[allover]

Pretty inpenetrable studies for a layman. At no point do they really say how "inflammation" is harmful to the average healthy person? You seem to have drawn pretty broad conclusions from these very specific studies, that only demonstrate findings like:

> "In conclusion, macronutrient composition of the diet may differentially alter the postprandial pro-oxidative milieu, with high-carbohydrate meals potentially leading to greater oxidative stress response. However, both meals increased circulating IL6, regardless of the type of nutrient consumed."

I don't see how that translates into a sentence like your:

"Carbohydrates aren't so much you body's preferred fuel".

If you can connect the dots clearly I'd love to see it, but the impression I get is people like yourself and the 'inflammation' crowd are taking these very specific studies and totally distorting their meaning to make broader truths.

[CuriouslyC]

My conclusions aren't from those studies alone, those are just the ones that popped up quickly for a google scholar search. I don't keep an index of all the studies I read so at times it can be hard to find everything that supports a position I've built up over years of scholarly research (not blogs and lay writing).

I tried to connect the dots a bit with some of the biochemistry of why carbohydrates need to be cleared quickly, it can't simplified much past that. What it comes down to is that oxygen atoms make molecules more chemically reactive than other common elements like carbon and nitrogen. This causes "unintended" reactions, which produce molecules the body doesn't know how to handle. These molecules can directly trigger an immune response, or they can be incorporated into other molecules which causes them to malfunction in various ways. Both cases are bad.

It isn't necessarily the inflammation itself that is bad. Rather, it is a sign that something is going wrong with your body. Usually when inflammation is high, either you have something foreign in your body, or your cells are killing themselves for some reason, and immune cells are being activated to "clean up" the debris.