My Inflammation Was in the ‘Normal’ Range. My GP Said That Wasn’t the Same as Optimal

“My Inflammation Was in the ‘Normal’ Range. My GP Said That Wasn’t the Same as Optimal.”

My GP told me my inflammation was fine. Normal range. Nothing to worry about. I believed him for years — until I found out that normal and optimal are two completely different things, and what I did about it changed more than just one blood test result.

Because “normal” covers a lot of ground. It means you haven’t crossed a threshold. It doesn’t mean you’re where you want to be. And when I started understanding what chronic inflammation was actually doing in my body — quietly, over years — I realised I’d been given permission to stay somewhere I shouldn’t have been staying.

I’m Neil. I’ve been tracking my NHS blood results since 2012 — data going back to 2012, Recorded in NHS bloods throughout. In the next fourteen minutes I’ll show you what inflammation actually looks like in a long-term dataset, what my gut health markers told me about where it was coming from, and what happened to both when I spent eighteen months deliberately fixing the inputs. And if your GP has ever told you something is fine without explaining what fine actually means, this video is worth your time.

Three things. First: what the inflammation marker actually measures — and why being in the normal range told me almost nothing useful about whether I was improving or declining. Second: the gut health number that came back in the same blood test, and what it confirmed about the connection between what I was eating and what was happening in my blood. Third: what I changed, what I tracked, and what the data showed over the following three months. We’ll start not with a blood test — but with a question my GP had never actually asked me.

THE SCIENCE

The question my GP never asked was this: what’s causing it?

Not is it high. Not does it need medication. What is actually driving the number. Because CRP — C-reactive protein, which is the inflammation marker you’ll see on a standard NHS blood panel — is a signal, not a cause. It tells you fire is somewhere in the building. It doesn’t tell you where the fire started or what’s feeding it.

And for years, I didn’t know either. The number sat in the low end of normal. GP said fine. I said fine. Neither of us looked at what was upstream of it.

Will Bulsiewicz is a gastroenterologist — gut specialist, NYT bestselling author, ZOE collaborator. His framing changed how I thought about this entirely. He says the gut microbiome isn’t just connected to the immune system. It IS the first line of immune defence. The immune system is actually the third line. First: your gut microbes. Second: the gut lining. Third: the immune system itself. (Expert Insights Row 864)

So if you’re asking why inflammation exists, and you haven’t looked at what’s happening in the gut first — you’ve skipped lines one and two entirely.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Think of your gut lining as the cellar door of a pub. (ANA-020) Below the cellar: your intestines, breaking down food, sorting what’s useful. Above it: the bar, your bloodstream, where nutrients arrive properly processed, in clean glasses, ready to use.

When that cellar door is intact, only the right things come through. But when the lining gets damaged — from ultra-processed food, seed oils, chronic stress, repeated antibiotic use — gaps form. And now things are coming through that shouldn’t. Undigested food particles crossing into the bloodstream. Bacterial fragments getting upstairs. The bouncer — your immune system — goes absolutely mental trying to deal with it. Mounting a response to everything. Inflammation everywhere, persistent, low-level, and almost completely invisible on a blood test until it’s been going on for years.

That’s not a dramatic sudden event. That’s a door that’s been quietly rotting.

Tim Spector’s team — including a landmark Stanford RCT — took this further and tested what happens when you fix the inputs. (Expert Insights Row 1170) Thirty-six participants. Two groups: one eating five daily portions of fermented foods, one eating a high-fibre diet. Six weeks. The fermented food group showed a significant decrease in nineteen inflammatory proteins — including interleukin-6, which is one of the key markers in systemic inflammation. Not a modest dip. A measurable immune system shift. First human study to clearly demonstrate this effect.

The high-fibre group? Useful. But not the same response.

Now think about your gut microbiome like The Friday Night Pub. (ANA-016) You want regulars from all walks of life — builders, teachers, pensioners, students, people who’ve been coming for decades. That diversity is what makes the pub resilient. If the students leave town — one bacterial strain dies off — the pub doesn’t collapse because there are still builders and pensioners holding things together.

Monoculture gut is a student-only pub. Term ends, everyone goes home, landlord goes bust.

