How to eat to lower inflammation - the top 5 foods to boost energy, stop pain, and to live longer | Prof Luke O’Neill

Most of us think of inflammation when an ankle swells or a cut turns red. It’s our body’s immune system, and without it, we couldn't fight infections or repair injuries. But when it stays switched on, this chronic inflammation can drain your energy, can affect your health over the years, and even lead to heart disease. Eventually, 1 in 3 of us will develop an inflammatory disease. In today's episode, Professor Luke O'Neill - one of the world's top 1% immunologists - explains why that matters and what you can do about it. He explores how everyday foods can push inflammation up, or help calm it. He also explains why balance matters more than banning foods like sugar, red meat, gluten, and dairy. As for your gut, you’ll learn how anti-inflammatory foods like plants, fibre, and a healthy microbiome can help keep inflammation down. By the end of the episode, you'll know how to eat, rest, and enjoy life in ways that can keep inflammation in check. Could the way you eat help your body's healer do its job without going into overdrive? 🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30 🌿Let your gut microbes snack on the ZOE Gut Health Bar Build healthy habits. Download the ZOE app today and start your trial for just £2.30 for your first week. 👉 Join ZOE Follow ZOE on Instagram. Timecodes 00:00 Intro 04:14 Why 1 in 3 people will get an inflammatory disease 06:49 When inflammation turns from healing to harmful 10:23 Why does your immune system now damage your heart and brain? 13:46 Why does chronic inflammation make you so tired? 15:35 The link between depression and inflammation explained 18:10 Does inflammation speed up ageing? 19:56 Testing for chronic inflammation - what CRP tells you 23:01 Does belly fat cause inflammation? What Ozempic reveals 25:46 Does your gut microbiome affect inflammation? 28:04 Are ultra-processed foods inflammatory? Sugar and fat explained 30:18 Does sugar make inflammation worse? 33:15 Insulin resistance and inflammation 35:07 Fructose: fruit vs processed food 39:35 Is red meat inflammatory? How much is too much 41:52 Does gluten cause inflammation? 44:29 Does dairy cause inflammation? 46:13 Seed oils and inflammation 46:40 The anti-inflammatory diet 49:38 Anti-inflammatory plants: how willow bark led to aspirin 51:32 Do polyphenols fight inflammation? 53:44 Do anti-inflammatory supplements work? Are they worth it? 54:34 How to reduce inflammation today: why morning sunshine matters 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati The Appetite Reset by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE The Smart Snacking Guide: How to feed your gut, fuel your day, and snack without guilt The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks Better Breakfast Guide Mentioned in today's episode Daily 30: Does it work? The Mediterranean diet and CRP levels, Nutrients (2018) Metabolic Reprogramming in Stromal and Immune Cells in Rheumatoid Arthritis and Osteoarthritis, European Journal of Immunology, (2025)Episode transcripts are available here.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Zoe Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Every second, a silent battle is unfolding inside your body. Cells are sending chemical distress signals. Immune defenders are rushing to the scene. Tiny blood vessels are opening, and a process that's protected humans for hundreds of thousands of years is springing into action. For most of human history, this process helped keep us alive. It fought infection, repaired injury, and protected us from harm. But today, cutting-edge research is increasingly identifying long-term inflammation as the biggest factor that shapes how you feel right now, why you put on weight, and how long you will stay healthy. As a result, inflammation is becoming a major buzzword in health. Supermarket shelves are lined with anti-inflammatory products.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Social media is full of supplements to buy, and almost every week, there's a new claim about the hidden dangers lurking in a food we all thought was healthy. But how much of it is actually true? Is inflammation really that important? Can the food we eat genuinely tune inflammation up or down? And if so, which advice is backed by science? Which is simply clever marketing? To help us separate fact from fiction, I'm joined by Luke O'Neill, a professor of biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin, whose research into metabolism and the immune system puts him in the top 1% of all immunologists. You'll leave this episode with clear, practical steps all of us can take to feel better and support our long-term health.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Luke, should listeners aim to get rid of all inflammation?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Can inflammation save your life?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Yes, it can.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  Are some forms of sugar worse than others when it comes to inflammation?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Can ultra-processed foods increase inflammation?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Could the rise of ultra-processed foods help explain the increase in autoimmune conditions?

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Partly.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  If I eat red meat from time to time, will that significantly increase my inflammation?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Are inflammatory health conditions more common than they were in the past?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Very much so.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Can eating plants lower inflammation?

