The Real Anti-inflammatory Diet

People say that lowering inflammation is the key to boosting your mental and physical health. And there are all these claims about the best way to do it: add “anti-inflammatory foods,” like blueberries or turmeric, and absolutely don’t do certain kinds of exercise. We’ll find out how you can really lower your inflammation, and what this can do for your body and mind. We talk to neuroscientist Dr. Caroline Ménard, nutrition scientist Dr. Rosa Casas, and exercise physiologist Dr. Grace Rose. This episode does discuss depression and suicide a little bit. Here are some resources: United States: National Alliance on Mental Health: Call 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), text “HelpLine” to 62640 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 International resources and general mental health resources can be found here: https://resources.byspotify.com/ Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/sciencevsinflammation In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Chapter 1: Everybody is talking about inflammation (03:23) Chapter 2: How inflammation can affect our bodies and minds (16:04) Chapter 3: Can we fix inflammation by cutting out nightshades? (19:48) Chapter 4: How to really lower your inflammation through your diet (28:44) Chapter 5: Does working out too hard raise chronic inflammation? This episode was produced by Meryl Horn with help from Wendy Zukerman, along with Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Music written by Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, So Wylie, Bumi Hidaka and Peter Leonard. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke with for this episode, including Professor Suzanne Segerstrom, Professor Andre Nel, Dr. Hannah Mayr, Professor Zhaoping Li, Dr. Jennifer Felger, Professor Andreas Michalsen, Professor Charles Serhan, Professor Heather Zwickey, Dr. Jian Tan and Professor Philip Calder. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Versus.

• 0:06Wendy Zukerman?

  This is the show that pits facts against the fire inside your body. Today on the show, inflammation.

• 0:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Everyone is talking about it.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  If you're not feeling well, you most likely have inflammation.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  The number one health trend of 2024 is reducing inflammation.

• 0:30Speaker 03

  Reducing inflammation that we hear so much about these days.

• 0:33Wendy Zukerman?

  If you're feeling crappy in basically any way, people say that it is inflammation that's to blame.

• 0:40Speaker 04

  You're typically bloated and maybe you have headaches and you're having problems sleeping at night or you're fatigued during the day.

• 0:44Speaker 05

  Inflammation is really dangerous in a lot of ways because it just triggers bad things in your body.

• 0:51Wendy Zukerman?

  Not only is it triggering bad things in your body, but people say that inflammation can ravage your mind. Yeah. Struggling with your mental health? Apparently, it's inflammation.

• 1:03Speaker 04

  Inflammation in our brains can cause all kinds of problems, including anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue.

• 1:07Speaker 06

  Inflammation gets in the way of your brain neurons talking to each other. You're feeling a little more anxious, have a bit of depression. This is a huge sign of chronic inflammation.

• 1:17Wendy Zukerman?

  Never fear, though. The internet also has solutions. There are all these tips online about what you have to do to rid your body of inflammation. Like, you need to avoid certain kinds of exercise.

• 1:31Speaker 04

  Overexercising can cause a lot of inflammation, especially in the gut.

• 1:36Wendy Zukerman?

  And the biggie is to change your diet. You can read countless books about anti-inflammatory diets and it feels like everyone's got advice about what to eat or not to eat to lower your inflammation. Question, what are some good anti-inflammatory foods? Blackberries, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries.

• 1:57Wendy Zukerman?

  Anti-inflammation juice, celery, ginger, and if you can get turmeric, absolutely add the turmeric. Turmeric is the one when it comes to fighting inflammation. Let's talk about nightshades. Tomatoes and nightshades are going to kill you.

• 2:14Wendy Zukerman?

  Did you catch that? Tomatoes and nightshades are going to kill you. If you missed it, catch up.

• 2:22Wendy Zukerman?

  But curiously, it's not just health fluisers that are obsessed with inflammation these days. Scientists are too. In fact, there has been this explosion of research in this space. In the past year, there were over 60,000 new scientific papers written about inflammation. 60,000. And we read some of them to find out what is the groundbreaking research on inflammation? What is it doing to our bodies and our brains? And if this is a problem for you, how can you tamp down that inflammation? When it comes to our health, a lot of us have been wondering if we

• 3:04Speaker 01

  most likely have inflammation.