Western diets have been running student-only pubs for thirty years. Ultra-processed food feeds a narrow group of bacterial strains — the ones that thrive on sugar, refined carbs, and additives. The rest of the regulars gradually stop coming. Diversity collapses. Resilience goes with it. The immune system, now working off a depleted first line of defence, starts over-responding to things it shouldn’t.

That’s chronic low-level inflammation. And it’s linked to virtually every common disease — from depression to type 2 diabetes, from arthritis to cardiovascular disease to certain cancers. (Expert Insights Row 1179, Tim Spector)

Why it matters — and this is worth being clear about — is that this mechanism doesn’t switch on at a diagnosis. It builds over years. Gut diversity declining quietly. Barrier integrity gradually weakening. CRP drifting upward but staying in range. Someone in their late thirties or forties might be running this process for a decade before a GP flags anything. The mechanism is the same whether you’ve had a diagnosis or not.

One more downstream effect worth naming. (ANA-018) There’s a thick cable running from your gut to your brain — the vagus nerve. Your gut sends more signals up to your brain than your brain sends down. Around ninety percent of serotonin — the mood regulator — is made in your gut, not your brain. So when the gut’s inflamed, when the pub is half-empty, when the cellar door is leaking — the factory floor is producing less of everything the boardroom needs. Energy, mood, focus, appetite regulation. It all runs on what the gut produces. Fix the factory, and you’re not just fixing a blood test number.

The common misconception worth addressing here is that inflammation is always something you can feel. It isn’t. Chronic low-level inflammation — the kind that sits in the lower half of normal on a blood test — doesn’t usually announce itself with pain or swelling. It runs silently. Fatigue that doesn’t shift. Joints that feel a bit older than they should. A mood that’s harder to lift than it used to be. Digestion that’s functional but never quite right. These aren’t dramatic symptoms. They’re background noise. And most people, reasonably, attribute them to ageing.

They’re not ageing. They’re inputs.

MY EXPERIENCE

I want to tell you about a decision I made about ten days after finishing a long fast.

I’d just come off an extended water fast — January 2025. Before it, I’d set myself a specific goal: the refeed wasn’t just going to be about food. It was going to be about deliberately rebuilding my microbiome. I’d read the Spector research. I understood the gut-inflammation connection in theory. I wanted to test it in practice, against my own numbers. (WMTWL-MOM-011)

So within ten days of refeeding, I’d made twenty new fermented food recipes. Twenty. Kimchi. Sauerkraut variations. Kefir. Different ferments with different bacterial profiles. Some were ready that week, some needed another week. That first taste — slightly sour, tangy, alive in a way that mass-produced food isn’t — it felt like I was doing something right. Digestion stayed calm throughout. That surprised me a bit, given how cautiously I normally approach refeeds. (WMTWL-MOM-090)

The idea behind all of it was microbiome diversity. Twenty different fermented foods means twenty different bacterial strain profiles arriving in the gut in a concentrated window. Not just quantity — variety. Tim Spector’s Friday Night Pub needed rebuilding from a student-only establishment into something with a proper crowd.

And alongside that, I changed how I was getting plant diversity in day-to-day. Here’s the practical thing I found: you can hit fifteen different plant points in a single bowl of soup before you’ve even started your eating window. Thirty plants a week sounds ambitious until you realise that herbs count, spices count, different-coloured vegetables count, pulses count. A pot of soup — leeks, carrots, celery, onion, garlic, lentils, three different herbs, a tin of tomatoes, black pepper — that’s ten right there. Make it properly and you’re at twelve or fourteen. Fifteen before noon is genuinely achievable, and it completely changes your relationship with the thirty-plant target.

That was the protocol. Fermented foods daily. Diversity through soup as the primary delivery mechanism. And reduced UPF — which, if you want to stop pouring acid on the cellar door, is probably the most important single thing.

The blood test came back on the 8th of January 2025. (WMTWL-EVID-103)

CRP: 6.2 milligrams per litre on the previous test. Down to 1.0 on this one. That’s an 84% reduction.