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  And finally, what's the most common misconception that you hear about inflammation?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  That inflammation is somewhat benign. It's not. It can be very dangerous and can shorten your life.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  I think inflammation seems to be a very hot topic at the moment. Online, I seem to be being bombarded by people trying to sell me all sorts of different products that promise to reduce my inflammation. That's very confusing. On the other hand, like I know inflammation is a big deal because across all of these podcasts, I feel more and more scientists in all different areas are talking about inflammation and telling me that it's a problem that is going to lead to their particular, like, disease area. So the net result is like, I sort of know it's bad, but I'm very confused about what to do about it. So I'm therefore delighted to be in the hands of someone who truly understands the topic. So Luke, can you just remind us what is inflammation? And why did it evolve in the first place?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  The ancient Greeks defined it, actually. If you sprain your ankle, it gets red, it gets swollen, it gets sore. You can't really use it, you know, these are the cardinal signs of inflammation. You know, and that was discovered 2,000 years ago. So it's a normal process, and it's a tissue injury if you hurt yourself, or an infection. Imagine a bacteria in your skin, it'll go a bit red. It'll be sore, it'll be swollen, and they're the key features there. The purpose of it is to fight the germs, number one. And secondly, repair the tissue. It's got a wonderful way to fix things that are broken. In many ways, inflammation is the body's healer. Without it, we wouldn't be here because infections would have killed us, our injuries would have wiped us out, basically. So it evolves many millennia, every organism on Earth, actually, has some kind of inflammatory process going on.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  But that's how we see it as a normal process. The problem, though, is if it goes wrong, the same weapons that it's using to fight germs and repair tissue is now destroying your own tissues. And that's what these diseases are. And I'm talking about MS in the brain, the inflammatory process out of control there. In your skin, it could be psoriasis and eczema. In your joints, arthritis. By the way, any disease, any anitis, that means inflammation. In case people don't know, it was configured as a way to describe them, you know. So many diseases, we now know over what 30, 40 years' work, involves the inflammatory process now doing harm, you know, now actually damaging your own tissue. One in three people will have an inflammatory disease in their lifetime, one in three. It includes heart disease, by the way.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Your heart gets inflamed, gives you a heart attack, and they're very common. Your liver gets inflamed in certain situations. So we put them all under one big umbrella of an inflammatory disease. So they're very, very important to people.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  So you're saying we really need inflammation, like fight the germs, repair the tissue, it's our healing process. It sounds incredibly important.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Then you just sort of flipped it around and said, but by the way, it's now causing one in three, like, inflammatory diseases, and it's really terrible.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  So why does this thing that's designed to make me stay healthy become this thing where suddenly we're all getting sick from it?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  We don't know. I mean, it's a bit of a mystery why these... There wasn't much arthritis 1,000 years ago. They can look at skeletons, you see, and there wasn't much going on, you know. So it seems to be a consequence of modern living somehow, you know. First of all, infectious diseases were known to be inflammatory 200, 300 years ago. So for example, if I can mention the dreaded COVID, you know, that goes into your lungs, the inflammatory process kicks off to fight the virus. But now you get this sort of collateral damage happening in tissues. So we knew infections could trigger an overactive inflammatory process. Again, not fully clear why. It can be too much of a germ is in your system, and that goes into overdrive, that's one idea. We think genetics are very important, we're all a bit different. But in terms of things like rheumatoid arthritis, why was your own immune system begin to think parts of your joint are foreign?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Because remember, it's as if there's an infection there, and there isn't. Hence the word autoimmune, that means self-immune response. I've got it, we use analogies, Jonathan, all the time, which can get a bit tedious sometimes. But it's an army to fight infection that becomes a civil war. It turns on your own tissues and destroys different parts of your body. And the big mystery is why does this happen? And why is it going up in incidence all the time? There's some of the things we're wondering.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  And so is that what inflammation gone wrong is? Is my own inflammatory response is no longer fighting the germ or the wound, but actually attacking my own body?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  You've got it. So for example, in infection, your immune system makes something called TNF. Now, the mouthfuls get challenging, it must be said. TNF is a signal to wake up inflammation, help you fight the infection. The very same molecule is very high in the rheumatoid joint. You can measure TNF there. There's no infection, though, that's what the mystery is. And the TNF is again causing the same inflammation as if there was an infection. So the same weapons, if you like, are now turning on your own tissues in a kind of friendly fire-type scenario. And that was a big advance, I suppose, about 40 years ago, when we realized that with your own body and your own molecules and your own immune system are now making too much or going out of control in somewhere.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  But what point does it stop being helpful and stop becoming harmful? Because I'm also picturing that if I don't have any of this inflammation, then, you know, I'm sort of like the boy in the bubble, and I'm going to die of the common cold, presumably.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  You've asked a killer question. You've done your homework. So we think sometimes they're called wounds that won't heal. See, in your joint, in rheumatoid arthritis, it's like a big wound. You know, there's blood going in, all the white blood cells are there. It's just like a wound, and it doesn't heal, so it can't resolve. And resolution of inflammation is the final part of this process, which you've cleared up the mischievous thing, you know, get what's called resolution. And there's all these repair processes are part of it. And for some reason, they aren't kicking in. And that's actually a subdivision of inflammation researchers. They just work on resolution and repair. Specifically, although other people work on the initiation, there's all different stages. But you're quite right, there's something going wrong with the better end of this, in a way. And it can't really get repaired properly.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  And now the injury persists and can cause all kinds of symptoms.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Do you have a friend who now orders their coffee without milk, leaves the breadbasket untouched, maybe checks every label for gluten because they've heard these foods cause inflammation? Share this episode with them. One of the world's leading immunologists explains why the cutting-out foods like this will really help them and what the latest science says they should focus on.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  So you've talked a bit about rheumatoid arthritis and obviously that's one example of a response to inflammation. But then you talk more broadly, you said like one in three people get an inflammatory disease. You talked about heart disease. And I've heard people talk about inflammation, you know, as a risk factor for all sorts of things, I understand. Like, what are the different things that inflammation, if it's sort of stain on like this, can end up causing that a listener would be aware of?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  But arthritis is obvious because you're swollen, your knee. Anybody listening with us, they are arthritis, very painful. Pain is a key feature. It's swollen, it's red and hot to touch. I mean, these are the cardinal signs. Again, the surprise was heart disease, will be the saying, you can't see the heart getting swollen, can you? You know? And yet we know in a heart that's heading towards a heart attack, white blood cells have gone in, they're chewing up cholesterol. That's a key noxious thing that's building up and the immune system is trying to clear the cholesterol. And now you get the inflammation that damages the heart and promotes a heart attack. And that was like, sort of surprise to people. People thought heart disease was all about lipids, as you would know, and statins with lower cholesterol. That's true. But it's actually provoking an overactive

• 9:44Speaker 01

  inflammatory response in the heart. The other surprise to us was Parkinson's disease. In that disease, another noxious thing builds up in the brain. It's a protein. It's called alpha-synuclein, another multiple alpha-synuclein. That builds up, the immune system goes in, tries to clear it, and now causes massive inflammation in that part of the brain. And that inflammation is so hot in that part of the brain, it destroys the neurons, and those neurons control movement. So the first symptom of Parkinson's, often tremor, because you're destroying your own immune system, it's going in to destroy the neurons in that part of the brain. So it turns out that even disease like Parkinson's has this inflammatory component as well. Even though you can't say it's swollen, like you're with a knee,

• 10:25Speaker 01

  similar cells are there. A good analogy I use is like a vacuum cleaner, actually. So it's going to the Hoover up the stuff, right?

• 10:31Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  It gets clogged, gets too hot, and now starts to burn your living room down or whatever it is. In this case, the vacuum cleaner is in your brain and it's burning your hippocampus and Alzheimer's.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  One of the things I feel I've learned over the last decade is just how incredibly clever my body is. It's clearly been off from my ancestors for millions of years. So why is it that suddenly it's burning up when it's trying to clear this cholesterol in my heart or these things in my brain, whereas it feels like it should have evolved to do a good job? I'll never forget the moment that everything shifted for me. I was at a public talk on nutrition, listening to a speaker explain that my gut had trillions of microbes in it, and that these bugs shaped every aspect of my health. That speaker was Professor Tim Spector, one of the world's top 100 scientists, who became my co-founder here at Zoe. Nine years later, Zoe runs the world's largest gut health research study. And the conclusion

• 11:24Speaker 00

  is simple. Gut health is health. How you feel, your long-term health and your digestion are all shaped by the state of your gut. As a listener to this show, you know how important it is to feed your good gut bugs. But I suspect that like me, you have a busy schedule, and often you feel you haven't given them all the different plants they crave. And that's exactly why we created Daily 30. It's a gut health supplement packed with over 30 plants that you sprinkle onto any meal. It tastes great, adds a satisfying crunch, and gives your gut the diversity it craves. Finally, a healthy habit that's easy to stick to. I should know, I take it every day. And because we're Zoe, we don't just guess, we test. We put our original Daily 30 formula through a randomized controlled trial, the

• 12:09Speaker 00

  gold standard of testing. The results blew us away and proved it supports your digestion, energy, and gut health. That trial helped us develop the formula we have today. Today, Daily 30 is a non-negotiable daily habit for me. So don't put your health off for the future. Go to Zoe.com/daily30 and try it today.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Well, we probably go back way to the Stone Age. So 300,000 years ago, there wasn't too much cholesterol around. The diet, which we'll come on to, I'm sure, was a bit different.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  You move to the 20th century, and our diet changes, and now cholesterol starts to build up, and the very same process goes in. But now there's so much cholesterol, the vacuum cleaner overheats and now causes heart damage. That's one reason why we're transitioning from a normal process into this more disease-like state.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  So let's say I go in, I clean the house, it's not very dirty, so I clean it. But then, one night, my son, who's now 18, has a massive party with 100 of his friends. I wake up in the morning, everything is trashed. The tool that should have worked is now just broken because the amount of cholesterol that we get today in the 21st century is just out of any idea of what we could have eaten in the past.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's the exact situation in that particular case. Now, if you take it to these like lupus, now lupus is a much more complicated thing than heart disease. It's a multi-organ systemic, we call this inflammatory disease, SLE, systemic lupus, arritymatosis. It's one of the more common inflammatory conditions. In that disease, Jonathan, it's a horrible disease, not because of the skin, it's because of a skin rash, again, redness and soreness, goes to the eyes, they get inflamed, your kidneys get inflamed, your joints get inflamed, every part of your body can become inflamed. The immune system is completely out of control, attacking all these different parts of the body. What's happening there is bits of your own body are being seen as if they're a bit of a virus. And now things called T-cells go in, another type of stuff, they go in,