• 3:06Wendy Zukerman?

  But then, there's science.

• 3:11Wendy Zukerman?

  Science vs. Inflammation is coming up just after the break.

• 3:22Speaker 04

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• 3:57Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today, we are looking at inflammation. How big of a problem is this? What can we do to tamp it down? Verell Hod, senior producer at Science Versus.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Hi, Wendy.

• 4:10Wendy Zukerman?

  Are you worried about your inflammation?

• 4:12Speaker 04

  Um, I kind of am now. I wasn't before doing this episode, but now I'm like, ah, this might be real. So yeah, it's been a journey.

• 4:22Wendy Zukerman?

  Well, let's start that journey at mental health. Because I'm hearing a lot about how chronic inflammation is affecting our brain and our mental health. So what do we know here?

• 4:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's interesting. Because like, one of the first clues that we got that maybe inflammation can actually affect our mental health, it kind of goes back to the like, classic role that the immune system can play in our bodies. So like, it fights viruses and bacteria, and that's a good thing.

• 4:53Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, yes.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  But we know that that fight can take its toll on us and make us feel pretty crappy. I talked about this with Caroline Menard. She's an associate professor at Laval University in Quebec City. If you have a flu or a cold, your immune system is fighting against this virus. You feel it. With that kind of bleh feeling when you have a cold. Like, that's inflammation. Yeah, and generally, you're not going to feel like going running or doing a lot of like, super hard activities. You're just going to be like, I'm going to stay in bed, I'm going to rest. So yeah, being sick can actually give people symptoms of depression, like feeling sad and unmotivated.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  And we also have these cases where doctors have used drugs that really ramp up people's inflammation, because it can help them fight diseases. And the doctors noticed that this treatment was making a lot of their patients really depressed.

• 5:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, wow.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  So like, there's evidence that inflammation itself can like, make people's mental health worse.

• 5:54Wendy Zukerman?

  And so how does all of this work? How exactly does inflammation affect our mental health?

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Well, scientists are finding that out right now. And one of the big discoveries in the field was made by Caroline.

• 6:06Wendy Zukerman?

  Not only I see it, but I know I'm the first person in the world Ever to see it. And so the first time I saw it, I was very happy. I went to get a couple of IPAs. Because I thought that was really cool. So what did she say?

• 6:20Speaker 04

  OK, so to explain what she saw, let me first explain how her lab researches this.

• 6:26Wendy Zukerman?

  OK.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  So they use mice and they have this kind of terrible way of sparking inflammation in the mice. So with people, we know that if you experience social stress, like if you get bullied a lot, you are more likely to have chronic inflammation. And so to mimic this in mice, here's what they do. First, they get a little like black mouse. And then they put it in a cage for like five or 10 minutes every day with a larger, meaner white mouse. And every day, they basically get bullied by this more aggressive mouse.

• 7:00Wendy Zukerman?

  What does a bullying mouse look like?

• 7:03Speaker 04

  I mean, sometimes it actually kind of beats up the tinier one. Other times, it will just stare it down, looming over the mouse. And it will sometimes like rattle his tail at it. But that's not the end of it. What we do after that is we house them in the same cage. And they have a plastic transparent divider, so they can see each other and smell their holes. So they don't physically interact, but they see the big bully on the other side. I say it's a bit like in the schoolyard, you know, when you see the bully on the other

• 7:31Wendy Zukerman?

  side of the schoolyard, you don't know if it's gonna come for you.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 7:36Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, that poor little mouse.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, so funnily enough, some of the mice are actually OK with all of this, but other mice seem like it messes them up a little bit. And so Caroline kind of looks at those mice that are really affected by this. And she does see that they have higher inflammation.

• 7:54Wendy Zukerman?

  OK.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  So this is basically chronic inflammation in the mice. And then the question is, well, what is this all doing to their brains?

• 8:02Wendy Zukerman?

  Exactly.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  So to find that out, Caroline's team killed the mice, sliced up their brains.

• 8:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  And what she saw was that there are a bunch of immune cells right near the brain, congregating in this area called the blood-brain barrier.

• 8:18Wendy Zukerman?

