The Science of Diet and Inflammation
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Inflammation has become the wellness industry's favorite villain, blamed for everything from acne to anxiety to the vague sense that you're just not thriving. But like most diet culture origin stories, this one starts with real science that got fed through a game of telephone until it came out selling you a $90 turmeric latte.
In this episode, we dig into what inflammation actually is (spoiler: it's not always bad), trace the cultural history from legitimate Mediterranean diet research to modern seed oil panic, and break down which anti-inflammatory claims have evidence behind them. We talk about why athletes specifically shouldn't fear exercise-induced inflammation, it's literally how your body adapts to training, and why the supplements that promise to "balance" your inflammation are mostly just balancing your wallet toward empty.
Kylee walks us through the research on omega-3s, fiber, polyphenols, and yes, turmeric (the verdict: modest effects at best, potential liver damage at worst). We discuss why CRP testing became a marketable fear, how the autoimmune protocol diet targets desperate people with real conditions, and why the answer to feeling better is almost never more restriction.
If your anti-inflammatory protocol costs more than lunch and involves eliminating entire food groups, we've gone off the rails.
Zoë: Before we get into it, if you like this show and you want more of it, we have a Patreon. And also Apple Podcast subscriptions and Spotify Premium, if that's more your speed. What do you get? Bonus episodes where Kylee and I answer your nutrition questions, go deeper on topics we couldn't fit into main episodes, and occasionally just riff on whatever weird Health News is making us insane that week. On Patreon, you also get access to my deep dive blog posts, recipes, community threads, and so much more. But honestly, the biggest thing you're doing when you subscribe is helping us keep the show alive. We're fully independent, and it's just us making a thing that we care deeply about. And while we do need sponsors to keep the shows going, your support directly funds research time, editing, production, all of it. If YDS has ever helped you feel less crazy about food or your body or just the unhinged state of the wellness industry, throwing a few bucks our way is genuinely the best way to keep it going. Seriously, it costs the same amount as like a can of beans. Links in the show notes, or you can subscribe directly in Apple or Spotify. Thank you, we love you, let's get into it. Welcome to your di...
Kylee: It sucks the podcast that knows the only thing truly inflammatory is charging $47 for a jar of adaptogenic golden milk powder.
Zoë: I'm Kylee Van Horn and I'm Zoë Rom, freshly inflamed. Amazing. Inflamed and ready to go.
Kylee: Enflamed by...
Zoë: You know, being alive in the year of our Lord, 2026, just baseline. Every morning. Every day. Just living in the bad place. No, that's not fair. I'm doing well.
Kylee: I'm drinking an N.A. Beer I'm vibing. Inflammation, we're getting inflammatory. I want to hear kind of a buzzword in the space right now or maybe I don't even know about right now. I feel like.
Zoë: I feel like forever, I feel it's been a thing.
Kylee: For a while.
Zoë: Yeah, I hear it a lot, not just in the world of athletics, though I do hear it a lot. But in wellness too, and I feel like it's like a miasma that hangs over all of us and no one knows exactly what it is, and yet it's around us all the time.
Kylee: Your body is on fire. My body's on fire! Your brain is inflamed, Zoë.
Zoë: This is something I feel like I hear about it on the internet sort of in the same way with toxins, where if you have a headache, if your hair wax luster, if your teeth aren't wide, if you had a bad day at work, if you didn't get a good night's sleep, if your clothes never fit as good the next day, if your head never falls in quite the same way if it might be because you're inflamed. It's inflammation. Inflammation. This is the story of a girl who cried a river and drowned the whole...
Kylee: You're bringing me back, okay? I am familiar.
Zoë: You are in the 90s. Man, I missed that warped tour. But I feel like it's something that I don't understand fully, which makes me think that probably there's a lot of other people that don't fully understand it. And yet I feel it's a phrase that I've definitely leaned into and I hear about a lot. What are you hearing? You're a coach. You work with athletes. How big a deal is inflammation to the folks that you're working with?
Kylee: I think the athlete population is almost more susceptible to it because it's this idea of, is it a performance inhibitor or does it allow for adaptations to occur? And then how much should I be trying to like tamper it down because it might be out of control? I get a lot of questions about supplements, I would say.
Kylee: Supplements, and then sometimes—I'm chugging golden milk. Sometimes the dietary questions in the sense that, oh, I think I have this health thing going on. I think should do an inflammation balancing diet, and I'm like, oh tell me more about that. Tell me more. What does that mean?
Zoë: Can we define inflammation maybe before we get to the history? Because I feel like there's two sort of separate things at work here, right? There's acute inflammation and chronic inflammation. And while they're interrelated, they're not exactly the same. So maybe you can walk us through what acute inflammation is.
Kylee: Oh, it's so cute, it looks like a little hat. I don't know if I would think of it that way. It's so adorable. Well, the example that I wanna give is, if you cut your finger. Oh, that's not cute. I don't know if that would be cute or not. Not cute. So you cut your finger. Within minutes, it gets red and swollen, painful. That's acute inflammation because your body's immune system is coming to the rescue and helping healing. And so think of it as like, it's detecting this damage and it's, oh crap, something's happening here. And then your blood vessels dilate, blood flows to the area, and then, your immune cells kind of attack and make sure that no bad bacteria gets in, they clean it up, and they start repairing, and healing happens.
