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Episode: The Real Anti-inflammatory Diet

Author: Spotify Studios
Duration: 00:42:02

Episode Shownotes

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

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_04
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. This is the show that pits facts against the fire inside your body. Today on the show, inflammation. Everyone is talking about it.

00:00:20 Speaker_01
If you're not feeling well, you most likely have inflammation.

00:00:24 Speaker_02
The number one health trend of 2024 is reducing inflammation.

00:00:30 Speaker_04
Reducing inflammation that we hear so much about these days. If you're feeling crappy in basically any way, people say that it is inflammation that's to blame.

00:00:40 Speaker_03
You're typically bloated and maybe you have headaches and you're having problems sleeping at night or you're fatigued during the day. Inflammation is really dangerous in a lot of ways because it just triggers bad things in your body.

00:00:51 Speaker_04
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.

00:01:03 Speaker_04
Inflammation in our brains can cause all kinds of problems, including anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue.

00:01:07 Speaker_02
Inflammation gets in the way of your brain neurons talking to each other.

00:01:11 Speaker_05
You're feeling a little more anxious, have a bit of depression. This is a huge sign of chronic inflammation.

00:01:17 Speaker_04
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.

00:01:31 Speaker_06
Overexercising can cause a lot of inflammation, especially in the gut.

00:01:36 Speaker_04
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?

00:01:53 Speaker_02
Blackberries, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries. Anti-inflammation juice. Celery, ginger. And if you can get turmeric, absolutely add the turmeric.

00:02:04 Speaker_04
Turmeric is the one when it comes to fighting inflammation.

00:02:07 Speaker_01
Let's talk about nightshades. Tomatoes and nightshades are going to kill you.

00:02:14 Speaker_04
Did you catch that? Tomatoes and nightshades are going to kill you. If you missed it, catch up. But curiously, it's not just health fluences that are obsessed with inflammation these days. Scientists are too.

00:02:30 Speaker_04
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!

00:02:44 Speaker_04
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?

00:03:01 Speaker_04
When it comes to our health, a lot of us have been wondering if we most likely have inflammation, but then there's science. Science vs. Inflammation is coming up just after the break. Welcome back. Today we are looking at inflammation.

00:03:30 Speaker_04
How big of a problem is this? What can we do to tamp it down? Meryl Hord, senior producer at Science Versus. Hi, Wendy. Are you worried about your inflammation?

00:03:42 Speaker_06
I kind of am now. I wasn't before doing this episode, but now I'm like, this might be real. So yeah, it's been a journey.

00:03:52 Speaker_04
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?

00:04:04 Speaker_06
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.

00:04:18 Speaker_06
So like it fights viruses and bacteria. And that's a good thing. Right.

00:04:23 Speaker_00
Yes.

00:04:23 Speaker_06
But we know that that fight can take a 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.

00:04:35 Speaker_00
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.

00:04:43 Speaker_06
Like that's inflammation. Yeah.

00:04:45 Speaker_00
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.

00:04:55 Speaker_06
So, yeah, being sick can actually give people symptoms of depression, like feeling sad and unmotivated. 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.

00:05:12 Speaker_06
And the doctors noticed that this treatment was making a lot of their patients really depressed. Oh, wow. So, like, there is evidence that inflammation itself can, like, make people's mental health worse.

00:05:24 Speaker_04
And so how does all of this work? How exactly does inflammation affect our mental health?

00:05:30 Speaker_06
Well, scientists are finding that out right now. And one of the big discoveries in the field was made by Caroline.

00:05:36 Speaker_00
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 it was really cool.

00:05:49 Speaker_04
So what did she say?

00:05:50 Speaker_06
OK, so to explain what she saw, let me first explain how her lab researches this.

00:05:56 Speaker_04
OK.

00:05:56 Speaker_06
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.

00:06:13 Speaker_06
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.

00:06:26 Speaker_06
And every day they basically get bullied by this more aggressive mouse. What does a bullying mouse look like? I mean, sometimes it actually kind of beats up the tinier one.