• 14:05Speaker 01

  and they begin to react with these things. Now, there's a name, if you're an immunologist, for bits of viruses, they're called antigens. These are called autoantigens, they're bits of your own body now, suddenly being misrecognized as if it's a piece of a virus. And in that situation, absolute havoc is being wreaked. It's almost like every tissue with lots of viruses in it, you know? And the immune system's gone in, it's trying to kill the viruses, of course. And again, we're getting this collateral overactivation, that that's the biggest mystery of all. Why does the immune system begin to see bits of yourself? That's what's called non-cell.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  And I've heard a number of my guests over the last few years talk about low-grade constant inflammation now being almost like the norm for us, and that this in their particular area of study is sort of triggering things that wouldn't have happened otherwise. How does that fit into this picture? Because that feels different than like the specific cholesterol example. It's sort of almost like, I don't know, like the vacuum cleaner is on all the time, or what's going on?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the other concern we have, there's low-grade burning away in the vacuum. There's no fire going on here, by the way.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  It's overheating a little bit, right? And over time, and that's chronic, in your living room with your vacuum cleaner, even though it's not ramped up to 11 or whatever, it might be set on six, and that low burn will begin to cause a little bit of smoldering here and there. And that smoldering translates into milder symptoms. I mean, that chronic low-grade burn seems to be a feature of modern life as well. And what does that mean for people? Fatigue is a key feature, actually. One of the key symptoms of systemic inflammation is fatigue. And the reason for that is interesting. When you get an infection, you get what's called sickness behavior. Now, what does that mean? Imagine you've got the flu. You get on the duvet, you feel a bit depressed, actually, you lose interest in things, you

• 15:54Speaker 01

  don't want to socialize, your appetite goes, you feel exhausted. That's a standard response to infection. It evolved, Jonathan, to get you away from the herd, interestingly. So when you're really sick, you crawl into a burrow, other animals do this to stop it spreading. Isn't that wonderful? Evolution in action. If you're a pack animal, and one animal gets infected, evolution to get them away from the, go in on the duvet equivalent, it's your own immune system that's triggering those responses. If you don't crawl away, you can infect everybody, the whole herd dies. And we are a social species that evolved to be social. This evolved to maintain our social sort of structures, as it were, you know? Now, we knew this from COVID, by the way. In COVID, that was a malign virus because you'd carry it and have no symptoms. And now spread it. And that's why the pandemic

• 16:39Speaker 01

  began. Ebola, you're really sick, you don't go near the rest of your friends. A few people get infected, it doesn't spread like wildfire, you know? So this business of what's called sickness behavior is actually a key part of stopping infection spreading, is the idea.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  And so, look, how does that fit with chronic inflammation?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  So now, the same molecules are kicking off in the chronic, sort of burning, sort of, you know, state, and making you feel tired, just like what if you had an infection, you know? So it's very similar. And again, we'd like to know, of course, why you're having this low-grade inflammation burning away in the background. The exact same molecules are being made as if you're infected, and you get low-grade fatigue, low-grade depression and lack of appetite. That's a feature of low-grade inflammation. Anyway, it's the exact same molecules, by the way. Now, it's very exciting, there may be new treatments for depression in this. They're now targeting some of these immune pathways to relieve depression. Wouldn't that be marvelous? We could have a new class of antidepressants that are targeting the very same things that are happening during infection, you know? So it's a really exciting part of immunology, really.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  You're saying that you could be living with a low level of this sort of chronic inflammation, like on for a long period of time, that is triggering the same chemicals in my body as if, you know, I got flu or some sort of like serious virus, and then it's going to trigger a low-grade level of fatigue, but also like depression?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Lack of appetite is a feature of inflammation, anyway. The reason for that, we think, is you stop eating stuff just in case there's germs in the food you see. You may have picked up the thing from eating contaminated food, so you lose your appetite. That's one reason why we think you might lose your appetite during an infection. But the trouble is, there's no infection, something's happening, and the same molecules in your body are triggering a similar response. And it's a really important finding, and you may have heard of things like ME and chronic fatigue syndrome. They're more than likely low-grade inflammation, making the same kinds of molecules. The trouble is, it can be hard to measure, the levels can be very low, you know, but it's in the same realm, I guess, that we're talking about here.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  And I've heard people telling me that almost all of us today, living like in the Western worlds, are probably living with a level of chronic inflammation that is much higher than our ancestors. Is that just all scaremongering, or is this true?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  There is evidence for that. It's a bit too fast to be genetic, all this, remember? So let's say, for instance, lupus, that's gone off, that's doubled in society over the past 40 years. Why would it double? It's too fast to be genetic, it has to be environmental. And then the big question is, what's in modern living again that's causing this low grade inflammation? That's a really important consideration in this whole debate, really.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  What can it do in terms of my health? I think you talked about like fatigue and depression. But if I have this sort of long term inflammation, and let's say that I don't maybe have arthritis, I'm listening to this, well, I haven't got arthritis, don't need to worry about impact on my health otherwise?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  You do, this is the issue really, because it can damage your heart. For heart disease, is it, this is a big part of heart disease, we think. The increasing incidence of heart disease is probably low grade inflammation is part of it, you know. And then who knows, it could become Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. We know there's early signs of those diseases with no symptoms, you know. When you're in your thirties even and forties, you can see hints of it, you know. Again, is that this low grade inflammation that's pushing it? Then it builds up and then it gets worse and worse. And then finally, there's a tipping point and now the symptoms begin. So, so it's many different diseases, we think. There's a thing called inflammaging. If you come across this idea where the aging process itself is being driven by low grade inflammation, right? And there is some evidence

• 20:12Speaker 01

  for this. So if you have models of inflammation and model organisms and you make them inflamed, they age more quickly, you know. You can measure markers of inflammation going up as slowly as we age, you could get higher and higher and higher over time. There's a rationale that says inflammation speeds up the aging process.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  So does that mean if we were able to reduce inflammation, we could actually slow down the rate of aging?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. And that's a very exciting area, longevity, isn't it? And we will be coming on to this, I'm sure. Can you slow down the inflammatory process and live longer? That's the overall, can you increase your, your health span, we call this, by the way. Now, your lifespan is called your health span. What's fascinating as well, you know, your organs age at different rates. You may be a forty year old man or whatever it is, but your lungs could be a fifty year old because you've been smoking, you know, or whatever it is. So we know our tissues age at different rates incredibly. You've got your biological age, which is your date of birth, but turns out your, your actual chronological age is that. The biological age might be different, you know, maybe slightly older. That's a really interesting area as well. The whole aging business is being intensively studied for that reason. The dreaded smoking ages the skin terribly, right? There's toxins in the smoke, it's speeding