  OK.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  And so this is this barrier that sort of surrounds all the blood. Blood vessels near your brain. And it's meant to keep our brains safe from all the dangerous stuff that's just floating around in our blood.

• 8:31Wendy Zukerman?

  Right. It's meant to keep our brains safe. So what did she see here? I mean, was the blood brain barrier doing its job?

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Well, that's what Caroline wanted to look at. Since we know that these immune cells are pumping out inflammatory chemicals.

• 8:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  And she saw that they were lining up near the barrier. She wanted to know whether this was actually affecting the blood brain barrier. So she uses this very fancy microscope that has lasers. And she takes these amazing images of the mice. Okay, so let me show you one of the pictures.

• 9:05Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, okay, great. Wait, what is this? It looks like two eels kissing on a thermal camera.

• 9:16Wendy Zukerman?

  What am I looking at?

• 9:17Speaker 04

  I mean, I guess I could see that. So the picture, that picture is of a control mouse. And that's, that's the blood brain barrier lit up in fluorescent green. I guess it kind of looks like eels.

• 9:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  But now let me show you the second picture of the mouse that has chronic inflammation.

• 9:33Wendy Zukerman?

  Ooh.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  And you can see that the eels are, are kind of ripped to shreds.

• 9:39Wendy Zukerman?

  That is a messed up blood brain barrier there. I mean, the, the green lines are ri- this, you can actually barely see them in some places.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  You have these tiny holes. So instead of having a long line, you have these tiny gaps here and there. So this is where the, the barrier is broken. Yeah, I mean, it almost looks like it's been ripped apart. Yeah, exactly. And this is where the inflammation is sneaking.

• 10:03Wendy Zukerman?

  The inflammation is sneaking in. Is that what she said?

• 10:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's where the cytokines can get into the brain.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  And we know that once they're there, they can really do some damage. So they can cause oxidative stress in our neurons. And the cytokines. Canes can actually mess up the production of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, which we know can play a role in depression.

• 10:30Wendy Zukerman?

  And so how much of this evidence is in humans now?

• 10:35Speaker 04

  We are getting more and more that's in humans.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Caroline has done most of her work in mice, but she also got some human brain samples from people with depression who actually died by suicide. And she could check, like, did they have the same little holes in their blood-brain barrier that the mice did?

• 10:54Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 05

  And so we were able to see the same phenomenon in the human brain as well of individuals who die by suicide.

• 11:01Speaker 04

  Ooh, compared to?

• 11:03Speaker 05

  Healthy control. So healthy control who die from other reasons, for example, a car accident or something that was not related to depression.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  Wow, so you think this is happening in people too?

• 11:13Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  And so now researchers are like trying to figure out if we can use this to help people with depression.

• 11:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow. So, I mean, of all the people who are struggling with their mental health right now, do we have any idea how, how many might be able to blame inflammation for this?

• 11:34Speaker 04

  That's still a little unclear. So like for depression, there is one small clinical trial that found roughly a third of the people in that study with depression had high inflammation and they were the ones that felt better after they got treated with an anti-inflammatory drug. So it's not going to be everyone, but it could be a pretty big chunk.

• 11:56Wendy Zukerman?

  It's funny because as you were explaining the mechanism of how it all works, I, I have to say, it really does feel like that is what is happening in my brain. I don't suffer from depression, but when I am very stressed, I do feel as if my brain gets a bit cotton ball-y or brain foggy. Yeah, I could almost feel those side cards flooding in through my crappy blood-brain barrier. And this, this only happened since I got COVID a couple of years ago. I never used to have this effect and I got a pretty nasty case of COVID.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I asked Caroline about COVID actually, since I think a lot of people might have that experience. Now, and like, yeah, of course, we've known for a long time that COVID causes a ton of inflammation. But then Caroline told me about this study that came out recently that was looking at the blood-brain barrier of like 75 people who had COVID.

• 12:55Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, gosh, I'm so nervous.

• 12:58Wendy Zukerman?

  It's not gonna be good.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Are you ready?

• 12:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, I'm ready.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  The barrier of the brain became way more leaky in those individuals who had very strong case of COVID. And then even with the the brain fog, the long-term COVID, they see this weakness of the barrier. So maybe the the inflammation was so intense that the barrier became a bit more fragile.