00:06:36 Speaker_06
Other times it will just stare it down, looming over the mouse and it will sometimes like rattle his tail at it.

00:06:45 Speaker_00
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 those holes.

00:06:54 Speaker_00
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 side of the schoolyard, you don't know if it's going to come for you.

00:07:04 Speaker_06
Oh, no. Oh, that poor little mouse. 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.

00:07:17 Speaker_06
And so Caroline kind of looks at those mice that are really affected by this, and she does see that they have higher inflammation. OK. So this is basically chronic inflammation in the mice.

00:07:28 Speaker_06
And then the question is, well, what is this all doing to their brains?

00:07:32 Speaker_04
Exactly.

00:07:33 Speaker_06
So to find that out, Caroline's team killed the mice, sliced up their brains. Right. 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. OK.

00:07:49 Speaker_06
And so this is this barrier that sort of surrounds all the 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.

00:08:01 Speaker_04
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?

00:08:10 Speaker_06
Well, that's what Caroline wanted to look at.

00:08:13 Speaker_06
Since we know that these immune cells are pumping out inflammatory chemicals, and she saw that they were lining up near the barrier, she wanted to know whether this was actually affecting the blood-brain barrier.

00:08:25 Speaker_06
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.

00:08:35 Speaker_04
Okay, great. Wait, what is this? It looks like two eels kissing on a thermal camera.

00:08:46 Speaker_06
What am I looking at? I mean, I guess I could see that. So that picture is of a control mouse, and that's the blood-brain barrier, lit up in fluorescent green. I guess it kind of looks like eels.

00:08:59 Speaker_06
But now let me show you the second picture of the mouse that has chronic inflammation. And you can see that the eels are kind of ripped to shreds.

00:09:09 Speaker_04
That is a messed up blood-brain barrier there. I mean, the green lines, you can actually barely see them in some places.

00:09:20 Speaker_00
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 barrier is broken.

00:09:28 Speaker_06
Yeah, I mean, it almost looks like it's been ripped apart.

00:09:30 Speaker_00
Yeah, exactly. And this is where the inflammation is sneaking. The inflammation is sneaking in.

00:09:36 Speaker_04
Is that what she said?

00:09:37 Speaker_06
Yeah, that's where the cytokines can get into the brain. And we know that once they're there, they can really do some damage. So they can cause oxidative stress in our neurons.

00:09:51 Speaker_06
And the cytokines can actually mess up the production of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, which we know can play a role in depression.

00:10:01 Speaker_04
And so how much of this evidence is in humans now?

00:10:05 Speaker_06
We are getting more and more that's in humans. 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.

00:10:19 Speaker_06
And she could check, like, did they have the same little holes in their blood-brain barrier that the mice did?

00:10:24 Speaker_00
Yeah. And so we were able to see the same phenomenon in the human brain as well of individuals who died by suicide.

00:10:32 Speaker_06
Compared to?

00:10:33 Speaker_00
Healthy control. So healthy control would die from other reasons, for example, a car accident or something that was not related to depression.

00:10:41 Speaker_06
Wow. So you think this is happening in people too? Yes. And so now researchers are like trying to figure out if we can use this to help people with depression.

00:10:49 Speaker_04
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?

00:11:05 Speaker_06
That's still a little unclear.

00:11:06 Speaker_06
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.

00:11:23 Speaker_06
So it's not going to be everyone, but it could be a pretty big chunk.

00:11:27 Speaker_04
It's funny because as you were explaining the mechanism of how it all works. 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,

00:11:43 Speaker_04
I do feel as if my brain gets a bit cottonbally or brain foggy. I can almost feel those cytokines flooding in through my crappy blood-brain barrier. And this only happened since I got COVID a couple of years ago.

00:12:02 Speaker_04
I never used to have this effect and I got a pretty nasty case of COVID.

00:12:05 Speaker_06
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.

00:12:16 Speaker_06
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.

00:12:25 Speaker_04
Oh, gosh, I'm so nervous. It's not going to be good.