• 21:21Speaker 01

  up the aging process. And if you're in your fifties, you've been smoking since you were twenty, you'll have the skin of a seventy year older. Now, what that means is, if you don't smoke, you'll slow down the aging of the skin. There's really good evidence for that one. Can we extend that to the heart, the liver, the brain? That, that's the hope that all this research will have in that direction.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  That sounds fascinating. Last question before we go and talk about things you can do to change this. Is it easy to tell if you have this chronic inflammation?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  It's tricky if you haven't got a disease. So if you've got rheumatoid arthritis, say, for the, the one I mentioned, or lupus, you will see in the blood very clear signs of that. And doctors will diagnose it. You go to your GP, they'll take a blood sample and a consultant might see you and measure things, you know. And that's easy to see. The low grade stuff bumps around a bit, it varies between us, you know, so it's a bit more difficult to pin it down. There's one global marker, it's called CRP, C reactive protein. When that goes up, you're definitely inflamed. And you see that in all these diseases. And lo and behold, as you age, there's more and more CRP. We'd love to see better measurements, actually. One of the frontiers is, could you spot markers more robustly before

• 22:30Speaker 01

  symptoms emerge? Wouldn't that be great? Then you go in and treat more quickly, you know, the, as you probably know, the earlier you treat these diseases, the more likely you'll succeed. It's tricky to take a blood sample of someone who's got no other symptoms. Oh, that person's inflamed. It's not as simple at the moment.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  What do you look at to see if somebody's got this inflammation?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  A simple, a simple way to, all I've done for forty two years is identify the component parts, the bits of the engine. Imagine the body's a huge big engine. The job of a biochemist is to get the biochemicals. Once you identify them, then you measure them in disease. That's your next step. Try to see if they're elevated or not, you know, changing in disease. That's the next thing you do. And then, of course, other than what I do a lot of is, can you turn them down to normal levels and restore things to, to factory settings? We use that term sometimes strangely.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Does that mean that you could take my blood and measure things in there that would tell you whether or not I have this low grade inflammation?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And that's more and more evidence. And I could take a sample of your blood now, maybe measure a thousand things, can you believe it? And it's the combination of those thousand and how the ratios between them. Can you imagine the complexity? It's such a complicated system. And the ratios might be as important as the absolute amount.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  It's very interesting. It reminds me of the microbiome. We talk about the microbiome a lot, and we work with some amazing scientists. And, you know, it's gigabytes of data. We have these really big machine learning models to understand what's going on and have been able to start to understand the difference between what's good and, and bad. But it's very complicated. And it sounds like you're saying that, you know, that what's going on in my inflammation is, is the same.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  And you may have done this with the microbiome. Even worse, you'll see things in your blood from the microbiome, remember, and they're changing as well. So, so what you're seeing in the blood then is a readout of your own body and the bugs in your gut, which are really important for all this, of course. And it's that, it's that profile that you're trying to get. And it's very active. You wouldn't believe the amount of work that's going on with wearables, for instance, that would detect this stuff in your sweat. Wouldn't that be great? And maybe you will see this tiny signal that's, oh, that person is at risk of a heart attack. Let's get in there. And cholesterol was the very first thing we used to measure years ago. It's getting much more sophisticated now then.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Can you help me to understand why the food I eat would affect my inflammation? It's not obvious, right? I think people listening to say, well, I can understand that the food I eat can determine whether I'm fat. I can sort of understand that. But like the inflammation, how does that fit together?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Well, number one is obesity. Country mile. It begins with all that. And this began about thirty, forty years ago. If you're obese, there's loads of fat in your tissues. Guess what happens? The immune system doesn't like it. And if you take a sample of fat tissue from someone, visceral fat in particular in the middle, it's full of immune cells. That, that was discovered thirty years ago, which surprised people. What's the immune system doing in fat was the question. The answer is, it wants to, again, the vacuum cleaner, get rid of it. These fats are noxious, you know, they're, they're overstimulating your body. Again, they're making byproducts. You may have come across reactive oxygen as a huge area, these oxygen radicals, bits of bleach are being made amazingly from fat. And that will bleach your tissues and injure them. So the immune system wants to get rid of this. So

• 25:32Speaker 01

  it goes in now and tries to get rid of the fat. And guess what? Overheats again. And now we get the inflammatory process being triggered because of all this fat tissue that's there. Now, the latest stuff, John, that's very exciting, is the semaglutide class of drugs, as you probably well know, GLP one, Ozempic, Mounjaro, they work in part by get, getting rid of fat and lowering inflammation. Isn't that amazing? So they're, they're actually anti-inflammatory as well. And that was more scientific evidence then, that fat is the part of the problem here. So too much fat in your diet, lack of exercise, the fat builds up and that drives the immune system crazy. And now it begins to explode in the wrong place at the wrong time. So there's no doubt that that's one, one big factor. The second one is carbohydrates, of course, because you have too much sugar in your diet.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  That will irritate the body as well. Things get modified by sugar and that begins to irritate the immune system as well. And we knew this for hundreds of years. Moderation is always your friend. And a great line I saw, I think it was in The Guardian, to give them credit. If you eat like the Stone Age and behave like it's the Stone Age, you're less likely to get inflamed. And there was a big link into that then, you know. So again, it's that kind of business of the diet being imbalanced and not being the natural diet. Because your body is the body of a person who evolved three hundred thousand years ago, remember. Not much has happened in that time, really, you know. And yet you're, you're exposing yourself to things that wouldn't have been around three hundred thousand years ago. And then your body goes into overdrive.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  It's really fascinating listening to you talk about that. So I, I think what I heard you say is, there's a number of different ways in which the food we eat can lead to inflammation. One is that if we end up living with obesity, then the fat in our body isn't this completely inert thing. It's both creating, I think you said like something almost like bleach, is that what you said?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  It is like bleach.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  But then our immune system is responding to that. And so it's like being triggered by this level of excess fat and therefore that's creating inflammation.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  But then you also talked, I think, about, you know, diet high in a lot of sugar. And I'd like to come on in a minute to understand that in more detail. But that's another example.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  Do we understand what the role of the microbiome is in all of this?

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Very important. And that's been a breakthrough. If you list the breakthroughs in this business I'm in, the breakthroughs became discovering the bits of the machine, right? And then we realized that the gut is a very complicated place, millions of species, and it's changing dynamically and it's a huge area, you know. And now we know there's a healthy microbiome and a very unhealthy one. And diet allows certain bugs to grow, you know. So certain foodstuffs promote the good bugs. And, and you know, this from fermented foods are a good example. That was discovered by the ancient people. And now we know why. It brings out certain species. Guess what those are doing? They're making molecules that are anti-inflammatory, it turns out, right? There, there's things called short chain fatty acids. That's, that's the area for this. One is called butyrate, for instance. Now, that, that's bacteria

• 28:23Speaker 01

  digesting your food and making a byproduct that's protecting your gut. Now, again, evolution probably set that off, you know. We were selected out to have these bugs in our gut to allow us to do that. Now, you can imagine then, if you get an imbalance in the microbiome, there's nasty guys down there. Now, they're making different things. And they're making molecules that are pro-inflammatory, that are irritating the system. And they can go into your circulation, not just in the gut, by the way. They can go to your liver, they can even go to your brain. There's a theory, John, that, that Parkinson's begins in the gut. Have you come across this? There's certain bacteria that make a noxious thing, gets into the nerves, trappings up into your brain. Now you begin to develop that disease. So the role of the gut and the microbiome is so important. The problem is, there's no credible therapeutic

• 29:06Speaker 01

  yet that have come from that understanding. So it's still a work in progress. Many people are trying to uncover this, to get a medicine out of it, if you like, you know. It's unlikely it'll be eat bacteria because the analogy I use, your guts like the Amazon rainforest, right? There's so many species. If you drop a single marmoset in the middle, they won't breed and take over the whole forest, but you know, so. So it's quite hard to control the microbiome by sticking in certain bacteria, even if you eat loads of them, you know. The, the only one that works is Clostridium for food poisoning. That, that can work. You can count to that one. But overall, has, has it been the progress we'd have liked so far there?