• 13:19Wendy Zukerman?

  And so she thinks that part of the reason people are getting brain fog is because this blood-brain barrier is leaky, it's allowing more inflammation in, which is then causing damage to the brain?

• 13:32Speaker 04

  Basically, yeah, and they could see this leakiness in people's brains who had brain fog even a year after they had COVID. Maybe this can help explain why people with long COVID have brain fog. And so, yeah, scientists definitely think now that like chronic inflammation can play a huge role in cognition and mental health, but it also messes with stuff besides our brains.

• 13:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Do you know, like, I can almost feel brain fog right now from the stress of what you have just told me there.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 14:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Continue, continue with your laundry list of the terrible things caused by chronic inflammation.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, Wendy's brain.

• 14:15Wendy Zukerman?

  I know.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  All right, um, so, yeah, we know that chronic inflammation is also linked to heart disease. One reason is that if your blood vessels are a little bit inflamed, a lot of the time, that can make plaque buildup. Chronic inflammation is also linked to type 2 diabetes, cancer.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  And then, of course, there's a ton of autoimmune diseases. So it's a long list.

• 14:40Wendy Zukerman?

  You're almost like the big mouse, just bullying me with facts about how terrible inflammation is right now, just staring at me.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  I am not the bully mouse.

• 14:53Wendy Zukerman?

  Bullying me with facts.

• 14:56Wendy Zukerman?

  So why is it that some of us, where does this chronic inflammation come from? Stress, as you've talked about?

• 15:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, chronic stress is one. People who are older are more likely to have chronic inflammation. It goes up with age. Also, our fat tissue sends out like pro-inflammatory signals. So people who are fatter might have more inflammation. And air pollution can cause inflammation too.

• 15:22Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, man.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  One paper estimated, based on this like common marker for inflammation called CRP, that about 35% of US adults have chronic inflammation.

• 15:33Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  And then another study said that 70% of all deaths worldwide are caused by chronic inflammatory diseases.

• 15:42Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  So it's coming for a lot of us.

• 15:45Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, gosh. Wow, wow, wow. I mean, I wasn't sure, just because there's so much talk about chronic inflammation. I really am a bit surprised by this, that scientists really do believe that this rumbling of chronic inflammation is truly the cause of quite a lot of our illnesses.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, or at least it's playing a role for sure. I was surprised too.

• 16:12Wendy Zukerman?

  Why were you surprised?

• 16:13Speaker 04

  I think it's just when people say that there is like one thing that can explain so much. I'm always just suspicious. There's no way that there's like a one process is like responsible for all these different things.

• 16:25Wendy Zukerman?

  Right. Exactly.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  But it seems like there's actually a lot of evidence backing it up, that this is this puppet master of health inside of our bodies.

• 16:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, okay. So then the question becomes, how do we fix this? Can we fix it?

• 16:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, and a lot of people say that the key to lowering your inflammation is through diet.

• 16:47Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, yes.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  And when I first started looking into this one claim that I kept coming across.

• 16:54Speaker 05

  This idea that if you want to reduce your inflammation, you gotta cut out stuff from your diet.

• 17:01Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  Um, like one thing that surprised me was nightshades, which includes vegetables like eggplants, potatoes, um, also tomatoes.

• 17:12Wendy Zukerman?

  This surprised you? This has been around for ages.

• 17:17Wendy Zukerman?

  Like Gwyneth Paltrow was crapping on about how much she hated nightshades. But I guess I shouldn't say crapping on about it. Is there, is there any science here? Why do people hate nightshades?

• 17:26Speaker 05

  I mean, there's always been this like lore around nightshades. Maybe one reason they're even called nightshades is that they're kind of dark. Like they, they might have some kind of toxin in them that

• 17:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Night and shade.

• 17:39Speaker 05

  Makes them bad for us. Yeah.

• 17:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  And well, I mean, there are these chemicals in them that people think might be bad.

• 17:45Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  One of the big ones is called solanine.

• 17:51Speaker 05

  And researchers have tried like giving this to mice and it found that it made, did make their gut kind of messed up.

