Why You Should Care About the Letter NrF2

Every now and then there will be a headline about how taking a multivitamin can actually be bad for your health or that high dose of this vitamin can be counterproductive.  

On the other end we see all the time how this food or vitamin is an antioxidant.  This supplement ORAC value is the highest ever!  Oxygen radical absorbance capacity.  Does this matter?

Between these two headlines, there is another.  Inflammation is the start of most disease and problems that make you feel less then how you really want to be feeling.  What is inflammation?  

The type of inflammation we are concerned about is not the inflammation that comes to mind.  When you roll your ankle there is some redness, some heat, some pain and some swelling.  This is not what we are taking about.  Para-inflammation is our target.  

""Para-inflammation is an adaptive response of the immune system to low levels of tissue stress (i.e., a low-degree of “danger” stimuli), such as in aging whereby oxidative stress accumulates bit by bit for many decades. The physiological role of para-inflammation is to maintain homeostasis (or re-set the homeostatic threshold of the tissue) and restore tissue functionality."  Medzhitoz 2008.  

In layman's terms, think of para-inflammation as the area between a healthy state and an inflamed state on a time line.  All of us are on this time line in some fashion.  A stress comes along, remember stress can be physical, mental or emotional.   How "healthy" we are determines our response to this stress.  The stress can trigger the para-inflammation into full blown inflammation.  Visualize hot coals that are no longer creating a fire, but stress comes along and blows on them, and boom the coals ignite back up into a full fire.  

Now enter the letters NrF2.  This is the master regulator to protect the cells against stress, to keep them from becoming inflamed.  It is the guardian.  Lets list what NrF2 can do.  Improve cell function, remove toxins, increase mitochondria, eliminates cells beyond repair, protects against cellular stress.  Regulates almost 500 genes!

Addressing the first question of antioxidants.  This old theory was about targeting outside the cell.  It's hard for an antioxidant to have an effect across the cell membrane, gut wall and blood brain barrier.  So it is ineffective for internal cell influence, the cytoplasm.  To target inside the cell we need the NrF2 system.

How do we prime then the NrF2 system?  Phytonutrients.  Plant chemicals.  It only works well if we have a surplus of these.  The best ones studied are: sulforaphane from broccoli sprouts, curcumin from turmeric, resveratrol, carnosol from rosemary , Ginkgo extract, polyphenols from green tea and sulphur from garlic.  

The old way was to take a lot of one vitamin or a supplement that has a high ORAC value to target free radicals outside the cell.  One molecule of vitamin C can in theory grab one free radical, one molecule of superoxide dismutase grabs one billion!  There lies the difference.  Antioxidents are outside the cell.  Priming the NrF2 system gets to the inside cell to get enzymatic activity going.  Which can be constantly renewed.  

Enough phyochemicals can keep the NrF2 pathway primed.  It can block the stress of life from taking our bodies from para-inflamed to inflamed and help keep us on other end of the homeostasis that we call healthy and feeling good.  

I am going to link a recipe for Turmeric Chicken with Garlic and Broccoli.  Now you know what getting these phytonutrients can do
for your body, it is always easier to eat a little better.  

PS.  NrF2 stands for nuclear factor erythroid 2–related factor 2