What does an anti-inflammatory diet look like?
“Interventional studies to improve healthy aging require appropriate outcome measures, such as blood-based biomarkers, which are readily available, inexpensive and widely accepted.” We need blood-borne biomarkers of mortality risk. For example, having high levels of C-reactive protein in your blood can increase your risk of premature death by 42%. IC-reactive protein is one of the inflammatory biomarkers most used to predict death, but those with high levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), another indicator of inflammation, can increase the risk of premature death by 49%. What can we do to reduce it?
I’ve talked before about foods that can contribute to inflammation, like meat and sugar, versus foods like nuts that don’t. But what about anti-inflammatory foods that reduce that inflammation?
What happens when blueberries are added to high-fat, high-glycemic-load foods including white potatoes, white bread, ham, cheese, and butter? Adding one cup of blueberries caused a significant drop in IL-6 to that meal, as you can see below and at 1:15 in my video. What Foods Are Anti-Inflammatory?.
What about raspberries? People were fed eggs, butter, white potatoes, white flour biscuits, and sausage with two cups of frozen or frozen raspberries mixed with water into a smoothie, compared to giving others the same amount of calories and carbs in the form of a banana. Bananas were no match for meat, eggs, milk, and simple carbohydrates; that meal caused a tripling of IL-6 levels within four hours. But by drinking those two cups of raspberries instead, their bodies were able to hold the line, as you can see below and at 1:45 for me. video.
Why did raspberries work but bananas didn’t? Probably the antioxidants.
After all, it is an antioxidant ingredients it failed miserably. There was no benefit to 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 red, blue, and purple colors? Indeed, that’s what a number of randomized controlled trials have shown, and half a dozen studies combined show pomegranates, a fruit full of anthocyanin pigments, can reduce inflammation over time.
What about adding spices to foods as a way to reduce inflammation? Supplementation with grape and turmeric extracts did not affect the inflammatory response to the milkshake. But giving people one teaspoon a day of real turmeric—that is, whole spice, pure curcumin supplements—resulted in a significant decrease in IL-6 levels.
Garlic powder lowers IL-6 levels as well, starting at about half a teaspoon a day. Ginger powder (ground ginger) has had similar effects in doses ranging from half a teaspoon to one and a half teaspoons.
Of course, one way to moderate the inflammation caused by a Sausage and Egg McMuffin is to not eat it in the first place. How about just eating a plant-based diet? To my surprise, the decrease in IL-6 did not reach statistical significance. Whenever a dietary intervention does not have the desired effect, you should always ask, “What was the food they were really eating?” The study looked mostly at the Mediterranean diet, which has a lot of plants, but maybe the diet didn’t go far enough? For more clarity, we turn to the research of Dr. Turner-McGrievy’s famous New DIETs, where people continue to eat their full omnivorous diet or are randomly assigned to eat a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet, a pesco-vegetarian diet, or a non-vegetarian diet with, for example, limited red meat. So, while a vegan might eat red beans and brown rice with chopped tomatoes and roasted peppers for a snack, a vegetarian might add cheese, a pesco-vegetarian might add shrimp, and a semi-vegetarian might add turkey sauce. Below is an in-depth look at five eating patterns, which you can also see at 4:01 in mine. video.
What happened over the course of two months to their Dietary Inflammatory Index score? The Dietary Inflammatory Index is a measure of how inflammatory your diet is. A negative score means the whole food is anti-inflammatory, and the lower, the better, while a positive score means the whole food is pro-inflammatory, which is where the people in the study started. That’s not surprising, because they were eating a normal diet and our nation is full of inflammatory diseases.
But when the study participants switched to a strictly plant-based diet, their diet changed to an anti-inflammatory diet. This was the case even if they cut meat or all meat except fish. But if instead they switched to mainly poultry or reduced their diet to only meat, their diet remained inflammatory. You can see the results below or at 4:47 in mine video.
Now, not all plant foods are anti-inflammatory. If all you do is increase your healthy plant-based diet, like juice, white bread, white potatoes, soda, and cake, you may end up burning even more. But if you eat a really clean diet of whole plants, you get a significant reduction in lipoprotein(a)—Lp(a)—that we didn’t even think was possible with food—and a drop in LDL cholesterol and even the most dangerous type of LDL cholesterol. And, almost across the board, you get a decrease in inflammatory markers; we’re talking a 30% decrease in C-reactive protein and a 20% decrease in IL-6. Therefore, perhaps previous studies on plant-based diets were not successful because they were not sufficiently plant-based, with animal products still being widely used. Therefore, “total elimination of animal products and processed foods…may be a smart dietary strategy” to fight inflammation.
Doctor’s Note
Hungry for more? Look Foods That Cause Inflammation.
For more on a plant-based diet, see the related posts below.