00:12:29 Speaker_00
Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. The barrier of the brain became way more leaky in those individuals who had very strong cases of COVID. And then even with the brain fog, the long-term COVID, they see this weakness of the barrier.

00:12:43 Speaker_00
So maybe the inflammation was so intense that the barrier became a bit more fragile.

00:12:49 Speaker_04
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?

00:13:02 Speaker_06
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

00:13:18 Speaker_06
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.

00:13:28 Speaker_04
Do you know, like, I can almost feel brain fog right now from the stress of what you have just told me there. Oh, no.

00:13:39 Speaker_06
Continue with your laundry list of the terrible things caused by chronic inflammation. I'm sorry, Wendy's brain. I know. All right. So yeah, we know that chronic inflammation is also linked to heart disease.

00:13:53 Speaker_06
One reason is that if your blood vessels are a little bit inflamed a lot of the time, that can make plaque build up. Chronic inflammation is also linked to type 2 diabetes, cancer, asthma, and then of course there's a ton of autoimmune

00:14:08 Speaker_06
immune diseases, so it's a long list.

00:14:11 Speaker_04
You're almost like the big mouse, just bullying me with facts about how terrible inflammation is right now, just staring at me. I am not the bully mouse. Bullying me with facts. So why is it that some of us

00:14:29 Speaker_04
Where does this chronic inflammation come from? Stress, as you've talked about.

00:14:34 Speaker_06
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.

00:14:46 Speaker_06
So people who are fatter might have more inflammation and air pollution can cause inflammation too. So one paper estimated based on this like common marker for inflammation called CRP, that about 35% of U.S. adults have chronic inflammation.

00:15:03 Speaker_00
Wow.

00:15:04 Speaker_06
And then another study said that 70% of all deaths worldwide are caused by chronic inflammatory diseases. Wow. So it's coming for a lot of us. Oh, gosh.

00:15:16 Speaker_04
Wow, wow, wow. I mean, I wasn't sure just because there's so much talk about chronic inflammation. I really

00:15:25 Speaker_04
I'm 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.

00:15:38 Speaker_06
Yeah, or at least it's playing a role for sure. I was surprised too. Why were you surprised? I think it's just when people say that there is like one thing that can explain so much, I'm always just suspicious.

00:15:51 Speaker_06
There's no way that there's like a one process is like responsible for all these different things. Right. Exactly.

00:15:58 Speaker_06
But it seems like there's actually a lot of evidence backing backing it up that this is this puppet master of health inside of our bodies. OK. OK. So then.

00:16:08 Speaker_04
The question becomes, how do we fix this? Can we fix it?

00:16:12 Speaker_06
Yeah. And a lot of people say that the key to lowering your inflammation is through diet.

00:16:18 Speaker_04
Right. Yes.

00:16:19 Speaker_06
And when I first started looking into this, one claim that I kept coming across was this idea that if you want to reduce your inflammation, you got to cut out stuff from your diet.

00:16:31 Speaker_04
Yes.

00:16:32 Speaker_06
Like one thing that surprised me was nightshades, which includes vegetables like eggplants, potatoes, also tomatoes.

00:16:42 Speaker_04
This surprised you? This has been around for ages. 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 any science here? Why do people hate nightshades?

00:16:56 Speaker_06
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 makes them bad for us. Yeah.

00:17:10 Speaker_04
Right.

00:17:11 Speaker_06
And well, I mean, there are these chemicals in them that people think might be bad. So one of the big ones is called solanine. And researchers have tried, like, giving this to mice. And it found that it did make their gut kind of messed up.

00:17:28 Speaker_04
Uh-huh.

00:17:28 Speaker_06
And there's even a case study from the 70s 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.

00:17:44 Speaker_04
That's such a thing that would happen to schoolboys in England.

00:17:47 Speaker_06
Yeah. Poor lads. We ate the old potatoes. Was this like a Charles Dickens story? So like, yeah, there was those studies, but I felt like none of that was that convincing.

00:18:00 Speaker_04
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?

