What does an anti-inflammatory diet look like?
“Intervention studies to promote healthy aging need appropriate outcome measures, such as blood-borne biomarkers, which are easily obtainable, cost-effective and widely accepted”. We need blood-borne biomarkers of mortality risk. For example, having higher levels of C-reactive protein in your blood can increase your risk of premature death by 42%. C-reactive protein it is one of the most widely used inflammatory biomarkers to predict mortality, but those with the highest levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), another marker of inflammation, may increase their risk of premature death by 49%. What can we do to download it?
I’ve talked before about foods that can contribute in inflammation, like meat and sugar, versus foods like nuts that don’t. But what about the anti-inflammatory foods that actually moderate that inflammation?
What happens when blueberries are added in a high fat, high glycemic load meal consisting of white potatoes, white bread, ham, cheese and butter? Adding just one cup of blueberries caused a significant drop in IL-6 from this meal, as you can see below and at 1:15 in my video What foods are anti-inflammatory?.
What about raspberries? People were they feed eggs, butter, white potatoes, white flour biscuits and sausage with or without two cups of frozen raspberries mixed with water in a smoothie, compared to giving others the same amount of calories and carbohydrates in the form of a banana. Bananas don’t go well with meat, eggs, dairy and crappy carbs. this meal resulted in a tripling of IL-6 levels within four hours. But by drinking those two cups of raspberries, their bodies were able to hold the line, as you can see below and at 1:45 in my video.
Why did raspberries work but bananas didn’t? Maybe it’s the antioxidants.
Well, antioxidant supplements failed miserably. There was no benefit from antioxidant vitamins and minerals such as vitamins C or E, beta-carotene or selenium. Maybe it’s those special antioxidant pigments, anthocyanins, that give berries those bright red, blue and purple colors? Indeed, dozens of randomized controlled trials have it turned outwhile half a dozen studies together demonstration pomegranates, a fruit full of anthocyanin pigments, can reduce inflammation over time.
What about me summation spices in meals as an approach to alleviate inflammation? Supplementation with grape and turmeric extracts did not affect the inflammatory response to a milkshake. But grant People a teaspoon a day of real turmeric—that is, the whole spice, not pure curcumin supplements—resulted in a significant drop in IL-6 levels.
Garlic powder reduced IL-6 levels as well, starting at about half a teaspoon a day. Ginger powder (grated ginger) had the same results with doses ranging from half a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half.
Of course, another way I mediate the inflammation caused by a Sausage and Egg McMuffin is to not eat it in the first place. What about exactly? eating a plant based diet? To my surprise, the drop in IL-6 did not reach statistical significance. Whenever a dietary intervention doesn’t have the effect you were hoping for, you should always ask, “What exactly was the diet they were actually on?” The study mainly looked at the Mediterranean diet, which certainly has more plants, but did the diets go far enough? For more clarity, we series in the famous New DIETs study by Dr. Turner-McGrievy, where people either continued to eat their fully omnivorous diet or were randomized to follow a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet, a pesco-vegetarian diet, or a semi-vegetarian diet that, for example, limited red meat. So while the vegan might eat red beans and brown rice with diced tomatoes and roasted peppers for dinner, the vegetarian might add some cheese, the vegetarian might add shrimp, and the semi-vegetarian might add some turkey sausage. Below is a more in-depth look at the five eating patterns, which you can also see at 4:01 in my video.
What it happened within two months for their score on the Dietary Inflammation Index? The Dietary Inflammatory Index is a measure of how inflammatory your diet is. Negative scores mean your overall diet is anti-inflammatory, and the lower the better, while positive scores mean your overall diet is in the pro-inflammatory balance, right where the subjects in the study started. That’s no surprise, given that they went on regular diets and our nation is teeming with inflammation-related diseases.
But when the study participants switched to a strictly plant-based diet, their diet changed and became an anti-inflammatory diet. This was the case even if they just cut the meat or all meat except fish. But if they switched mostly to poultry instead or only limited their meat intake, their diet remained inflammatory. You can see the results below or at 4:47 on mine video.
Now, not all plant foods hectare anti-inflammatory. If all you do is increase your intake of less healthy plant-based foods like juice, white bread, white potatoes, soda, and cake, you may end up with even more inflammation. But if you eat a really clean diet of whole plant foods, you take significant reductions in lipoprotein (a)—Lp(a)—that we didn’t even think were possible with diet—as well as drops in LDL cholesterol and even the most dangerous form of LDL cholesterol. Also, almost across the board, you have a drop in markers of inflammation. We’re talking about a 30% drop in C-reactive protein and a 20% drop in IL-6. Thus, perhaps previous studies with plant-based diets were unsuccessful because they were not plant-based enough, with animal products still being substantially consumed. Therefore, completely “eliminating animal products and processed foods…may be a more prudent dietary strategy” to combat inflammation.
Doctor’s note
Hungry for more? See Foods that cause inflammation.
For more on plant-based diets, see the related posts below.