Zoë: So that sounds all positive and productive. I mean, you don't want to cut your finger, but that sounds like a really positive bodily process, right?
Kylee: Exactly. And if we didn't have it, our cuts or little scrapes might potentially get infected and not heal and then could lead to worse things. Body sepsis, like bacterial infections taking over. Or like if you're sick, having a hard time actually getting over an illness if your immune system isn't working properly.
Zoë: Yeah, so what about chronic inflammation, like what's the difference there and why is, I mean, obviously, anything that's chronic and not made by Dr. Dre is probably concerning.
Kylee: I like to think of this one as your system, like the alarm's not shutting off sort of thing. Instead of having that acute response where the body helps heal immediately, you kind of have this low grade level of inflammation simmering in the body. And this is oftentimes related to things like chronic disease. If you can think of the chronic disease position, like autoimmune diseases, depression, metabolic syndrome. Oh, depression. Yeah. The inflammation in your brain could be a thing. Could be causing, like, if your brain's inflamed, it makes you sad? Inflammatory molecules can cross the blood-brain barrier and change the neurochemical properties in the brain. Got it. Puffy brain. Yeah, puffy brain! Got a bad case of the puffy-brains syndrome. The chronic level of inflammation, I think from my experience, that's what people automatically go to when they think about inflammation. They're kind of like, they're thinking chronic as in don't want to have permanent muscle damage or tendon tissue damage or something like that.
Zoë: So they're conflating this acute normal productive response to training stimulus, like the point is to provoke, I mean the point isn't explicitly to provoke inflammation, it's to provoke adaptation and as a part of adapting to that stress or stimulus, you have inflammation. The problem becomes when it's chronic and people are conflating, oh all inflammation must be bad and focusing on the inflammatory piece of things rather than the time scale and sort of the like. Well, how persistent is it as being like the definite, like what makes it bad or not?
Kylee: Right. And so when people exercise, you create a tiny amount of microdamage, your muscle fibers break down, and that is a stressor on the body. And that's where acute inflammation comes in, kicks in, floods the area. And then this actually helps with the healing and adaptation process. And your body kind of says, oh, we need to get stronger to handle this kind of stimulus the next time. Yes. And then it repairs, rebuilds, you make new muscle protein. Strengthen your connective tissue, and then that kind of improves that metabolic capacity. So it's a signal for your body to actually adapt, and if you didn't have it, you would have a hard time getting fitter or adapting to those training stresses.
Zoë: We're sort of getting at this idea of exercise and inflammation, because as athletes, I feel like there's this tendency to try to tamp down on inflammation or try to extinguish it with cold plunges or golden milk lattes or chugging tart cherry juice or whatever. How big a concern is that? Do you think athletes should be as focused on trying to sort of shoot down this acute exercised-induced inflammation with these dietary interventions.
Kylee: I don't think so, I think it does warrant, I mean, if it's a situation where people, it takes them four days to recover from a workout because their muscles sort of— I mean at that point, I feel like cherry.
Zoë: Gonna save you. You need something strong.
Kylee: That might, that might be a problem, but I wouldn't worry about it. When you think about athletes and training stress and muscle soreness, like our doms that you hear about, it's literally your body remodeling to make it stronger.
Zoë: Then what do you think is the problem with these anti-inflammatory protocols for athletes? Why do you they miss the mark?
Kylee: So I think that if you're obsessing over eliminating inflammatory foods or you're taking high dose NSAIDs after every workout, again, like that could impair training adaptations and also like NSAID after every work out, that just makes my stomach hurt thinking about it. Some studies show that blocking inflammation can actually reduce that muscle growth and strength gains too. So it's maybe not even looking at like the endurance component, but strength as well. Keep in mind, I think the general theme is we need to inflame to adapt. That's going to be our new little theme in this episode.
Zoë: That honestly sounds like a, like, a bullshit, like weekend marriage retreat that you have to go on to, like save your marriage. Wow. Enflamed to adapt. Hi, my name is Zoë and we're renewing our vows. Six months into this marriage, still crushing. I never clean the stove. So okay, I feel like there is a problem here, because the wellness industry has essentially convinced people that their vague symptoms equal chronic inflammation. Again, if you feel tired, if your brain is foggy, if not getting faster, if... You invade Greenland, inflammation.
Kylee: What about if you feel inflamed? If you feel... Inflamed. This one's tough though. I think I get this a lot from my athletes that are in recovery. Oh, interesting. Because they have this uncomfortable feeling in their body. And so they'll say, I feel inflame or I feel bloated. We're not trying to negate that, but it's kind of like, where is this coming from? And again...
Zoë: Right. And again, like knowing what we do, like we've covered this on previous episodes, the part of our brain that understands disgust, both in a food context and in a moral context, those parts of the brain are touching tips. And so a lot of times people conflate that moral, oh, I know I've been told that junk food is bad and it should make me feel bad and guilty for eating it. It will literally be a physical feeling of, oh my God, I ate an entire bag of Doritos. It's normal, you know, if you overeat, you're gonna have physical sensations associated with that. But the moral component that gets layered in, your brain doesn't really separate that. It just is like, oh, disgusting. I feel bad, I feel gross. I feel like I need a hot shower.