00:18:08 Speaker_06
Yeah, no, one one report from the University of California, San Francisco, said that in people, quote, no research has shown that solanine has a direct effect on inflammation, unquote.

00:18:21 Speaker_06
So, yeah, there really does not seem to be any convincing evidence that cutting out nightshades can lower inflammation.

00:18:28 Speaker_04
You're not cutting eggplants out of your diet anytime soon.

00:18:31 Speaker_06
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. Yes. And they also have fiber in them.

00:18:45 Speaker_06
And, you know, we covered this a few weeks ago. Fiber can lower your inflammation by keeping your microbes happy.

00:18:52 Speaker_06
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.

00:19:04 Speaker_06
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.

00:19:16 Speaker_04
OK, so nightshades back on the menu. Jug foods is still bad for us. What's up next?

00:19:23 Speaker_06
After the break, an anti-inflammatory diet that scientists are actually excited about. Wow, that's big. That's big. Plus, could exercise be causing chronic inflammation?

00:19:34 Speaker_04
Coming up. Welcome back. Today we're talking about inflammation. Meryl has scared the **** 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.

00:20:06 Speaker_04
What else you got for us?

00:20:08 Speaker_06
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. Yes. And that's been used for thousands of years in South Asia as part of Ayurvedic medicine.

00:20:23 Speaker_06
And it's thought to help with inflammation. Yeah.

00:20:25 Speaker_04
Yeah. Seeing a lot on turmeric shots, turmeric in this, turmeric in that.

00:20:30 Speaker_06
Yeah. It's a huge market now. Yes. 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? Great.

00:20:45 Speaker_06
And a lot of these studies find that, yeah, it can actually do this. Uh-huh. 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.

00:21:03 Speaker_04
So what do you make of that? I mean, are you adding more turmeric to things now?

00:21:08 Speaker_06
I haven't been, no. I just feel like the science isn't solid enough yet. Mm-hmm. Okay.

00:21:14 Speaker_06
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. Great. It's just clinical trial.

00:21:30 Speaker_06
So I talked to one of the researchers who's been running it.

00:21:33 Speaker_05
My name is Rosa Casas. I'm an associate professor at the University of Barcelona.

00:21:40 Speaker_06
And so her study has been going on for like 20 years. It's actually one of the biggest randomized controlled trials on diet ever. Wow. It's called the PREDIMED study and it's on the Mediterranean diet.

00:21:55 Speaker_04
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?

00:22:07 Speaker_06
All right. So here is like a classic meal that you might eat if you're on this diet.

00:22:12 Speaker_05
Pasta with some nice sauce. It's a sauce that is made with tomato, garlic, and onion. And you slowly simmer it with olive oil. That sounds tasty. It's very good and very healthy. Sofrito.

00:22:32 Speaker_04
That sounds delicious.

00:22:33 Speaker_06
Exactly. This actually got me kind of excited because I was like, oh, I would eat that. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so besides pasta and veggies, people were also encouraged to have stuff like fruit, beans, nuts, fish, and seafood.

00:22:47 Speaker_06
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.

00:22:54 Speaker_04
So that is the Mediterranean diet. Then tell me about this amazing study.

00:22:59 Speaker_06
Okay, so they got over 7,000 people who are at least 55 years old, and they had a higher risk for heart disease.

00:23:09 Speaker_06
And if you were in the Mediterranean diet group, then you'd meet with a dietitian who would give you advice about how to incorporate all these foods into your diet.

00:23:19 Speaker_06
But then, just to make sure people really change their diets, the researchers also shipped food to them. So some people got nuts or olive oil. And the people who got olive oil were getting a liter of it a week. What? One liter a week? Yeah. Yeah.

00:23:37 Speaker_06
That was for the whole family. For the Von Trapp family? What? Yeah, I mean, I guess they wanted people to just go wild with this stuff, right? Like drizzle a little on everything.

00:23:50 Speaker_04
OK, all right. It's expensive, but OK. And then if you were not in this group, what was the control?

00:23:58 Speaker_06
They were actually told to go on a low fat diet, but you weren't given any olive oil or pushed to eat these other Mediterranean diet specific friendly foods by the dietician.

