Tolerate It: What a Newborn Baby Can Teach You About Inflammation

Before you read, press play on “tolerate it” by Taylor Swift. Listen while you read. Your brain files a lesson next to a song far better than it files a lesson alone, and by the end of this page the song will be the reminder.

A new baby is born, takes a first breath, and everything changes at once.

Nine months in the womb, the baby lived in a warm, wet, protected, low-oxygen environment where the immune system was told to stay quiet. It had to. If the baby’s immune system attacked the mother, or the mother’s attacked the baby, the pregnancy would end. So for nine months the whole system ran on one instruction: tolerate it. (Yes, like the Taylor Swift song.)

Then birth. The lungs fill with air and oxygen floods in. The gut, which had met only a small, mother-selected set of microbes in the womb, gets flooded by trillions of them in the first few days. The skin, the nose, the throat, the intestines all meet the outside world for the first time. And the immune system has to flip from “tolerate it” to “fight it” in a matter of hours.

It does that with inflammation. A newborn’s immune system is young, it is not precise, and it fires easily. It runs on cytokines, the chemical alarm signals that tell the body to swell, heat up, and fight. That is why babies spike a fever with every cold. That is why teething makes them miserable. That is why colic, eczema, and wheezing all show up in the first couple of years. The alarm works fine. What is missing is the off switch.

Simply stated: a baby is a body full of inflammation looking for a way to calm down.

And the way to calm down comes from the mother.

Milk is a message, not just a meal

We think of breast milk as food. It is food, but that is the least interesting thing about it. Breast milk is a signal. It carries the mother’s immune protection, her antibodies, and a set of fat-based messenger molecules that tell the baby’s body how to behave.

One family of those messengers is the endocannabinoids. You have heard the word cannabinoid because of cannabis, but your body makes its own, and they were in your body long before any plant. They are made from fats. One of them, called 2-AG, is the reason a newborn knows how to nurse. Block that signal in a newborn mouse and the pup will not feed. Two more, called OEA and SEA, are fullness signals, and the amount of them in a mother’s milk tracks with how fast her baby gains weight.

And one of them is PEA. Palmitoylethanolamide.

PEA is made from palmitic acid, the most common saturated fat in milk. And PEA has one job: it turns inflammation down.

The mother’s body makes it and puts it in her milk fat, and the baby drinks it many times a day, at exactly the age when inflammation could do the most damage. The baby’s brain is being wired. The baby’s gut is learning what is food and what is a threat. Too much inflammation during that window leaves marks that last a lifetime. So the mother hands the baby the off switch until the baby can make enough of its own.

Simply stated: the mother feeds her baby anti-inflammation, as fat.

How PEA turns inflammation down

Every cell in the body makes PEA. It is not stored. It is made on demand, at the site of injury, in proportion to the injury, and then broken down once the job is done. It is a local, on-the-spot lipid signal.

Rita Levi-Montalcini, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering nerve growth factor, named this class of molecule the ALIAmides, Autacoid Local Injury Antagonists, in 1993, after showing that PEA reins in mast cells, the same cells that the nerve growth factor she discovered switches on. That is the correct frame for PEA. It is the molecule the body deploys to keep an inflammatory response proportional to the insult. It is the body’s built-in way of saying, “Enough. That is proportional. Stand down.”

It does that in three places.

First, PEA calms mast cells.

Mast cells are the immune cells packed with histamine that sit around every nerve and every blood vessel in your body. When they burst, they release histamine and a chemical called nerve growth factor, and nerve growth factor makes nearby nerves more sensitive to pain. PEA keeps mast cells from bursting.

Second, PEA calms microglia.

Microglia are the immune cells inside the brain and spinal cord. When they stay switched on for too long, they change the wiring so that the spinal cord amplifies pain signals. That is how pain becomes chronic after an injury has healed. PEA switches microglia back to their quiet, housekeeping state.

Third, and this is the part that matters most, PEA flips a switch inside the cell called PPARalpha.

PPAR-alpha is the master switch that tells your mitochondria, the energy factories in every cell, to burn fat for fuel.

When that switch is on, the mitochondria make clean energy. And the same switch, when it is on, shuts off the genes that make inflammatory cytokines.

Read that again. One switch. Energy on, inflammation off. They are not two separate things. They are the same event.

Simply stated: PEA tells the cell it has fuel, and a cell that knows it has fuel stops sounding the alarm.