• 29:41Speaker 00

  I think this is why we're convinced about food as the way to influence the microbiome. And I think actually that's a brilliant transition to let's talk about the foods that we should be trying to reduce first.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  And then I'd love to talk later about all the things we could add. I asked you about ultra-processed foods at the beginning. From your perspective, are they real? And if so, what is it about ultra-processed foods that might tie into inflammation?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  I was badly caught myself recently in Ireland. I do things in the media sometimes and I went on about them. And then a very eminent nutritionist, you can't just use this blanket term ultra-processed food. All that that means is you're you're taking a natural food stuff and doing something to it. Now, some of it can be good. You can't say they're all bad. What it comes down to in the end is high sugar, high fat. They're the two nasties. And if you drink a soft drink, it's full of fructose. It's full of corn syrup. That's far too much carbohydrate and that's been ultra-processed. You've concentrated the natural sugar into this drink, you know, and you drink a glass of it. Then you're taking a huge amount of sugar and your body gets overwhelmed by the sugar. So there's very good evidence that those types of things, we've done the fat one already. That will drive fat tissue.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  But people don't realise if you drink too much sugar, that gets turned into fat. There's a biochemical process that takes glucose and makes a thing called citrate. And that finally makes fats. So it's one reason you put on weight is it can just from sugar itself. Because the body's very clever biochemically. You're doing that, by the way, again, it's evolutionary. In ancient times, if you saw loads of sugar, you gorged, right? Because you mightn't see sugar again for a month and you stored some of it as fat. So we evolved to gorge, in a sense, in an environment where it was sparse. But now we're gorging all the time and now we're laying down too much fat. The second reason why sugar is dangerous is if you've got an inflamed tissue, like an arthritic joint, that will burn the glucose in a funny way. And that was on my big discoveries, actually, in my lab back in 2013.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  So if I inject some sugar into an inflamed joint, the inflamed joint is voracious, by the way. Because it's burning away. It's like shoveling coal into an engine, right? Because it's really voracious. But now fumes begin coming off. And we found one particular fume, it's called succinate is the name of it. It's a product from glucose and that's very inflammatory. So now you can say if you're feeding an inflamed tissue loads of sugar, exhaust fumes are coming off the engine now damaging the tissue. And that's one reason why too much sugar is bad for you, because it actually exacerbates the inflammatory process.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  One that you've already said is like, if I'm overweight, I'm living with obesity, that's going to increase my levels of inflammation. So in general, eating food that's going to cause me to put on weight is going to be a problem. But now you're talking about sugar specifically. You're saying separately from whether or not I'm just having so much sugar that I'm going to put on weight. Actually, if I've got inflammation already turned on in my body, then this sugar adding it into my bloodstream can actually cause that inflammation. It's almost like throwing petrol on a fire.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Exactly, that's what it is precisely. The reason it's happening is, you can imagine sugar is like a type of coal going into an into an engine. If you put too much coal in, you get a lot more fumes coming off and they now become damaging. And we can measure these fumes in the blood, this thing succinate, for example. We can measure in the rheumatoid joint. Again, if you take a rheumatoid joint from someone and a normal joint, this is full of succinate. It's come from glucose. We showed in our lab, it came from the glucose you fed the thing, you know, you're making this sort of product in a way. These are normal things, by the way, they aren't unnatural. Again, it's just too many of them. The level has gone far too high. So one reason why a lot of sugar is dangerous is you're making these byproducts, if you will, that become toxic to the body in a way, you know. And again, it's a consequence of overeating too much sugar, really.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  What's the byproduct of this? So I've got this low-grade inflammation, I'm adding the sugar on top, I'm getting these fumes you're describing. What does that do?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Well, they're now irritating the immune cells because the immune cells can sense the fumes. The immune system is able to sense noxious things anyway. It can be bacteria, it can be whatever, it can be cholesterol. They also sense metabolic products. And now those immune cells ratchet up a bit in a way and they get even more active. It's a bit like a feed-forward loop, we call this in a way. You're pushing it in a positive way all the time into this more dangerous state is the way to think of it. Biological systems often have these loops. They have negative feedback turn off, positive to turn them on. And this feeds into that sort of overarching idea that you're propagating the whole thing even further. So the one thing you don't want to do then is to have a bad diet, especially if you've got an inflammatory disease. You're just adding adding petrol to the fire, exactly as you said, that's a good analogy.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  One of the things I've learned is that, you know, I have blood sugar in my blood anyway, right? Like I have to have some blood sugar or I understand I fall over and die. So it's not just having any blood sugar that is the problem, presumably. What exactly is the?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  It's too much, the system goes into overdrive, it's too much, that's one problem. If it's too high, your body doesn't like it. You know, there's a normal level of sugar that we need all the time. We use sugar as a source of energy, it's really important. But if it goes too high, now we begin to see these negative consequences. Getting back to my Stone Age, you know, you rarely got too high in the Stone Age, you know? If it did get too high, it came down quickly, turned into fat as a storage thing and you carried on regardless. But now modern living is far too high and that begins to push the machine a bit too hard is the way to think of it. It will get broken down eventually by the body, of course. Having wreaked a bit of havoc along the way is the way to think of it. So the goal is to keep it low. The big one is insulin, as you probably know as well. So insulin's job is to lower blood glucose. But that's why you make insulin after a meal.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Your pancreas makes it to suck up the glucose into your cells to use as a source of energy. Guess what inflammation does? It makes you less sensitive to your own insulin. It's called insulin resistance. This is the feature of type 2 diabetes. And now blood glucose skyrockets because the cells can't take it up. That promotes more inflammation, promoting yet more resistance to insulin. And you get type 2 diabetes, that's that disease in a nutshell in a way. Because your body gets overwhelmed, if you like, and you become insensitive to your own insulin.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  So this is sort of vicious cycle here where you have some inflammation, therefore when you have high blood sugar, it makes it higher, then your body itself gets worse at dealing with the blood sugar. And it's sort of like ramping up worse and worse.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  You've got it. And then the immune cells are now destroying your tissue, they're destroying your joints, they're destroying your skin in loops, whatever it is. And the whole thing gets gets out of control really.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Are all sugars equally bad in terms of causing the inflammation?