• 17:57Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  And there's even a case study, uh, from the seventies of almost 80 schoolboys in England who had a bad batch of potatoes and then a lot of them got really sick. And some researchers blamed that on the solanine.

• 18:14Wendy Zukerman?

  That's such a thing that would happen to schoolboys in England.

• 18:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, poor lads.

• 18:19Wendy Zukerman?

  We ate the old potatoes.

• 18:22Wendy Zukerman?

  This was just like a Charles Dickens story.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  So like, yeah, there was those studies, but I didn't, I felt like that none of that was that convincing.

• 18:30Wendy Zukerman?

  Right. Yeah. I mean, the bad batch of potatoes, that could have been anything that caused those illnesses and then you've got some studies in mice, right?

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. No, one, one report from the University of California, San Francisco, said that in people, quote, "No research has shown that solanine"

• 18:48Speaker 04

  Has a direct effect on inflammation, unquote. So yeah, there really does not seem to be any convincing evidence that cutting out night shades can lower inflammation.

• 18:58Wendy Zukerman?

  You're not cutting eggplants out of your diet anytime soon.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  Um, no, and actually it's kind of the opposite because we know that eggplants and other vegetables have stuff that can actually lower inflammation, like nutrients called polyphenols.

• 19:13Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  And they also have fiber in them.

• 19:15Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  And, you know, we covered this a few weeks ago. Fiber can lower your inflammation by keeping your microbes happy. So if you want to try cutting something out to lower inflammation, you probably don't want to cut out vegetables, but you could look at cutting out junk food. So like processed food, processed meat, that stuff does seem to be linked to higher inflammation. And then maybe also stuff like sugar and saturated fat, though the science there is a little more mixed.

• 19:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, so nightshades back on the menu. Junk foods is still bad for us. Uh, what's up next?

• 19:52Speaker 04

  After the break, an anti-inflammatory diet that scientists are actually excited about.

• 19:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow, that's big. That's big.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  Plus, could exercise be causing chronic inflammation?

• 20:04Wendy Zukerman?

  Coming up.

• 20:47Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today, we're talking about inflammation. Merrill has scared the [bleep] out of us, out of me at least, about our leaky brain barrier. How do you fix it? How do you lower your chronic inflammation? Avoiding processed foods might help. What else you got for us?

• 21:07Speaker 04

  Well, there are lots of foods that people say can help with inflammation. But the one that seems to be like really having a moment right now is turmeric.

• 21:17Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  And that's been used for thousands of years in South Asia as part of Ayurvedic medicine. And it's thought to help with inflammation.

• 21:25Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seeing a lot on turmeric shots. Turmeric in this, turmeric in that.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a huge market now.

• 21:31Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  And researchers have been doing clinical trials, like giving people a pill that has the stuff that's in turmeric. And they'll check to see, does it lower inflammatory markers in the blood?

• 21:44Wendy Zukerman?

  Great.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  And a lot of these studies find that, yeah, it can actually do this.

• 21:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  But a lot of these are pretty small studies. And it's inconsistent. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And we're not really sure why.

• 22:02Wendy Zukerman?

  Huh. So what do you make of that? I mean, are you adding more turmeric to things now?

• 22:07Speaker 04

  I haven't been, no. I just feel like the science isn't solid enough yet.

• 22:13Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm hmm. Okay.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  But then like away from turmeric, as I've been talking to scientists, this one study just kept coming up again and again and again as like the study to look at when it comes to lowering inflammation.

• 22:27Wendy Zukerman?

  Great.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  It's just clinical trial. So I talked to one of the researchers who's been running it. My name is Rosa Casas. I'm...

• 22:36Speaker 05

  An associate professor at the University of Barcelona.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  And so her study has been going on for like 20 years.

• 22:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  It's actually one of the biggest randomized controlled trials on diet ever.

• 22:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  It's called the PREDIMED study and it's on the Mediterranean diet.

• 22:55Wendy Zukerman?

  So for years now, the Mediterranean diet has been in and out of headlines as this sort of magic diet in a way. Let's dive into it. What does it actually involve?

• 23:07Speaker 04

  All right, so here is like a classic meal that you might eat if you're on this diet. Pasta with some nice sauce.

