate’s mechanism for weight loss is less clear, it’s thought to involve both appetite suppression and a feeling of fullness.  

Quell Caps also includes LDN, which reduces inflammatory cytokines or messengers, helping with our old friends, metainflammation and inflammaging.

First Steps

We’ve covered a lot of ground here. If you’re interested in learning more about these products, or in speaking with one of our clinical pharmacists about weight optimization, please don’t hesitate to contact us.