What does an anti-inflammatory diet look like?
“Intervention studies to enhance healthy ageing 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 may increase your risk of dying prematurely by 42%. C-reactive protein is one of the most widely used inflammatory biomarkers for predicting mortality, but those with the highest levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), another marker of inflammation, may increase premature death risk by 49%. What can we do to bring it down?
I’ve previously talked 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 actually attenuate that inflammation?
What happens when blueberries are added to a high-fat, high-glycemic-load meal consisting of white potatoes, white bread, ham, cheese, and butter? Adding a single cup of blueberries caused a significant drop in IL-6 from that meal, as you can see below and at 1:15 in my video Which Foods Are Anti-Inflammatory?.
What about raspberries? People were fed eggs, butter, white potatoes, white flour biscuits, and sausage with or without two cups of frozen raspberries blended with water into a smoothie, compared to giving others the same amount of calories and carbs in banana form. Bananas were no match for meat, eggs, dairy, and crappy carbohydrates; that meal resulted in 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 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 like vitamins C or E, beta-carotene, or selenium. Maybe it’s those special antioxidant pigments, the anthocyanins, that give berries those bright red, blue, and purple colors? Indeed, that’s what dozens of randomized controlled trials have demonstrated, whereas a half-dozen studies combined show pomegranates, a fruit packed with anthocyanin pigments, can bring down inflammation over time.
What about adding spices to meals as an approach to cool down inflammation? Supplementation with grape and turmeric extracts did not affect the inflammatory response to a milkshake. But giving people one teaspoon a day of actual turmeric—that is, the whole spice, not purified 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 (ground ginger) had the same results with doses ranging from half a teaspoon to one and a half teaspoons.
Of course, another way to mediate the inflammation caused by a Sausage and Egg McMuffin is to not eat it in the first place. What about just 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 result you expect, you always have to ask, “What exactly was the diet they actually ate?” The study mostly looked at the Mediterranean diet, which certainly has more plants, but maybe the diets didn’t go far enough? For more clarity, we turn to Dr. Turner-McGrievy’s famous New DIETs study, where people either continued to eat their fully omnivorous diets or were randomized to eat a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet, a pesco-vegetarian diet, or a semi-vegetarian diet that, for example, limited red meat. So, whereas the vegan might eat red beans and brown rice with chopped tomatoes and roasted peppers for dinner, the vegetarian might add some cheese, the pesco-vegetarian might add shrimp, and the semi-vegetarian might add some turkey sausage. Below is a more in-depth look at the five diet patterns, which you can also see at 4:01 in my video.
What happened within two months to their Dietary Inflammatory Index scores? 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, whereas positive scores mean your overall diet is on balance pro-inflammatory, which is exactly where the people in the study started. That comes as no surprise, given that they were eating regular diets and our nation is awash with inflammation-related disease.
But when the study participants switched to strictly plant-based nutrition, their diet flipped to become an anti-inflammatory diet. That was the case even if they just cut out meat or all meat except fish. But if they instead switched mostly to poultry or only limited their meat intake, their diet remained inflammatory. You can see the results below or at 4:47 in my video.
Now, not all plant foods are anti-inflammatory. If all you do is boost your intake of less healthy plant foods, like juice, white bread, white potatoes, soda, and cake, you can end up even more inflamed. But if you eat a really clean diet of whole plant foods, you get significant reductions in lipoprotein(a)—Lp(a)—which we didn’t even think was possible with diet—as well as drops in LDL cholesterol and even the most dangerous form of LDL cholesterol. Also, nearly across the board, you get a drop in inflammatory markers; we’re talking a 30% drop in C-reactive protein and a 20% drop in IL-6. So, maybe previous studies with plant-centered diets were unsuccessful because they weren’t plant-based enough, with animal products still being substantially consumed. Therefore, the total “elimination of 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 related posts below.