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Too much is bad, too much glucose is bad. But certain sugars are worse and fructose, as you would have come across as well. Now, strangely, that's a natural sugar in fruit. So when you eat an apple or a pear, you're taking in fructose, right? Again, it is too much fructose. That's even more toxic than too much glucose. And one reason for that is fructose will generate even worse byproducts than glucose, you know? So therefore you get even more toxic buildup of things and that's been well worked out now. So I think fructose is especially troublesome among the sugars, too high levels of fructose. Now, fruit's good for you, never forget. It is a natural thing and you want to be taking in fructose, it's a good source of energy. But too much fructose, if you have a gram of glucose versus a gram of fructose,

• 36:49Speaker 01

  in an inflammatory context, the fructose is doing more damage than the glucose. So that's why we don't like fructose, too much fructose is a bad thing.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  So someone listening to this, I think is going to be like, well, hang on a minute. You said, I find fructose in fruit, that's good for me, but I should worry about fructose. So how could I even get fructose if I'm not eating fruit?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  A lot of processed foods have fructose added as an additive. Look at the label, you'll see fructose is added in, you know? So that's the first thing you would say. The second thing is, it's interesting, if fructose is there with fibre and other things, it's less toxic. So if you eat fructose in a normal food, like like an apple, the other bits of the apple, if you will, make the fructose less damaging, you know? And it's partly the microbiome, actually, because the fibre in the fruit, the microbiome begins to burn the fructose. Isn't that great? So you're you're building up a microbiome there that can metabolise some of this fructose. If you take neat fructose, that too much of it is going to go into overdrive and cause all kinds of problems. Especially if you drink it every day. I mean, as you know, people with ultra, we feel sorry for some people that can afford this ultra-processed food, you know?

• 37:54Speaker 01

  If you if you take it chronically, the thing gets worse and worse, if you're having it every day, you know?

• 37:58Speaker 00

  Is fructose always in drinks or can it also be in my food as well?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  It can be in food as well. Yeah, you see, we crave sweetness, remember? What's happening here is, again, on the plains of Africa, 300,000 years ago, we evolved to eat sweet things. So what do food manufacturers do? They put loads of sweet things in their food and fructose is one of those sweet things that's put in food, other sugars as well. And then we like to taste them, we eat more of them. So we're kind of leveraging a normal thing in a way. Now, remember, moderation is good, you can have some fructose, of course. These things aren't all bad. Again, the case of you can have the odd cake now and again. I'm a big fan of enjoying yourself as well, you know, because your mental health's very important. So you can't be too sluggish to it either. But too much is when the problems kick in. And again, certain types of sugars are really bad and fructose is on that list.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  But it's not just fructose. If I had a sugary drink that is normal table sugar.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  That is still going to be bad and cause this inflammation.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Exactly, there's too much precisely. If there's 10 teaspoons of sugar in a drink, that's too much sugar to be taken. Maybe one day in five, it's okay, but but if you drink that drink all the time, you're going to be in real trouble.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  I think everyone listening is not really surprised that sugary food is bad for them. Right. So I think maybe surprised that it's got this tight inflammation and that it's not just about weight gain, but I'd love to talk about some other foods, many of which I think are quite controversial. And can I start with red meat?

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Is red meat good for us in terms of inflammation? What's the situation?

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Well, again, you've got teeth in your mouth that evolved to allow you to eat meat. Okay. So, so we are omnivores. You can choose not to and live off, you know, vegetables, I suppose. But, but we did evolve to eat meat because we have these teeth that can tear it up. So eating meat is a normal thing that we do. But yet again, the dreaded moderation comes in. If you eat too much meat, protein, too much protein can be bad for your kidneys for a start, as you probably know. And one of the fears of these protein drinks is that people drink is they damage, they can damage the kidneys. They needed a lot of meat for that to happen, but still too much protein can overwhelm the system again. Iron is in meat. The redness of meat is based on hemoglobin, you see. And in the muscle, there's loads of iron. Too much iron can cause the body again to get a bit irritated, you know.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  So again, too much meat, we, we know a lot about eating too much meat can be damaging. And most importantly of all is the balanced diet for obvious reasons. If you just eat meat, you're going to be in trouble because you need the other fibre from other places and other things for another reason. Yeah. So meat itself isn't bad. Too much of it is. And then on its own is your main source of nutrients. It's going to be more damaging.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  Eating meat is fine. We're evolved to do that, but eating too much can actually cause inflammation in our body?

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. One thing it does cause is this oxygen damage, these oxygen radicals, they're called reactive oxygen species. This is bleach, actually. That's not a bad analogy. We use oxygen all the time, of course we do. Oxygen is needed for us to burn glucose and burn fat, you know. The trouble is you can get byproducts from the oxygen and these can be very damaging. And they are like bleach molecules, really. Now meat can promote some of that bleach to be made. Now guess what's in vegetables, John? Antioxidants. They suppress the bleach, they're antioxidant. So if you eat meat with vegetables, you're going to counter some of the risk of the oxygen that's going to get toxic in a way.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  And a big reason for the vegetables is the microbiome, because that will allow the right bugs to grow in your gut that maintain your health. So that's all very clear. If you just eat meat, your microbiome is going to look very different because the species of bacteria can't grow because they need fibre, you see. So now all the evidence would suggest you need a balance of the two, really.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  I'd love to talk about some foods that people cut out because they're worried that they are causing inflammation. And the first one that I see a lot of is gluten. And obviously there are people with celiac disease, but there are a lot of other people avoiding gluten because they're worried that it's going to be causing inflammation anyway.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  You know, what does the latest science say about this?