Calprotectin — a gut-specific inflammation marker — came back at under 5. Normal upper limit is 10. It wasn’t just in range. It was near-zero.

ALT, which is the liver enzyme I’d watched drift elevated for a while — 69 back in December 2023, came down to 29 in January 2025, then 23 in April 2025.

Three markers. All pointing in the same direction. Not a single one of them adjusted by medication.

I’ll be honest about what I don’t know. I can’t isolate which part of the protocol drove which result. The fasting, the fermented foods, the plant diversity, the reduction in UPF — they were all running simultaneously. What I can say is that the mechanism Tim Spector describes in the research is exactly what I saw in my data. Fix the inputs. Rebuild the pub. The blood tests follow.

The timeline is worth being realistic about. January 2025 was roughly thirteen months after I started the full protocol — December 2023. The CRP reading I’m comparing it to was from the same period. It didn’t shift in three weeks. It shifted over more than a year of consistent inputs, with the extended fast and microbiome rebuild acting as what felt like an accelerant in the final phase.

What the mechanism I tracked in my data suggests — and this isn’t unique to my situation — is that the gut-inflammation connection runs before symptoms appear and before numbers get flagged. My CRP was in normal range for years while this process was presumably running. The interesting thing isn’t the number at the end. It’s how early in the process it was already happening.

If you’re at the stage where you’re asking questions before things get serious — this is what this channel is for. Real data, real GP conversations, properly documented. Subscribe if you want to follow it properly.

WHAT TO DO

Right. Three things you can actually start this week.

First: the soup strategy for plant diversity.

Forget counting thirty plants across a whole week as some abstract target. Start with one bowl of soup. Pick eight to ten different vegetables, add a couple of pulses, throw in three or four different herbs and spices. You’ve got twelve or thirteen plant points in a single meal. Do that once a day — before your eating window, as your first proper food, or as lunch — and you’re hitting fifteen different plants before you’ve had dinner. Thirty in a week becomes almost automatic. This isn’t a recipe prescription. It’s a framework. Whatever veg you’ve got, whatever’s in the cupboard. The diversity is the point, not the specific ingredients.

Second: one fermented food, every day.

Not a supplement. Not a pill. Shop-bought sauerkraut, kefir, kimchi, live yogurt — one portion, daily. The ZOE study used shop-bought fermented foods and got a measurable immune response in three weeks. This doesn’t need to be expensive or complicated. A tablespoon of sauerkraut alongside your soup. A small glass of kefir. That’s it. Daily consistency matters more than the specific type.

Third: track it, then test it.

If you’ve had a CRP reading before — even one from a general blood panel — you have a baseline. Tell your GP you want to understand the trend, not just the single number. Ask for a repeat at three months if you’re actively changing your diet. Calprotectin can also be requested if you have any digestive concerns — it’s a more specific gut inflammation marker and it came back in my NHS panel as part of a broader review.

The timeline expectation: three weeks for early immune shifts, according to the Stanford data. Three months for meaningful blood test comparison. Six to twelve months for sustained microbiome rebuilding. This isn’t a detox. It’s a long-term input change.

Safety notes. If you’re on immunosuppressant medication, speak to your GP before significantly increasing fermented food intake — there are interactions worth checking. If you’ve had gut surgery, inflammatory bowel disease, or a diagnosed condition like Crohn’s, the general guidance here doesn’t apply — your situation is specific and needs specific advice. Fermented foods are safe for most people, but start gradually if your gut is currently irritable. Introduce one new food at a time. Your gut will tell you if you’ve moved too fast.

CTA + SAFETY

I’ve built a gut health tracker — logs your daily plant count, fermented food intake, and connects it to your fasting windows so you can see the whole picture in one place. Link’s in the description, it’s free.

And if you want to go deeper on exactly how I approached the 18-month protocol — the fasting structure, the specific fermented recipes, the blood test timeline — that’s all in the 7-Day Fasting Blueprint, also linked below.

Educational content only, not medical advice. Speak to your GP before changing your fasting pattern, diet, or medication — especially if you’re on immunosuppressants, diabetes medication, or blood pressure medication. Everything I’ve shared here was self-monitored with regular GP reviews throughout.

See you Friday.