How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation

You asked us to do a main feature on inflammation, so here we go!

Before we start, it’s worth noting an important difference between acute and chronic inflammation:

• Acute inflammation is generally when the body detects some invader, and goes to war against it. This (except in cases such as allergic responses) is usually helpful.
• Chronic inflammation is generally when the body does a civil war. This is almost never helpful.

We’ll be tackling the latter, which frees up your body’s resources to do better at the former.

First, the obvious…

These five things are as important for this as they are for most things:

1. Get a good diet—the Mediterranean diet is once again a top-scorer
2. Exercise—move and stretch your body; don’t overdo it, but do what you reasonably can, or the inflammation will get worse.
3. Reduce (or ideally eliminate) alcohol consumption. When in pain, it’s easy to turn to the bottle, and say “isn’t this one of red wine’s benefits?” (it isn’t, functionally*). Alcohol will cause your inflammation to flare up like little else.
4. Don’t smoke—it’s bad for everything, and that goes for inflammation too.
5. Get good sleep. Obviously this can be difficult with chronic pain, but do take your sleep seriously. For example, invest in a good mattress, nice bedding, a good bedtime routine, etc.

*Resveratrol (which is a polyphenol, by the way), famously found in red wine, does have anti-inflammatory properties. However, to get enough resveratrol to be of benefit would require drinking far more wine than will be good for your inflammation or, indeed, the rest of you. So if you’d like resveratrol benefits, consider taking it as a supplement. Superficially it doesn’t seem as much fun as drinking red wine, but we assure you that the results will be much more fun than the inflammation flare-up after drinking.

About the Mediterranean Diet for this…

There are many causes of chronic inflammation, but here are some studies done with some of the most common ones:

• Beneficial effect of Mediterranean diet in systemic lupus erythematosus patients
• How the Mediterranean diet and some of its components modulate inflammatory pathways in arthritis
• The effects of the Mediterranean diet on biomarkers of vascular wall inflammation and plaque vulnerability in subjects with high risk for cardiovascular disease
• Adherence to Mediterranean diet and 10-year incidence of diabetes: correlations with inflammatory and oxidative stress biomarkers*

*Type 1 diabetes is a congenital autoimmune disorder, as the pancreas goes to war with itself. Type 2 diabetes is different, being a) acquired and b) primarily about insulin resistance, and/but this is related to chronic inflammation regardless. It is also possible to have T1D and go on to develop insulin resistance, and that’s very bad, and/but beyond the scope of today’s newsletter, in which we are focusing on the inflammation aspects.

Some specific foods to eat or avoid…

Eat these:

• Leafy greens
• Cruciferous vegetables
• Tomatoes
• Fruits in general (berries in particular)
• Healthy fats, e.g. olives and olive oil
• Almonds and other nuts
• Dark chocolate (choose high cocoa, low sugar)

Avoid these:

• Processed meats (absolute worst offenders are hot dogs, followed by sausages in general)
• Red meats
• Sugar (includes most fruit juices, but not most actual fruits—the difference with actual fruits is they still contain plenty of fiber, and in many cases, antioxidants/polyphenols that reduce inflammation)
• Dairy products (unless fermented, in which case it seems to be at worst neutral, sometimes even a benefit, in moderation)
• White flour (and white flour products, e.g. white bread, white pasta, etc)
• Processed vegetable oils

See also: 9 Best Drinks To Reduce Inflammation, Says Science

Supplements?

Some supplements that have been found to reduce inflammation include:

• L-theanine
• Ashwagandha
• Turmeric w/ black pepper

(links are to studies showing their efficacy)

Consider Intermittent Fasting

Remember when we talked about the difference between acute and chronic inflammation? It’s fair to wonder “if I reduce my inflammatory response, will I be weakening my immune system?”, and the answer is: generally, no.

Often, as with the above supplements and dietary considerations, reducing inflammation actually results in a better immune response when it’s actually needed! This is because your immune system works better when it hasn’t been working in overdrive constantly.

Here’s another good example: intermittent fasting reduces the number of circulating monocytes (a way of measuring inflammation) in healthy humans—but doesn‘t compromise antimicrobial (e.g. against bacteria and viruses) immune response.

See for yourself: Dietary Intake Regulates the Circulating Inflammatory Monocyte Pool ← the study is about the anti-inflammatory effects of fasting

The relationship between exercise and cancer has sometimes been laden with confusion, and in particular, it was long popularly believed that exercise accelerates cancer once it occurs, but now it seems that’s not the case.

You might have read about that, and specifically about how a research team (Dr. Alice Avancini et al.) analysed data from 22 randomized controlled trials (total n=968 participants) that investigated the effects of exercise on various pro-inflammatory biomarkers (mostly interleukin variants, but also c-reactive proteins) that are known to increase breast cancer reoccurrence risk.

What they found was:

❝Exercise induced small to large significant reductions in IL-6 (SMD = -0.85; 95% CI = -1.68 to -0.02; p = .05) and TNF-α (SMD = -0.40; 95% CI = -0.81 to 0.01; p = .05) and a trend for a decrease in CRP.

When stratifying by exercise mode, trends toward reduction in IL-6 and TNF-α were observed for combined exercise, whilst changes were not generally affected by exercise program duration❞

Source: Effects of exercise on inflammation in female survivors of nonmetastatic breast cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis

The “combined exercise” mentioned?

Aerobic exercise and resistance training.

This is important, because as regular 10almonds readers may remember…

What Your Metabolism Says About How Aggressive Cancer Is Likely To Be For You ← this makes a huge difference to survival chances

So, this study’s findings are very consistent with that, because:

• Aerobic training increases cardiovascular fitness, improving metabolism
• Resistance training increases muscle mass, improving metabolism*

*because muscle “costs” calories to maintain, prompting an increase in metabolism, whereas fat prompts our metabolism to slow, to conserve energy to face the obvious food shortage that must be coming

See also: Stop Cancer 20 Years Ago

Exercise & aging muscle

Yes, we said “older adults” specifically in the title, and now we’re getting to that part!

Most recently, another team of scientists (Dr. Jun Nishiyama et al.) that healthy skeletal* muscle acts as an anti-tumor organ, releasing tiny particles called extracellular vesicles (EVs) that help suppress the development of tumors.

^{*This means the muscles that move your skeleton, as opposed to different kinds of muscle such as, for example, the smooth muscle that operates the peristaltic motion of your intestines, or that forms the main part of the walls of your uterus (if you have one), or that wiggle your ears, and so forth.}

As muscles age and lose mass (per sarcopenia), they produce fewer of these vesicles. The vesicles that are released also contain lower levels of a molecule (known as miR-7a-5p to its friends) that normally helps restrain tumor growth. As a result, aging muscle can lose a lot of its natural cancer-fighting ability.

The good news is that exercise appears to reverse part of this process. The researchers found that physical activity reactivates a biological pathway involved in EV production, restoring the release of protective signals from muscle.

In other words: exercise more (be it with aerobic activity or resistance training, though ideally both), and greatly reduce your risk of cancer.

You can find this paper in full, here: Sarcopenia promotes tumorigenesis by disrupting NOTCH-SDC2-regulated biogenesis of muscle-derived extracellular vesicles

Want to learn more?

You might like this excellent book we reviewed:

Moving Through Cancer – by Dr. Kathryn Schmitz

Take care!