• 23:14Speaker 05

  It's a sauce that is made with tomato, garlic and onion. And you slowly simmer it with olive oil.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Oh, that sounds tasty.

• 23:27Speaker 05

  It's very good and very healthy, sofrito.

• 23:32Wendy Zukerman?

  Sounds delicious.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Exactly. This actually got me kind of excited because I was like, oh, I would eat that.

• 23:36Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  Okay, so besides pasta and veggies, people were also encouraged to have stuff like fruit, beans, nuts, fish and seafood. And one thing that's pretty great here is that people could eat as much of this stuff as they wanted. Like they didn't have to count calories.

• 23:54Wendy Zukerman?

  So that is the Mediterranean diet. Then tell me about this amazing study.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  Okay, so they got over 7,000 people who are at least 55 years old and they had a higher risk for heart disease.

• 24:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm.

• 24:08Speaker 04

  And if you were in the Mediterranean diet group, then you'd meet with a dietitian who would, you know, give you advice about how to incorporate all these foods into your diet. But then, just to make sure people really changed their diets, the researchers also shipped food to them. So some people got nuts or olive oil. And the, the people who got olive oil were getting a liter of it a week.

• 24:34Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow, one liter a week?

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, that was for the whole family.

• 24:38Wendy Zukerman?

  For the Von Trapp family? What?

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're gonna. I mean, I guess they wanted people to just go wild with this stuff, right? Like drizzle a little on everything.

• 24:49Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, all right. It's expensive, but okay. Um, and then if you were not in this group, what was the control?

• 24:58Speaker 04

  They were actually told to go on a low-fat diet.

• 25:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  But you weren't given any olive oil or pushed to eat these other Mediterranean diet, specific friendly foods by the dietitian.

• 25:07Wendy Zukerman?

  And so what did she find?

• 25:09Speaker 04

  Okay, so after all this mailing of olive oil, you know, meal planning with the dietitian.

• 25:14Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  Here's what happened with their inflammation. So in this part of the study, Rosa looked at 164 people.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  After one year, we observed reductions in inflammation because of the Mediterranean diet.

• 25:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  So yeah, they saw less inflammation. That marker that a lot of researchers look at, CRP, was down by more than 40%.

• 25:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  Do you remember the moment you you saw that this diet basically worked?

• 25:44Speaker 05

  Yes, I remember the moment and it was wow, this very incredible.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  And this work has been replicated by by other studies. So according to one meta-analysis, going on the Mediterranean diet really does work to reduce inflammation.

• 26:01Wendy Zukerman?

  That's awesome. So what's it doing? What? Why? Why is it helping?

• 26:06Speaker 04

  Well, it seems like it is about the fact that it's a bunch of different foods kind of working together. Rosa says, forget this idea that there's like this one superfood, that's the anti-inflammatory one that everyone just needs to eat. It's the fact that like there's all these different foods that are kind of dialing down inflammation in our cells in all these different ways. So for example, if you're eating a lot of fish, stuff like salmon, you'd be eating omega-3 fatty acids.

• 26:33Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  And they might be reducing inflammation in a few different ways. So for example, you have like a layer of fat surrounding all of your cells. And when you eat more omega-3s, they can literally get inserted into this. Fatty layer that's surrounding all your cells. And that will make it harder for your cells, for your immune cells to like become inflammatory.

• 26:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  And then, of course, there's other things going on, like a lot of the foods in this diet have fiber, which we talked about.

• 27:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  And then you're eating less junk food. And just by the way, I noticed that, you know how you see all these lists of top five anti-inflammatory foods?

• 27:16Wendy Zukerman?

  Of course, of course.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  Well, the stuff on the lists is like berries, chia seeds, fish. And it's basically all just either stuff that's on the Mediterranean diet or stuff that has a lot of fiber in it, or both.

• 27:30Wendy Zukerman?

  Right. It's not, the food on this, these lists, they don't have some magical anti-inflammatory power.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, basically. I mean, if anything, fiber is the magic. Um, but then Rosa and her team wanted to find out like, okay, we know that the Mediterranean diet lowers inflammation. But like, does this all actually lower your risk of getting diseases? Like if you're on this diet for years?