Kylee: Yeah. Well, and then that can dictate how someone feels, right? If they're feeling inflamed or feeling puffy or something. I don't like this at all. Yeah. So just bringing that up. Again, we're not negating this, but none of these things that we're talking about mean that someone has chronic inflammation, right. Like what you mentioned are little things that could be anything, right, like related to sleep or stress.
Zoë: Like related to sleep or stress or overuse thing. Right. Like there's not a checklist of your three out of these five things. You're chronically inflamed. So how would you know then if you actually had an issue with chronic inflammation?
Kylee: Back to it's oftentimes associated with actual health conditions. And so real autoimmune— Just like the detoxes. Yes. Do you need to detox or do you have literal lead poisoning? So real autoimmune diseases have higher levels of inflammation and have specific symptoms. So that could be actual persistent joint pain and swelling. Unexplained rashes, skin changes, GI bleeding, chronic diarrhea, unexplained weight loss, fevers without infection, but these are things that you should probably see a doctor for, right? We need an actual diagnosis.
Zoë: And these aren't on the scale of, I feel a little off today, these are on the scale of you are not functioning in life as a person.
Kylee: Right, this is not a, this isn't vibe, a vibe. I'm not thriving. This is, you can't drive.
Zoë: To Whole Foods.
Kylee: Yeah. So Zoë, we've touched on what acute, what chronic inflammation is. And now we've got to go down the history lane because I want to know more about where this idea, like, where did people start maybe talking or thinking about inflammation? And then how did we get to this whole wellness level of inflammation?
Zoë: Yeah, how did inflammation go from this specific biological process to the wellness industry's favorite villain? It's blamed for everything from acne to anxiety to the vague sense that you're just not thriving. And like most of the Diet Culture Origin stories that we cover on this podcast, this one starts with real science that got fed through a game of moron telephone until it came out the other end selling you a $90 turmeric latte. We're not going to go all the way back, but you could go as far back as ancient Greece and talking about the four humors and when things get out of balance, bad things happen, yada yada, fast forward to the 1970s, bada bing, bada boom, science. So scientists in the 70s discovered these signaling molecules called eicosanoids, which are basically chemical messengers in your body made from fatty acids. They found that omega-6s and omega-3 fats produce different inflammatory signals. And this was genuinely important and novel cellular biology research, like real scientists, lab coats, petri dishes, whole shebang.
Kylee: This was not the crazy seed oil conversation at the time, I'm guessing.
Zoë: This is, unfortunately, the crazy seed oil conversation's great-great-grandmother. And here's what was crucial is these researchers weren't telling anyone to stop eating canola oil. They were mapping molecular pathways, and the distance between we identified how prostaglandins work and seed oils are literally poison-destroying-your-gut is roughly the distance between Earth and whatever planet RFK is living on. So, the 1990s gave us the Mediterranean diet. Research so population studies showing that people in Greece, southern Italy, and Spain had lower rates of heart disease. The Lyon diet heart study in 1994 found benefits for people who had already had heart attacks. So even if you had a history of chronic inflammatory related diseases, adopting this diet was seen in the research to have some reversible, measurably reversible effects. And researchers did notice that these populations also had lower inflammatory markers, so it's not just like these downstream impacts and reduced disease, the biomarkers were measurably different as well. But here's what they were actually observing. A pattern of eating, so a pattern of...
Kylee: Oh, a pattern, so we're not talking about a restricted—
Zoë: Not a restrictive diet. Lots of vegetables, olive oil, fish, legumes, moderate amount of wine, meals with family and a general disposition towards enjoying food rather than fearing it. And it was never about identifying inflammatory supervillains and eliminating them. It was an overall way of living. It was a pattern of eating and a way of being, which is important to keep our eye trained on. The other important thing is that eat a variety of whole foods and enjoy your life. Boo, boring. That's not gonna sell any books. You can't scare anyone. So unfortunately, everyone going Mediterranean is not what happened next. So another thing to notice there is this kind of through line of elimination as a path to salvation and why we should be inherently skeptical. Of that way of thinking. So this is the turning point with CRP testing. So C-reactive protein, which is a marker of inflammation, becomes widely available and suddenly everyone has a number to measure and therefore be scared of. Oh gosh. Yep. So the medical community did have legitimate reasons to care about this, because chronic, low-grade inflammation does play a role in heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, that's real. But the wellness industry saw something else entirely, a marketable fear. Give people a number that's too high, and then you can sell them a solution. So, you know, you can make some amount of money with like selling sort of these biological interventions to people who are truly sick and truly need them. You can make a lot more money off the worried well.
Kylee: Well, the hard part here is CRP is if you take a singular marker of CRP, it's not necessarily a true indicator of your... You could take it after exercise and it would...