• 41:58Speaker 01

  There's a protein in gluten. It's called alpha glyadin, another mouthful. And for some reason, some people's immune system react to the glyadin and they go into overdrive now. And you get a big immune response to the glyadin in the gluten. And even worse than it turns into an autoimmune disease. Can you believe it? So celiac eventually becomes autoimmune because the immune system is off kilter. The glyadin is getting recognised and one of your own proteins is also a bit like glyadin, that gets recognised as well. And now you get your own tissues now generating an immune response. So celiac is well worked out and you've got to cut gluten out. By the way, that's a research to allow people to eat gluten, you know. And there's ways now to desensitise celiac people to gluten and now they can eat whatever they like. We're not there yet, but there's progress here.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  And in fact, if that works, you might desensitise to other things that cause arthritis or lupus, these autoantigens. That could give rise to breakthroughs in autoimmune disease. Now, if you haven't got celiac, gluten is just another source of nutrients, really, you know. And to my knowledge, there's limited, limited evidence that gluten and someone without celiac, they shouldn't see any ill effects, really. Now, the trouble is there may be a subset of people who are pre-clinically celiac, you know what I mean? They mightn't have all the symptoms and maybe they feel a bit bloated and a bit funny on the gluten. You can test for celiac now. If anybody feels they're, they're, they're reacting to gluten, I would go and get it tested. But overall, for healthy people with no celiac for definite, gluten is like any other source of nutrients, really, in a plant. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  By really improving my microbiome and really changing my diet in a big way, suddenly actually I've found I can eat loads of things that I thought I was having a problem with. And so I do think it's easy to focus on being intolerant to a particular issue. And potentially your issue is actually really your gut is just not in good shape. And if you can get it into a healthier place and suddenly have these microbes that are going to help you out, you know, you can be in a different place. That's obviously very different from having autoimmune diseases.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. More than likely, it's a combination of things that are going off kilter for some reason, you know. And then people begin to say, oh, it must be this or that or the other. It may not be as simple as that for them. But it's a tricky one because some people do have real problems with these things and they want to be helped, I suppose.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  I'd love to talk about a couple of other foods where a lot of people give them up because they're worried that they're inflammatory. One is dairy. What's the situation there?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Well, there is lactose intolerance as well, remember, which is really, again, that's an immune response. We've discussed fructose and glucose already. Lactose is the main sugar in milk and we love it. Babies suck up the lactose. They use that sugar to put energy into build things. So it's a great, very natural thing. For some strange reason, a percent of people have lactose intolerance and their immune system now like an allergy to the lactose. And that's a real thing. We probably evolved, interestingly, in maybe, I don't know, tens of thousands of years ago in Europe. The ones who were lactose tolerant survived because there were those dairy products around. And the ones who were intolerant died out. And that does a genetic basis for this, by the way, as well. You can tell from their genes if they're lactose tolerant or intolerant.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  So again, it's a bit like celiac again. There's a group of people out there who can't take lactose. Again, that can be tested for. You can test for lactose tolerance or intolerance. It is a type of allergy. Remember allergy, if you're an immunologist, is you're overreacting to something in the environment. It can be peanuts, it can be crustaceans. In those people, some are overreacting to lactose. So that's, that's another one that's a food intolerance that's through the immune system.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Got it. So unlike, it seems like you're saying there are foods that are just sort of going to be inflammatory for everybody. Like if I keep drinking Coca-Cola, that's going to be inflammatory. But it sounds like you're saying bread or, you know, full fat milk is more personalised. Some people, this may be inflammatory, but actually for the majority of people, this is a perfectly healthy whole food.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Most people, most foodstuffs are fine unless you eat too much of them and then you're, you're in trouble and don't balance them with other things.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Last food that I think, you know, the internet is awash with fear that it causes inflammation is seed oils. What's the truth about seed oils from your research?

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Oil from vegetables is uniformly good. Let's start with that fact, right? Olive oil and all those oils are great. Loads of evidence for that, right? You're going to look at it on the label, I suppose. If they're natural oils from natural plants like sunflower, these are pretty healthy for the vast majority of people.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  I'd love to switch now to about what we can add into our diets to reduce inflammation. So I guess my first question would be, if you were just going to describe like a sort of overall sort of anti-inflammatory diet to somebody who has never thought about this before, what would you be telling them to eat? When I hit 40, I started feeling tired and sluggish. I remember thinking, great, this is it. It's all downhill from here, but I was completely wrong. It wasn't my age, it was my diet. It was literally sapping my energy. I was trying to juggle kids, work and exercise. And back then I'd just grab whatever food was nearby.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  I still have that crazy schedule, but what's changed is what I put in my body. Our own research at Zoe has shown that if your digestion feels off or you're regularly feeling exhausted, it's often because your gut bugs are starving. They thrive on a huge variety of plants, at least 30 different plants a week. And the more, the better. But if you're as stretched as me, it's not always easy to achieve this. And that's exactly why our scientists developed Daily 30. It's a great tasting gut health supplement with over 30 plants in every single scoop. I take it every day without fail. And because we're Zoe, we don't just guess, we test. We put Daily 30 through a randomised controlled trial, the gold standard of testing.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  The results absolutely blew us away, proving it's good for energy, digestion and gut health. That trial helped us develop the formula that we have today. So if you're not feeling like yourself, don't settle for feeling sluggish. Head to Zoe.com/daily30 and try it for yourself.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  A balanced diet will mean your immune system is being fed the right kind of things. And they'll keep your immune system in tip top shape. If it's imbalanced with various things that we discussed, the immune system will like it and will begin to overreact. Secondly, the calories, of course, if you eat too much, the system goes into overdrive, as we discussed as well. So moderation is always your friend here. But never forget, I always quote Jonathan Swift. Remember, he wrote Oliver's Travels. Remember, he wrote a famous thing. He said, all you want is three doctors to look after you. Doctor Diet, which we're just discussing. Doctor Sleep, and that can be a huge confounder in these studies. And Doctor Mirth, which means have a bit of a laugh and enjoy yourself occasionally. Now, this is where we get to the problem of someone saying it's gluten.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  It could be a bad night's sleep all the time is affecting them in a way. And all three may interact, by the way. You've got to look at it in the context of other things as well.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  I love the idea of Doctor Mirth.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  Because I feel that a lot of people talking about wellness, it's like all incredibly serious. And there's like no room to have any fun. So I wasn't, I thought you were about to say Doctor Exercise, but I love the fact that you went to Doctor Mirth.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  And the idea that actually happiness itself.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Really important. And I would put the premium on that, John, to be honest, because, because if you get stressed and cortisol, all the usual things and depression, anxiety, they have massive negative effects on your health. In fact, that could swamp out any bad diet effect, for instance, you know. Now, there's, again, people are very interested in the interaction between them. And a big area that many are involved in is the brain immune connection. More and more evidence that your mood affects your immune system. If you're stressed, that could put the immune system off kilter and you get inflammation, you know. So it goes beyond the notion of diet, but again, they probably interact. And that's why I'm a big fan of a little bit of what you fancy. Even though you might think, oh, I shouldn't have that cake. I shouldn't have that cream bun. And now and again, you get a bit of mirth, you know, and that can counterbalance any of the negative effects.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  You know, in our own lives, if you're in a bad mood or depressed even, you may get indigestion from normal foods. And that's a really important fact, isn't it? You know, that's the brain talking to the digestive system here, you know. And you might have a balanced diet, but if you've got the stress thing going on, that balanced diet might become noxious to you. You know, your body is responding to it. So the interplay between these things is a real frontier that people are very interested in. So, so I think, remember all three, he didn't, he didn't say exercise because everybody exercised in those, there were no cars.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  You didn't have any choice. Everybody is.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  It's a walk for five miles a day to school and back, whatever it was, you know. So the natural state was to be exercising.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  That's really interesting. So it's another example of how we're having to worry about things now that 200 years ago, you wouldn't even think about.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  I feel I have to talk about plants because Zoe, you know, we're really big fans of eating a diverse range of plants because of the way that this is food for our microbiome. But can that help in any way the inflammation?

• 50:55Speaker 01

  We love them. Let's start with that. We love them. The first anti-inflammatories, remember, were plant-based. The very first drugs from plants were anti-inflammatory.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  Is that right?