• 27:57Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, of course, of course. Inflammation is one thing, but you really want to just not be sick.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  One of the things they looked at was to see whether this can help for heart disease, which is the number one killer of people in the US.

• 28:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  And like we've said, that is linked to inflammation.

• 28:11Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  And they found that it helped.

• 28:14Speaker 05

  To follow a Mediterranean diet, reduce the cardiovascular disease by 30% in comparison with a low-fat diet.

• 28:23Wendy Zukerman?

  Whoa. She said 30% lower.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, and other studies find this kind of thing too.

• 28:29Wendy Zukerman?

  Nice.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  And then one more disease I want to tell you about. They looked at breast cancer. And in this case, the women in the Mediterranean diet group were a lot less likely to get breast cancer than the people in the control group.

• 28:42Wendy Zukerman?

  What's, what's that? That is, is that an inflammation story as well? Is it because it's lowering inflammation?

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, we do think that, um, Inflammation can help tumors grow. So yeah, it just, it seemed like this diet was really helping people with a lot of stuff.

• 28:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Well, this is very exciting. So there are, there is a thing you can do to lower your inflammation. And it's to go on this diet that allows you to eat pasta and fry it with beautiful tomatoes.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  The frying part, it was like, you know, simmer it slowly with olive oil.

• 29:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, I'm not a cook. I don't know. You shove it on a pan. I don't understand the rest. So this is amazing. And, and I guess, I guess what is slightly annoying is for anyone who's really looking for a quick fix. As in, I'll just cut out eggplants from my diet, or I'll just add this one thing and all of a sudden, boom, no more inflammation. That's really not how we should be thinking about it. It's, it's really your whole diet, which is a bit annoying.

• 29:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:47Wendy Zukerman?

  So then, speaking of other things that are annoying, uh, exercise. So what's the story here? Cause online, man, people have so many opinions about exercise and inflammation. Do it, it lowers your inflammation. Don't do it. It actually ramps up your inflammation.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  The thing that I kind of came across a lot was this idea that if you do a really high intensity workout, it's going to increase your inflammation. So you really have to kind of be careful not to go too hard.

• 30:16Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes. What's the science here?

• 30:18Speaker 04

  So you often do see this short-term rise in inflammatory markers in the blood after people work out. I talked about this with Grace Rose. She's a lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. When you're exercising in general, you will always have, because exercise is a stressor, you have this sharp increase in inflammation. And we know that if you work out a ton, like if you work out excessively, it can kind of keep you in that high inflammatory state for longer.

• 30:50Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  If you do a, a triathlon, inflammation in your blood will still be really high, even 24 hours later. It seems like this is because really intense exercise can damage. Or just put a lot of stress on your muscles.

• 31:04Wendy Zukerman?

  This is excellent, Meryl, because I never want to do a marathon. And so any extra reason as to why I I don't do that. This is this episode is just getting better and better for me personally.

• 31:17Speaker 04

  So I found this one study where they got 10 marathon runners to agree to getting their calf muscles biopsied, like right after running a marathon.

• 31:26Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow, thank you.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, and they saw that their their tissue was damaged. So yeah, the idea is that that can spark this immune reaction. You know, you get muscle damage, your immune system is going to like spring into action like it does whenever you have tissue damage.

• 31:40Wendy Zukerman?

  So when you do exercise, you do get this sort of sharp increase in inflammation. But then, does that go down? Or does that, does that actually lead to chronic inflammation?

• 31:55Speaker 04

  Well, we can, we can find this out. Researchers have done a ton of experiments. Well, they'll have people do two different workouts. Some will do a more intense version of the thing and other, other people will do an easier version of the workout. And then they'll look at their inflammation and their blood after they've kind of rested. And Grace has collected over 20 of these for a meta-analysis where she could then see whether doing high intensity workouts is actually bad for you. And what we've, what we've shown is that it does not matter if you're doing any intervention that's lower or higher intensity exercise overall did not make a difference. And so for the people online who are saying you shouldn't exercise, especially, you

• 32:40Speaker 04

  know, don't do like HIIT workouts if you're worried about your chronic inflammation. Is that right? No, that's not right. So engaging in higher intensity exercise, like HIIT workouts, is really unlikely to increase your risk of, you know, chronic inflammation. In fact, it's more likely to reduce your risk of chronic inflammation than anything.