Zoë: High. Yes, just like if you took a picture on your iPhone of me right now, it's a snapshot of me. It's not me always. Would your CRP be high? I'm having a pretty good hair day, so I feel like my CRP is low because I'm assuming that having thick, lustrous hair means that I have low inflammation. So again, another thread I want us to pinpoint here is biomarker anxiety and how much easier it is to sell things to people who are theoretically well. But maybe could they be better? So in the mid-2000s entered this guru phase of anti-inflammatory panic. This is when the anti-inflammatory diet becomes a true brand. Dr. Andrew Weil publishes Healthy Aging, a book in 2005, and creates the anti-inflammatory food pyramid. Oh, wow. So now we have another version of the food pyramid? Yeah, we have Another Food Pyramid. To be fair to him, it was literally just the Mediterranean diet with corners. Amazing job monetizing that, I guess. Vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fish, wine, fine. But this did open the floodgates because right behind him comes Dr. Nicholas Perricone, a dermatologist, which maybe don't take your diet advice from a dermatologist. Just one idea that I have. He realized that the anti-inflammatory branding could also sell skincare. His book, The Perricone Prescription... Any time someone puts their own last name into a diet or a lifestyle, again, your ears should perk up.
Kylee: We had this at Natural Grocers. We had that book in the book section. Natty G has so much to answer for. Natty G has so much to answer for.
Zoë: Also, don't sell books at grocery stores. That's a hot take that I have. You get your books at the bookstore, you get your fruit at the fruit store, all right? So this man also conveniently happened to sell a line of very expensive supplements. I'm not surprised by that. So convenient, link in bio. And this is where the second thread kicks in. Inflammation isn't just making people sick. It's making you ugly. It's aging you. And if there's one thing the wellness industry knows how to exploit, it's women's fear of aging and the pressure that is put on our physical appearance. Like, how often do you hear the thing of, oh, if your face is puffy, it's gotta be some diabolical, gnarly, inflammatory process, rather than like, yeah, sometimes it's normal for you to have a little puff in your face sometimes. Exactly. It's not like a five alarm fire. Thank you. The Institute for Functional Medicine rises to prominence and suddenly everyone is getting put on elimination diets disguised as personalized medicine.
Kylee: Yeah, this is all the things I kind of hear about in practice. I'm on the gluten-free, dairy-free bean-free everything-free diet. I'm like, how do you even eat? Like this is insane. Here's the best part. I don't.
Zoë: All of these food groups, gluten, dairy, sugar, grains, all become suspects. Food sensitivity testing panels proliferate, despite having almost no scientific validity. Leaky gut becomes the explanation for everything from fatigue to brain fog to why you're not losing weight. And here's another move that just keeps happening. The answer is always to remove something, never to add joy back in, never just to eat enough. The solution is always restriction, dressed up as healing. The autoimmune protocol. Have you heard of this?
Zoë: So, the AIP takes Paleo and makes it even more restrictive by cutting out nightshades. Ooh, nightshade. Nightshades! We've got to be afraid of those. Which is like, that's such a sexy name for an eggplant. You know, nightsha— It sounds like a scotch stripper, but it's just freaking vegetables. Now, everyone that sees an eggplant, they're going to think of a stripper. Just think of my voice saying night— I'm going to change my Instagram handle to nightshade420. No nightshades, no eggs, no nuts, no seeds. It markets specifically to people with autoimmune conditions who are desperate for answers and maybe feel disenfranchised by Western medicine or by, you know, the for-profit exploitative American healthcare system. Some of those people do have legitimate food triggers. AIP casts a net so wide that it just catches everything, and suddenly women with Hashimoto's are afraid to eat a tomato. The guy I dated in college wouldn't eat nightshades.
Kylee: Oh, interesting. Yeah, and with Hashimoto's specifically, I'll have people that are like, my doctor told me to cut out gluten and all the nightshades, and I need to try no seeds as well. It's all of these different things. And I'm like, your doctor told you this? Okay, well, there's no science with the gluten-free diet and Hashimoto, by the way. Yeah.
Zoë: I mean, honestly, Nightshade sounds like something that, like, hobbits should eat. They do. Potatoes for elevensies. In 2013, 2015, the books Grain Brain and Wheat Belly, which, like... I feel like if we ever did, like, a radio prank call show, I would be Grain brain and you would be Wheat belly, like, as our alternate comedian personas. Grain brained in the house. These books convince everyone that gluten is inherently inflammatory, even if you don't have celiac disease. Lectins become the new enemy, the list of inflammatory foods keeps growing and growing, and the list safe foods keeps shrinking, and the list of supplements you need to go along with them is ever-expanding as well. And your wallet is shrinking. And at the bottom of all of it, Natty G. I'm just kidding. Where are we now? I think in the age of Instagram wellness and vibes-based self-diagnose-y on TikTok. Every food blogger has anti-inflammatory recipes. I can't tell you the amount of times when I was at Outside Magazine that we published five foods and they're all just like normal ass foods. Like, great. Like, okay. Yeah, you should be eating food. Eat fruits and vegetables. Not that fancy. Turmeric lattes, ginger shots, bone broth are all positioned basically as medicine and inflammation becomes this explanation for every vague symptom. Tired, you might be inflamed. Bloated, you're probably inflamed. Sad? Believe it or not, you're inflamed. And the target audience is overwhelmingly young women, people interested in fitness, mental health, and wellbeing. A lot of times we see people get stuck on this negative feedback loop of they eat a restrictive diet and they feel worse. And they think the answer is always more restriction. So they cut things out and cut things out and they'd never feel better. But we've just been so cultured that in puritanical United States, the answer could never be. More joy, more connection, more community, eating a cookie once in a blue moon.
