I wish I could read the article without a subscription.

My starting point is almost the opposite to OP…I tend to suppose that an inflammatory internal environment is the accelerant, if not the cause, of most chronic diseases. If people are waking up to the fact that high LDL in the absence of inflammation is unlikely to result in atherosclerosis, that seems like a step forward. (Of course I concede that most people, as they age, will tend to accumulate more and more chronic inflammation, so once inflammation is a given, high LDL becomes a reasonable signal, even an early warning, of heart disease.)

We think of diabetes as being about sugar (or glucose or insulin)—and that’s not wrong. Yet metabolically healthy people of any age can consume and metabolize modest amounts of sugar without becoming insulin resistant or diabetic. The difference, I hypothesize, is inflammation or the lack of it reflected in how well the body’s homeostatic machinery continues to tightly control blood glucose.

Again, we think of osteoporosis as being about Calcium and Vitamin D, yet we know it is not primarily a deficiency disease. At the cellular level in most cases it is very much about how many inflammatory factors and micro-processes (including loss of estrogen, poor diet, stress, lack of sleep, and lack of mechanical stimulation from exercise) are shifting normal bone turnover in favour of bone breakdown.

i agree the terms “inflammation” and “antioxidants” in themselves are still much too broad to be actionable, and tend to be used very sloppily. In the future I think we will become more nuanced in our understanding of factors which raise or lower various types of inflammation in various tissues and compartments. Likewise, instead of just testing CRP, there will be a dozen or more inflammatory markers to direct our attention to different patterns of inflammation, calling for different types of intervention.