• 33:01Wendy Zukerman?

  Reduce your risk of chronic inflammation?

• 33:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, we do actually have evidence that doing exercise either doesn't do anything to your chronic inflammation, or it might actually lower it, even for the marathon runners.

• 33:13Wendy Zukerman?

  That, I mean, that makes so much more sense. I mean, we know exercise is so good for us.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:20Wendy Zukerman?

  For so many different things. Okay, so Meryl.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Wendy.

• 33:25Wendy Zukerman?

  What I have learned from this episode is that. Chronic inflammation is a problem that a lot of us have to think about. Unfortunately, one more thing, add it to the pile.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 33:39Wendy Zukerman?

  And don't listen to people try to sell you quick fixes, whether it's a turmeric shot or someone telling you not to eat that tomato. Instead, you know what? Take that tomato, put it in a pan with some olive oil, simmer it, whatever that is. No simmer it and enjoy. Meryl, what are you gonna do differently as a result of this episode? You gonna cook up a sofrito?

• 34:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I actually do just wanna eat more vegetables. Like, while I was working on this episode, we're also working on the fiber episode. And so I feel like it's just like the universe is telling me to eat more vegetables.

• 34:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 34:20Speaker 04

  Researchers also told me some other tips that I liked. Try to get enough sleep because sleep is linked to lower inflammation. And also stress, you know, like those poor mice getting bullied. Like, you know, stress can cause inflammation. So lowering stress has also found to decrease inflammation in some cases. I talked about this with Caroline Menard.

• 34:40Speaker 05

  I think it's really, everybody can find their own recipe. Find something to do that you like, like taking a long bath, going for a walk with your dog. Something that's for you is very relaxing. Personally, I love to go to see heavy metal concerts. I find it very relaxing. And a good way to relieve anger and I play video games because I get out of my head and I really focus on one task.

• 35:02Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, this is great. A prescription for Mario Kart from a scientist? Absolutely.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Thanks, Meryl.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Thanks, Wendy.

• 35:09Wendy Zukerman?

  That's science versus.

• 35:12Wendy Zukerman?

  So, Meryl, how many citations did this week's episode?

• 35:15Speaker 04

  We have 119 citations.

• 35:17Wendy Zukerman?

  119. And if people wanna find these citations, learn more about anything that we talked about on the show, where should they go?

• 35:26Speaker 04

  Well, you can go to our show notes and then just follow the links to the trans.

• 35:30Wendy Zukerman?

  Excellent. And on Instagram this week, which is science underscore V S, what do we have for people?

• 35:38Speaker 04

  We will have, you know, those photos of the blood brain barrier that Caroline took photos of and the mice.

• 35:46Wendy Zukerman?

  The eels kissing. I mean, I would, I would love it if you guys, as you look at this photo, tell me what you see in this. Do you see the eels?

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, are they eels?

• 35:57Wendy Zukerman?

  What are they? It's like, it kind of looks like stars, you know, where you kind of find the pot and the whatever else is up in the stars. Anyway, tell us what you think.

• 36:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, thanks so much, Meryl.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  Thanks, Wendy.

• 36:17Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode was produced by Merrill Horn with help from me, Wendy Zukerman, along with Michelle Dang, Rose Rimla and Akedi Foster Keys. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Sam Behr. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Music written by Bobby Lord, Emma Munga, So Wiley, Bumi Hidaka and Peter Leonard. Thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Susan Segerstrom, Professor Andre Nell, Dr Hannah Mayer, Professor Zhao Ping Li, Dr Jennifer Felger, Professor Andreas Mikkelsen, Professor Charles Serhan, Professor Heather Zwicky, Dr Jian Tan and Professor Philip Calder. Science Vessus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 37:00Wendy Zukerman?

  And if you are listening on Spotify, then follow us and tap the bell icon so you get notifications when new episodes come out. And if you like the show, you like what you've heard, whatever app you are listening on, give us a five star review. Makes us feel happy.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  Thanks.

• 37:17Wendy Zukerman?

  I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.