Kylee: Definitely I can see the line between anti-inflammation diets and clean eating.
Zoë: Yes, for something that's a feeling, the sense that like I need to purify myself, I need to cleanse my diet, it gives a valence of science-iness and it makes something that is mental and emotional feel a little more physical without actually having to pin it on a specific real medical diagnosis. So there's just this proliferating sense that if I could just identify the right and eliminate all of the wrong ones I would finally feel okay. Worth acknowledging that supplement companies have gone absolutely feral in this context. Curcumin, resveratrol, omega-3s, adaptogens, everything is anti-inflammatory now. Which brings us to the final thread that I want us to keep an eye trained on, is notice when dietary advice is free, but the supplements that make it work cost $200 a month.
Kylee: You know what's interesting is that supplement companies cannot claim to be anti-inflammation.
Zoë: Really, they—
Kylee: They have to word it appropriately. Is it like, they can boost and— As inflammation balancing. My god. Yes. Just so you know, that's a fun fact. That's amazing. That's amazing.
Zoë: Sort of like how it's not that I don't do dishes, I'm just dish balancing. Right. It's not that I'm a slob, I'm just mess balancing. So the carnivore and keto communities also have converged on a new villain. Seed Oils, which we will do a full episode about, stop DM-ing us. Mark your calendars, it's coming. We warned you. Canola, soybean, sunflower, suddenly they're responsible for everything from obesity to autism to the general decline of Western civilization and why young men don't have girlfriends and why porn isn't as good as it used to be. End. This is totally based on a misreading of the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio research from the 70s. Remember that biochemistry that I teased at the beginning? Now it's been totally stripped of all nuance and turned into seed oils are literally poison. That is a thing that our Secretary of Health and Human Services said. That is quote, from a person in charge of things. Of things. We don't know what—
Kylee: We don't know what things those are, but honestly...
Zoë: Honestly, too many things. So the actual evidence on linoleic acid and metabolism simply doesn't support this. But obviously, evidence has never really been the point. The point is having an enemy. And also, I guess, selling beef tallow. COVID brings cytokine storm and vocabulary like this into the mainstream, and the wellness industry pivots almost overnight with COVID. Boost your immune system and reduce inflammation. Elderberry, Vitamin D, Zinc are all marketed as anti-inflammatory immune boosters. Then things like continuous glucose monitors also go mainstream for people who don't have diabetes and suddenly totally normal glucose fluctuations are inflammatory. The glucose goddess, which if you want to just absolutely murder an afternoon on Instagram, check her out, builds an entire empire on the fear that a banana is causing systemic inflammation. I'm scared. Which like if you can't win a fight against a banana? Here we are. In 2026, anti-inflammatory basically means whatever anyone wants it to mean. It's a wellness Rorschach test. It's word that is so vague and yet so loaded that it can sell anything to anyone who's been convinced that their body is at war with itself and that we must all rally around our number one enemy, the banana. Here we are, at this point, where anti-inflammatory diets are being promoted incredibly heavily. We've sort of touched on the cultural and historical context, but from a science perspective, I want to know, Kylee, is this hype warranted? Should we be getting all hot and bothered about seed oil?
Kylee: Well, we gotta look at the diet claims first, right? And you did go over them a little bit, but I wanna summarize here that essentially you're being sold like an elimination diet and supplementation. There's a trend here, right, with diet culture, this fear of things eliminating and then supplementing. It's just so much as look at a piece of bread, you're gonna be so inflamed. So we've got gluten. We want to eliminate gluten, dairy, sugar, nightshades, lectin, seed oils. I do not know what a lectin is. The, it's a component in grains. Right, okay. Yes, yes, yes.
Zoë: It makes things, like, sticky, like in a cooking context.
Kylee: And then you need to increase turmeric, ginger, berries, omega-3s, and green tea, which actually, okay, we're going to get into that. And I'm not saying that that's a bad thing, because I'm like, okay, great, increase those foods. The point is, is they're not medicine. It's being marketed as a healing cure-all. And it's like, well, these are just normal foods that you can include in your diet. They are. Right.
Zoë: It's gonna save your life.
Kylee: Also good. Right. And then we have the supplement line, the turmeric, which curcumin is the active component of turmeric. Yep. We've got fish oil. We got resveratrol, which is a component of grapes. So there's, you know, these different things that people are saying like just take these supplements or take this high antioxidant thing post-exercise and it'll tamper down your inflammation.
Zoë: I'm skeptical. What does the research actually show here?
Kylee: So we've got to start with the diets. Let's do it. You mentioned initially we had some research around the Mediterranean diet, correct? Potentially the most well-researched diet in history. Yeah. Your eat, pray, love on. High in—
Zoë: Fruits, veggies, whole grains, legumes, nuts. Relaxing on the beach with shirtless Greek sailors. Very relaxed. Some amount of wine, lots of sunshine. Getting a massage from an olive-skinned man. Low in red meat. Low in Red meat. Suck it, food triangle.