00:24:08 Speaker_04
And so what did she find?

00:24:09 Speaker_06
OK, so after all this mailing of olive oil, you know, meal planning with the dietitian, here's what happened with their inflammation. So in this part of the study, Rosa looked at 164 people.

00:24:21 Speaker_05
After one year, we observed reductions in inflammation because of the Mediterranean diet. So, yeah, they saw less inflammation.

00:24:32 Speaker_06
That marker that a lot of researchers look at, CRP, was down by more than 40 percent. Wow. Do you remember the moment you saw that this diet basically worked?

00:24:44 Speaker_05
Yes, I remember the moment and it was, wow, this very incredible, no?

00:24:52 Speaker_06
And this work has been replicated by other studies. So according to one meta-analysis, going on the Mediterranean diet really does work to reduce inflammation.

00:25:01 Speaker_04
That's awesome. So what's it doing? Why is it helping?

00:25:06 Speaker_06
Well, it seems like it is about the fact that it's a bunch of different foods kind of working together. Groza says forget this idea that there's like this one superfood that's the anti-inflammatory one that everyone just needs to eat.

00:25:20 Speaker_06
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.

00:25:27 Speaker_06
So, for example, if you're eating a lot of fish, stuff like salmon, you'd be eating omega-3 fatty acids, and they might be reducing inflammation in a few different ways.

00:25:37 Speaker_06
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.

00:25:51 Speaker_06
And that will make it harder for your cells, for your immune cells to like become inflammatory.

00:25:58 Speaker_04
Oh, that's cool.

00:26:01 Speaker_06
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. Yes. And then you're eating less junk food.

00:26:10 Speaker_06
And just by the way, I noticed that, you know how you see all these lists of top five anti-inflammatory foods?

00:26:16 Speaker_04
Of course, of course.

00:26:18 Speaker_06
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.

00:26:31 Speaker_04
Right. It's not the food on these lists. They don't have some magical anti-inflammatory power.

00:26:39 Speaker_06
Yeah, basically. I mean, if anything, fiber is the magic. But then Rosa and her team wanted to find out like, OK, we know that the Mediterranean diet lowers inflammation. But like, does this all actually lower your risk of getting diseases?

00:26:55 Speaker_06
Like if you're on this diet for years? Oh, of course. Of course, inflammation is one thing. But you really want to just not be sick.

00:27:02 Speaker_06
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 U.S. Right. And like we've said, that is linked to inflammation. Yeah.

00:27:12 Speaker_05
And they found that it helped. To follow a Mediterranean diet, reduce the cardiovascular disease by 30% in comparison with a low-fat diet. Whoa.

00:27:24 Speaker_04
She said 30 percent lower.

00:27:26 Speaker_06
Yeah. And other studies find this kind of thing, too. Nice. And then one more disease I want to tell you about. They looked at breast cancer.

00:27:35 Speaker_06
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. What's that?

00:27:44 Speaker_04
Is that an inflammation story as well? Is it because it's lowering inflammation?

00:27:49 Speaker_06
Yeah, I mean, we do think that inflammation can help tumors grow. So yeah, it just it seemed like this diet was really helping people with a lot of stuff.

00:27:59 Speaker_04
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. The frying part, it's like

00:28:17 Speaker_06
You simmer it slowly with olive oil.

00:28:19 Speaker_04
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.

00:28:26 Speaker_04
And 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.

00:28:39 Speaker_04
That's really not how we should be thinking about it. It's really your whole diet. Which is a bit annoying. Yeah. So then speaking of other things that are annoying, exercise. So what's the story here?

00:28:54 Speaker_04
Because 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.

00:29:05 Speaker_06
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.

00:29:16 Speaker_04
Yes. What's the science here?

00:29:19 Speaker_06
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.

00:29:33 Speaker_03
When you're exercising in general, you will always have, because exercise is a stressor, you have this sharp increase in inflammation.