The adult in pain is the newborn all over again

Now think about anyone you know with chronic pain. Back pain that never left. Sciatica. Fibromyalgia. Endometriosis. Migraines. Nerve pain. Arthritis. Pain that lingered after a virus. The names are different, but if you look inside the body, the picture is the same in every one of them.

Mast cells firing on a hair trigger. Microglia stuck in the on position. Cytokines that never reset. Nerves that have been retuned to scream at ordinary signals.

That is the newborn’s immune system. High inflammation, no off switch. The only difference is that nobody is feeding the adult the resolution signal anymore.

Adults make their own PEA, but in chronic inflammation the enzymes that break it down ramp up, and the supply cannot keep pace with the demand. The brake wears thin right where you need it most. And most adults in pain are also running on the wrong fuel. Their cells are burning sugar under stress instead of fat, the mitochondria are leaking, and the PPAR-alpha switch is barely on. Low energy and high inflammation are the same problem seen from two sides.

PEA itself has been studied for this. A 2023 review pooled eleven double-blind, placebo controlled trials, 774 people, across nerve pain, joint pain, pelvic pain, and gut pain, and found a significant reduction in pain scores with PEA at 300 to 1200 mg a day over eight to twelve weeks, with side effects that were rare and mild. A 2024 analysis of nine studies found that the second month of use lowered pain scores further than the first month alone. PEA has even been studied in children, for migraine, because the mechanism that keeps a baby’s inflammation in check is the same mechanism at any age.

Across those studies, PEA was well tolerated and did not interact with the pain medications people were already taking. It is a fat molecule your body already makes and every breastfed human has already had.

Simply stated: chronic pain is inflammation without an off switch, and PEA is the off switch you were born receiving.

What to do with this

If you live with ongoing inflammation, the picture inside your body is likely the newborn’s picture: a strong alarm and a worn-down off switch, sitting on top of a fat-burning switch that is turned down. The way to support that system is the way the mother does it. PEA in a micronized form, so it absorbs, taken with a meal that has fat in it, every day, for at least eight weeks. It works by changing which genes are turned on, and that takes weeks, not days.

That is why I built PEA Comfort Complex at GeneticProtocol.com. It delivers micronized PEA at a clinically studied dose, formulated to support the PPAR-alpha switch, healthy mast cell balance, and healthy endocannabinoid tone, for a healthy inflammatory response and everyday comfort.* It fits in the same program as morning sunlight, a fat-adapted metabolism, and leptin repair, because it works through the same switch all of those work through. The molecule and the lifestyle are the same instruction to the cell: you have energy, stand down.

A mother feeds her baby anti-inflammation as fat. You can feed yourself the same signal.

You were built to tolerate it for nine months. Not for a lifetime. The next time the song comes on, remember the switch.

Energy over inflammation is the basic equation.

© Courtney Hunt, MD, 2026

*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This article is for educational purposes and does not constitute medical advice; talk with your own physician before starting any supplement, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, or taking medication. Dr. Hunt is the founder of Genetic Protocol, which sells PEA Comfort Complex.

References

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2. Lang-Illievich K, et al. Palmitoylethanolamide in the Treatment of Chronic Pain: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Double-Blind Randomized Controlled Trials. Nutrients. 2023;15(6):1350.

3. Schweiger V, et al. Extended Treatment with Micron-Size Oral Palmitoylethanolamide (PEA) in Chronic Pain: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Nutrients. 2024;16(11):1653.

4. Bruun S, et al. Satiety Factors OEA, SEA, and PEA in Mother’s Milk Are Strongly Associated with Infant Weight at Four Months of Age — Odense Child Cohort. Nutrients. 2018;10(11):1747.

5. Human Milk Endocannabinoid Levels as a Function of Obesity and Diurnal Rhythm. Nutrients. 2021;13(7):2297.

6. Investigating Properties of Palmitoylethanolamide in Physiology and Disease: Far Beyond an Anti-Inflammatory Shield. Diseases. 2026;14(2):52.

7. Skaper SD, Facci L, Giusti P. Glia and mast cells as targets for palmitoylethanolamide. Mol Neurobiol. 2013;48(2):340-52.

8. Fride E, et al. Critical role of the endogenous cannabinoid system in mouse pup suckling and growth. Eur J Pharmacol. 2001;419(2-3):207-14.

9. Coull JA, et al. BDNF from microglia causes the shift in neuronal anion gradient underlying neuropathic pain. Nature. 2005;438:1017-21.