 To recap, until recently, the thinking was that the reason that a single meal of animal foods causes inflammation is because animal foods have saturated fat. The saturated fat causes the breakdown of our intestinal barrier, which could cause a fat-induced translocation of small quantities of bacterial endotoxin from the gut into our bloodstreams, which triggers the acute inflammatory reaction associated with egg and sausage McMuffin consumption. So, to date, it's been widely considered that the source of the circulating endotoxin is the resident intestinal microflora. Wait a second, though. What's wrong with this picture? Look at the time scale. The rise of inflammation starts within just a few hours of ingestion. But where's our bacteria? None are small intestine, but 20 feet farther down in our large intestine. It could take like 8 hours for a McMuffin to get down there. So what's going on? Where else could bacterial endotoxins be coming from if not the bacteria in our gut? Maybe the endotoxins are coming from the food itself. This is the new study that changed everything. For the first time ever, they aimed to determine whether common foodstuffs may contain appreciable quantities of endotoxin. 40 extracts were therefore prepared from 27 foodstuffs common to the Western diet, and the capacity of each to induce the secretion of inflammatory signals from human white blood cells was measured. They found whopping doses of endotoxin equivalents in some pork, poultry, dairy, and chocolate products. What's with the chocolate? Well the first step in chocolate making is bacterial fermentation of the beans. But thankfully the phytonutrients, the plant-based nutrients, outweigh the effect of the bacteria and decrease inflammation overall. The same cannot be said for animal products, though.