00:29:41 Speaker_06
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. Yeah. If you do a triathlon, inflammation in your blood will still be really high, even 24 hours later.

00:29:57 Speaker_06
It seems like this is because really intense exercise can damage or just put a lot of stress on your muscles.

00:30:04 Speaker_04
This is excellent, Meryl, because I never want to do a marathon. And so any extra reason as to why I don't do that, this episode is just getting better and better for me personally.

00:30:18 Speaker_06
And 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.

00:30:26 Speaker_01
Wow, thank you.

00:30:27 Speaker_06
Yeah. And they saw that 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.

00:30:41 Speaker_04
So when you do exercise, you do get this sort of sharp increase in inflammation, but then Does that go down? Or does that actually lead to chronic inflammation?

00:30:55 Speaker_06
Well, we can find this out. Researchers have done a ton of experiments where they'll have people do two different workouts. Some will do a more intense version of the thing, and other people will do an easier version of the workout.

00:31:09 Speaker_06
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.

00:31:23 Speaker_03
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.

00:31:34 Speaker_06
And so for the people online who are saying you shouldn't exercise, especially, you know, don't do like HIIT workouts if you're worried about your chronic inflammation, is that right?

00:31:45 Speaker_03
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.

00:32:01 Speaker_03
Reduce your risk of chronic inflammation.

00:32:04 Speaker_06
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.

00:32:13 Speaker_04
I mean, that makes so much more sense. I mean, we know exercise is so good for us. Yeah. For so many different things. Okay, so Meryl. Wendy. What I have learned from this episode is that chronic inflammation

00:32:32 Speaker_04
is a problem that a lot of us have to think about, unfortunately. One more thing, add it to the pile. 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.

00:32:49 Speaker_04
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 going to do differently as a result of this episode? Are you going to cook up a sofrito?

00:33:08 Speaker_06
Yeah, no, I actually do just want to eat more vegetables. 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.

00:33:20 Speaker_06
Researchers also told me some other tips that I like. 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.

00:33:33 Speaker_06
So lowering stress has also found to decrease inflammation in some cases. I talked about this with Caroline Menard.

00:33:40 Speaker_00
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.

00:33:54 Speaker_00
I find it very relaxing. And a good way to release anger and I play video games because I get out of my head and I really focus on one task.

00:34:03 Speaker_04
Oh, this is great. A prescription for Mario Kart from a scientist. Absolutely. Right. Thanks, Meryl. Thanks, Wendy. That's Science Versus. So Meryl, how many citations in this week's episode?

00:34:15 Speaker_06
We have 119 citations.

00:34:19 Speaker_04
And if people want to find these citations, learn more about anything that we talked about on the show, where should they go?

00:34:26 Speaker_06
Well, you can go to our show notes and then just follow the links to the transcripts.

00:34:31 Speaker_04
Excellent. And on Instagram this week, which is science underscore VS, what do we have for people?

00:34:39 Speaker_06
We will have, you know, those photos of the blood-brain barrier that Caroline took photos of and the mice. The eels kissing.

00:34:48 Speaker_04
I mean, 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? Yeah. Are they eels? What are they?

00:34:59 Speaker_04
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. Yeah. Thanks so much, Meryl. Thanks, Wendy.

00:35:17 Speaker_04
This episode was produced by Meryl Horne, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, along with Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, and Aketi Foster-Keys. We're edited by Blythe Turrell. Mix and sound design by Sam Bear. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly.

00:35:30 Speaker_04
Music written by Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Soe Wiley, Boomi Hidaka, and Peter Leonard.

00:35:35 Speaker_04
Thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Susan Segerstrom, Professor Andre Nell, Dr. Hannah Mayer, Professor Xiaoping Li, Dr. Jennifer Felger, Professor Andreas Mikkelsen, Professor Charles Serhan, Professor Heather Zwicky, Dr. Jian Tan, and Professor Philip Calder.

00:35:53 Speaker_04
Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are listening on Spotify, then follow us and tap the bell icon so you get notifications when new episodes come out.

00:36:07 Speaker_04
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. Thanks. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.