Kylee: So it's a pattern, really, of eating and not necessarily a list of prescriptive rules that you have to follow. This actually is one of the most researched and has the strongest research to support inflammation balancing properties being promoted by a dietary pattern, not a...
Zoë: Diet. So what specifically does the research show in terms of the benefits of the Mediterranean diet and how it relates to inflammation?
Kylee: So the most consistent evidence revolves around reducing inflammatory markers, CRP, and IL-6. That's measurable. And these are associated with lower cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and all-cause mortality. So when we look at the actual studies, which is what we want to be looking at, right? Studies, not TikToks. Multiple studies show modest reductions in inflammatory biomarkers. It's not saying like it's going to completely get rid of all inflammation because do we actually, again, do we want that?
Zoë: I kind of just feel like being alive entails some amount of inflammation. And no amount of olive oil is probably going to reduce what it feels like to be alive today.
Kylee: One meta-analysis of 22 randomized control trials in the Journal of Advanced Nutrition in 2022 showed that the Mediterranean diet, biomarkers CRP, IL-8, and TNF-alpha showed a tendency to decrease after a Mediterranean diet but pooled estimates did not actually reach statistical significance.
Zoë: So it's not something where the conclusion is going to say, and everyone must switch to Mediterranean tomorrow. Right. There's some evidence this could do some stuff in some cases.
Kylee: Exactly. It's a lot of asterisks. So yeah, it's not saying everyone needs to go on the Mediterranean. Drop everything and move to Greece. Diet and get rid of all your inflammation.
Zoë: This is disappointing because I love spaghetti, although sounds like I can have my spaghetti and eat it, too.
Kylee: This 2025 meta-analysis looked at 33 randomized controlled trials and showed significant reductions were observed for high-sensitivity CRP. Interleukin 6, and IL-17 in the Mediterranean diet group in comparison to a control diet. However, no significant effects were noted for CLP, IL-10, tumor necrosis factor alpha, or total antioxidant capacities. Like a lot of times when we're looking at anti-inflammation diets, we're trying to tamper down the oxidative stress, I guess, with antioxidants. And so essentially what it's saying is there was no statistical significance showing that antioxidant capacity of the diet was reducing down inflammation.
Zoë: It's not life-changing. Even getting bangs will change your life, so for context. So what about plant-based or vegetarian diets? We sort of talked about in our last vegetarian episode about some of the antioxidant benefits of plants. What does that mean for inflammation? And what does the research show?
Kylee: I wanna hear from you, like, do you ever think about this as somebody that's vegetarian? Have you thought about, oh, I'm eating this way to help inflammation levels?
Zoë: Well, being someone navigating the long and winding road in the wake of an eating disorder and having had orthorexic tendencies and trying to live the life of an adult in the year of our Lord 2026, whose I run quite a bit, probably 12 hours a week right now, and I don't know that I could get enough calories without ultra-processed foods, and that's something that I've always been told to be concerned about when it when it comes to inflammation? I think I struggle with the thing that we talked about earlier with my framework that I've always been handed for this is less about add in these positive things than take out these evil things. So I'm curious to hear what benefits there are to eating fruits and vegetables. I will say that like my partner has some inflammatory stuff going on and is a frequent drinker of tart cherry juice. I've been trying to get him to eat more berries.
Kylee: We'll get into that.
Zoë: Perfect. Great. I have questions.
Kylee: When we look at actual research here, it becomes a little bit more complicated. Ooh, I love complicated. There's not a lot of clarity around plant-based diets and whether they actually are reducing overall systemic inflammation. So a 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis from Scientific Reports Journal looked at the association of vegan diets with lower levels of CRP compared to omnivores. However, when they looked at this, they looked at vegetarians, vegans, omnivores, and the vegans had lower, little bit lower levels of CRPs. The vegetarians, the pattern was less pronounced, and then the omnivores were at their own level. And so there are no real substantial effects observed in other inflammatory markers. So CRP was the only thing that really there was a difference shown, but as we talked about before, CRP might not be always the best. It's just one small mesh. It's one marker. And... Right, and you have to look at it in the context of other things going on in your life and long-term. Right. What is your CRP doing? Right, like if you're smoking a pack a day, no amount of vegetables is going to combat the inflammation. And oftentimes, when we look at these studies or these diets, particularly for vegetarian and vegan diets, what's probably helping more is the addition of things like fiber. I mean, really, the higher plant foods do have higher antioxidant components, more polyphenols. Less saturated fat, maybe, maybe not. This is in debate right now in our current world that we live in. So who knows what that is. What isn't up for debate, Kylee? The diet itself, you know, a lot of people are typically following already like healthier lifestyle. Yeah. Unless you go back and you listen to our vegetarian episode where you ate quesadillas and that was the only thing you ate in college.
Zoë: I am 100% sure I was extremely inflamed. But there were many lifestyle decisions being made at that point in my life that were maybe not super supportive.
Kylee: What's not really magic is maybe or maybe isn't clear is like eliminating animals.