• 51:05Speaker 01

  The reason for that is the ancients could see the inflammatory wound. You didn't need a microscope, did you? And they'd rub in things. The most famous one of all being willow bark. Now, willow bark was known to be anti-inflammatory. Finally, in the 1870s, they purified the active ingredient. It was called salicyte from willow. That was the base for aspirin. So aspirin is anti-inflammatory, but it began with the herbal remedy willow bark, you know. The other one we love is curcumin and turmeric. Those kind of herbal based things have got a very strong foundation through antiquity. The problem is if you go to your health food shop and buy it, you're not sure what the dose is. That's one issue. It's a bit unregulated and worries me slightly, but we start with those herbal things. Rosemary has benefits.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Coriander, those sorts of Mediterranean herbs, which only grow there because of the temperature. Maybe they grow here eventually with global warming. They're very rich in oils and they're purifying things from those herbs as well that could be beneficial too. So a balanced diet and all these herbs and olive oil, that's a really good balance. That seems to get, and that was arrived at empirically by our ancient poor bearers. They knew, they knew some of this just by observing what they were eating, I suppose. So, so that kind of balance that we see in the Mediterranean diet, and there's very good evidence, as you know. So the Mediterranean diet, and that's defined by things like nuts and legumes and herbs. There's been really good studies on that. Big study, it lowered CRP, the biomarker of inflammation, the Mediterranean diet.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  You know, so there you have some of the evidence then that, that these diets actually do something that's measurable, that we know is inflammatory. You know, now you can show it's working now.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  One of the things that I hear our scientists and others talk a lot more about is polyphenols in plants. And they talk about that in relationship often to the microbiome. Does that link into inflammation in any way?

• 52:52Speaker 01

  It's very interesting. They're antioxidants, remember. Now, as I said earlier, you get these oxygen radicals, they're called, coming off food that can be very damaging. Loads of literature on this, like tens of thousands of papers. Now, these are natural antioxidants. They lower the bleach that you're making. And you believe, I mean, it's a strange analogy, but you are making bits of bleach. You're making in your immune system, by the way, to kill all known germs dead. That's domestos. You make a natural bleach, I bet you never knew that.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  I didn't.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, the cells called neutrophils that make bleach to squirt on the bacteria. So we make our own bleach.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  I can see that would be dangerous if it got out of hand.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Now we're talking, so you can see now that if you make too much bleach, that begins to bleach your own tissues and causes the injury. You know, there's evidence for this. What are these antioxidants? So they're chemicals, natural chemicals that mop up the oxygen radicals and detoxify your body of these things. And again, we see loads of them in plants. Plants are very rich in them. That's one reason we eat plants, probably. They get into your gut and certain bugs love them. Again, getting back to the idea, certain species of bacteria, they, they eat them and they really like them and they start dividing, you know. So it looks as if polyphenols can also help the microbiome, but they're not as important by a country mile as fibre. That's, that's your key microbiome feeder, as you might know, fibre in your diet.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  The main benefit from fibre is to get the right balance of bacteria in your, loads of evidence for this. A high fibre diet's beneficial because it works through the microbiome. Now, by the way, the plants and the polyphenols are the fibre anyway.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  And so if I increase the fibre, like we know that overall that's very good for my health and it's good for my microbiome. Does it have any impact on my inflammation?

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Well, it will do through the bacteria. So you're allowing the good guys to grow. They're making chemicals, natural chemicals that suppress inflammation. So it's indirect, if you like. There's some evidence of some fibre breakdown products being anti-inflammatory themselves. So you never know. You make a two for the price of one. The bugs are growing and they're suppressing inflammation. And meanwhile, you're making interesting things off the fibre that also might repress inflammation.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  What about supplements? Because there must be millions of supplements on the market that, you know, claim to be anti-inflammatory. Are these worth spending your money on?

• 55:00Speaker 01

  I'm always slightly sceptical, let's start with that, because you should get it from a balanced diet. You shouldn't have to take vitamins either, by the way, because then balanced diet will be full of them. Now, if you have certain diseases where your nutrients are problematic and you can't metabolise things properly, you might have anaemia. There's various things, vitamin D deficiency, then you take a supplement. But generally, if you're reasonably healthy, there's no need to take these supplements because the balanced diet will provide it, provide you with the things that you need.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  Final question. If someone is listening to this podcast, is suddenly thinking, oh, wow, actually, I think I am living with this chronic inflammation. What's the one thing that they could start doing today?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  It's always good to get expert advice on these things. So the number one advice is try to get reassured, try to get some mirth, good balanced diet, exercise, sunshine in the morning. Did you know, John, the first hour of sunshine is more beneficial than sunshine at dusk? There's a circadian aspect to inflammation, you know, it's worse at certain times of the day, you know. If your clock is off kilter, jet lag exacerbates arthritis. Did you know that? Because your body clock is off kilter. Get the clock regularised by sunshine in the morning, you know.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  Well, Luke, there are so many topics you've just opened up there at the end. I definitely want to have you come back and cover them. Unfortunately, we're over time. So what I would like to do is just try and do a little wrap up. I'm going to try and summarise. So the first thing that springs to mind is this analogy that my immune system is sort of like this vacuum cleaner going around cleaning up the damage. But unfortunately, in our modern world, like this vacuum cleaner is massively overheating. The vacuum cleaner can't cope, it's burning up. And then it starts to create all of these problems. And you describe the way that like my inflammation system makes basically like bleach inside my body to clean things up. Good for killing bugs, bad if it's out of control.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  And as a result of this low grade, long-term inflammation, you are saying that's what causes heart disease. That's what causes Parkinson's. That's what causes Alzheimer's. But even aging itself, it seems, may be largely driven by this inflammation, this inflammaging idea. Which also means if you can reduce the inflammation, you know, we can live longer, healthier, happier lives. So that's really exciting. On the flip side, if you are living with this chronic inflammation. Actually, it leads to the sickness behaviour. And so you said fatigue is one of the key features. Then we talked about specifically like what's the foods that we're eating and how does this affect it?

• 57:33Speaker 00

  We all know that having lots of sugar isn't very good for us and having a diet where you're constantly having these blood sugar spikes is bad. But interestingly, your own research has shown that if you do have this inflammation, then actually high levels of blood sugar make it particularly bad because you get these sort of fumes that come off it that then make inflammation even higher and fructose is even worse. So if you've got this ultra processed food that often has this fructose thing, it's a problem. However, if I eat an apple, you said it's totally fine because it's sort of wrapped up in the fibre and actually that's going to be healthy for me. So it's not that fruit is bad, it's what happens when you take the sugar off it. We then talked about meat and what you said is like, we're evolved to eat meat.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  If we're eating meat in moderation, you shouldn't worry about it. But when you're eating meat, it is actually causing this oxygen damage. If you're eating all these vegetables with it, then they're sort of the antioxidant fire brigade to put it out. So you need to balance that out. We then talked about some of the foods that people are very worried about being inflammatory, like gluten and dairy. And what you said is like, there are specific tests and if you're worried, you should go to your doctor, have those tests, something like celiac is a really serious disease. But if you don't, you shouldn't feel like gluten is just an inflammatory food for everybody. Like the vast majority of people can digest that just fine. And then finally, we talked about like, what should you do? Your microbiome is this huge support.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  So if you can eat the diet that really feeds it, then it creates all of these anti inflammatory products. And so, you know, polyphenols are one thing in the food which is exciting, but the biggest thing is just all this diversity of fibre because then it's going to support you. And we shouldn't be shocked because you said like plants were the original anti inflammatory medicines. And you were saying like willow bark, which became aspirin, like people use this for thousands of years. And the final thing I think I wouldn't want to leave without is remember Dr. Murth for your long term health. You know, like we talk about all the things with food and all the rest of it, but actually having pleasure and fun is really helpful and can lower your inflammation.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  So, you know, don't get so caught up in all this wellness and stuff that you lose the ability to actually enjoy your life.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Can you come work for me? You've captured it all perfectly.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

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