Zoë: Products per se. So like a well-constructed omnivorous diet could have similar anti-inflammatory profiles. Right. Got it. So what about low glycemic diets? I sort of hinted at the glucose goddess and this idea that if you see any sort of spike in your blood glucose levels, oh my god, panic, freak out, that's inflammation, call the fire department, hit the deck.
Kylee: Yeah, I feel like this is one that the wellness industry really preys on a little bit.
Zoë: Everybody loves this one.
Kylee: Some studies do show, again, lower CRP levels with lower glycemic load eating, but I'm like, what is this actually?
Zoë: Or is that diet is notoriously challenging to study? If you're eating a low glycemic diet, that would likely be a diet that's already pretty low in processed foods, pretty high in whole foods, pretty, probably pretty reasonably endowed with fruits and vegetables. So is it the low glycemia of it all that's working or is it, the well thought out diet? Like, is it all of these other factors that would be all but impossible to isolate in this context?
Kylee: Right, and I think it's really hard to put into context, too, the differences. Like, different people have different genetic responses to certain foods. And so I think that makes it complicated, too. Because they've done studies where one person will eat an apple and another person will eat an Apple and it will raise their blood sugar to different levels. And so, I think, it becomes really complicated to say that you need to go low glycemic and that will reduce your inflammation overall.
Zoë: One man's low glycemic could be another—
Kylee: Man's crazy town apple. Right. So they're kind of using it to in my mind the wellness industry is using this diet to demonize carbohydrate sources. Classic.
Zoë: The hits. Now that's what I call wellness industry. This is like the wellness industry's like free bird is play, eliminate carbs. Can you do eliminate carbs? Then do wagon wheel. So maybe this is a good time to bring up my favorite carbohydrate sugar specifically because we get a lot of DMs claiming that sugar is the devil, inflammatory... We definitely got one that was claiming we were getting money from the sugar lobby and I wish you know where to find us sugar lobby. What does research say about—
Kylee: So most of the sugar is inflammatory claims come from rodent studies. What? Oh my god, of course. So we've got the mice.
Zoë: We're back to mice. Okay, this is such a bummer because I would personally love to have people do science on me if I get to eat a lot of sugar while doing it. I volunteer as tribute. Stop doing this on mice. Do it on me. I'm available. I work from home. I would love to eat some sugar.
Kylee: Give me a slice of cake, I'm a happy camper. So in the rodent studies, they're using massive doses, 50% of your calories are coming from sugars that don't really translate to human consumption patterns, kind of weird.
Zoë: So like, it would be like if I ate an entire sheet cake, I might feel a little off.
Kylee: Right. Yeah, I bet. Great. Thanks.
Zoë: Cool.
Kylee: Human studies show that moderate sugar intake in active individuals and especially athletes doesn't really trigger the inflammatory cascade people are claiming.
Zoë: Oh my god, so it's almost like this thing that happens in mice shouldn't be extrapolated to all humans, and certainly not people who definitely need carbohydrates to fuel their activity.
Kylee: We need to look at the context, right? So in metabolically healthy people eating sugar, there's a minimal inflammatory response. If there's somebody that has type 2, type 1 diabetes, then maybe you don't need to have a different context. That's why we're contextualizing this. The point is issues typically arise in scenarios where there's chronic overconsumption, people aren't exercising. There's an existing health condition. If you're just taking in sugar and there's not a lot of other nutrients coming in, then yeah, that can be a problem.
Zoë: Actually, the unfortunate thing with things like this is like, humans suck at context. All the wrong people are hyper-fixing on removing sugar entirely from their diet, being obsessive about making sure they don't so much as make eye contact with a jar of agave, and then there's an entire other subset of the population that doesn't have access to fresh foods that don't have a ton of added sugars in, and...
Kylee: Well, that's where Instagram wellness influencers and our current administration, they thrive. They don't have to provide that context.
Zoë: So cool that our current administration is basically run by, like, the worst people on TikTok. I feel really good about it. So you mentioned some of these diets that do have some amount of robust research behind them, but... Well, in robust, I don't know if I would say robust. But some. That's where we're going with this. Robust the way I'm robust. Euphemistically, what about diets that have weak or inconsistent evidence? I feel like these are the ones that we hear about on the socials all the time. Like, these are diets like what they lack in research, they make up for in PR and branding. Right, can you guess any of them? I'm just— Oh, oh, oh! Paleo, keto, gluten-free, dairy-
Kylee: Very free AIP. Bean free, everything free. We can't have any of that stuff. Leaf my besties beans out of this. What could you eat on that diet? A green leaf, maybe. A green Leaf.
Zoë: I had a single sprig of arugula picked fresh from Kylie Jenner's garden, harvested on the breath of the first morning wind, served with fresh morning dew and a tiny thimble.
Kylee: They have limited quality research, and then there's mixed research on whether it even does anything with inflammation. And if it does anything, it's a lot of small studies that are showing reductions in inflammation and inflammatory markers, so you can't really draw conclusions from them.
Zoë: Right, so from these, especially these diets are all extremely restrictive, cut a lot of things out, very focused on elimination. They offer these drastic dietary interventions and the actual results are extremely small and likely aren't happening because keto and aren't happen because paleo, happening because it causes a larger shift in your eating patterns. Again, the magic is never in the paleo or the keto of it all. It's in these larger patterns if they are actually sustainable. I do just wanna pause briefly on the gluten free of it all. I feel like this is one I hear about a lot. So I'm curious if you can just face this one head on, give it to me, kind of keep eating bread. There's like almost nothing you could say that would make me stop eating bread, honestly.
Kylee: This one's tough because if you have celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, those things like celiac diseases is an autoimmune disease. So it does actually increase levels of inflammation whenever you are eating gluten. Right. If you don't have celiac or non-celiac. If you're just a middle-aged lady living in LA. There is no evidence for anti-inflammatory effects occurring if you go gluten-free. So grain brain, not a thing. And then, we.
Zoë: Wheat Belly.
Kylee: Not a thing. The problem too is that people are removing these gluten-containing foods, it becomes more restrictive, and then there's often less fiber and fewer nutrients coming in. So that might have the opposite effect of what people are intending. You could be more inflamed. Right. Because you're not getting as much fiber. So that can actually, Because if you're eating more simple carbohydrates, maybe that is keeping your blood...
Zoë: Sugar high. Backfire. All right. We're keeping the bread. So can we touch briefly then on the anti-inflammatory elimination diets, the AIP, or the autoimmune protocol? Like, this is supposed to be its whole thing.
Kylee: There's not actual, real, robust, robust if you want to call it. I love that word. Robust. If it was an espresso bean. There's very limited research on this diet in general. Yeah. And it's extremely restrictive. There's no evidence that eliminating your nightshades and your eggs and your nuts and your seeds, that that's gonna help most people. Yeah. Some people are gonna hear this and they're gonna be like, well, I'm still doing the AIP diet. Like, I don't care. And I'm going to... I'm so happy for you. Go with God. No, but I'm actually validating like when you're in a state, like with an autoimmune disease, sometimes you become desperate, and you're kinda like, well, I'm gonna try different things. Yes. And I think that's okay, but I would caution people to just take a step back and be like, all right, if I am gonna try this, what's the most intelligent way to do that? And I would say a guided approach with a professional would be a way to that. So not...
Zoë: So not a shirtless man that you found on Instagram.
Kylee: That and a medical doctor that like tells someone go follow the AIP diet or go follow a low FODMAP diet and there's no context there. There's no support there. And then athletes in particular get put in these situations that they're on an extreme elimination diet and they end up with deficiencies and they might have an eating disorder history, et cetera. Like there's not context considered into the whole process or whole dietary elimination protocol for sure. My point being, we hear you. You might be curious about AIP, and if you're going to do that, please get support. Get support, do it right, you know? Because there is very limited research and it's very restrictive.
Zoë: So, okay, when these diets do show anti-inflammatory effects, what do we know is actually driving the benefits? Like, what is it in these diets that's actually working and moving the needle?
Kylee: The boring things, Zoë. Like, why do we have to cover these every single time, right? It's just a different.
Zoë: Episode where we're like, eat, sleep, hug your mom.
Kylee: Hug your mom. Overall diet quality. One of the things that I like to say when we're talking about overall diet quality is can we focus on what we can add in? Instead of the restriction, can we focused on adding in more plant foods, higher amounts of whole grains? Love it. You can eat a banana. All in. You heard it here first, guys.
Zoë: You can eat a banana.
Kylee: We're bringing the banana propaganda back. We're bringin' the—
Zoë: We're bringing the banana back. That's right. The original superfood. I feel like the band has been coasting.
Kylee: Go listen to that superfoods episode if you haven't listened to it. Aging incredibly well. If you're new to YDS and you haven't listened to that, you've got to go listen. Yeah. There's an extremely good YouTube deep dive. That was like episode five that we did. More micronutrients. Okay. Boring, but sure. So a lot of those micros are coming from our plant foods. Oftentimes, it's less ultra-processed foods, which I tread lightly here because, again, like sometimes we need to have some convenience foods as... Athletes to help us get in the nutrition we need.
Zoë: Yeah, so maybe you can help me sort of like walk through this in right size or contextualize like how should we think about this because to my mind, for a lot of people, the potential downside of eating a few ultra processed foods pales in comparison. To the known downsides of insufficient fueling, especially for female athletes. I'm a runner, I exercise a good bit. A lot of the people that listen are going to the gym, they're doing yoga, they're training in some kind, so it's not the gin pop necessarily. People that are listening to this podcast are burning some energy out there. How do you think about weighing out, eating enough, and acknowledging, yes, ultra-processed foods can cause inflammation, but that's not as big a concern as eating enough.
Kylee: I would say understanding and doing a deep dive on what is eating enough for you. Because I think a lot of people hear that message, and it's great, I love it, but at the same time, they don't know what that is. And it's confusing and also stresses people out. Because they're like, well, I don't what enough is, am I eating too much? Maybe I'm underdoing it. And then it creates a separate level of anxiety for people. It's not based on elimination, but it's based on the fear of like over or under feeling and not having confidence and trust in your body. So that is something where developing that understanding and then developing an understanding of how to listen to your body too, I think is really important. And I would say overall, that's king. Like is getting in enough nutrition. Because if you're underdoing it for a long period of time, your systems aren't gonna be operating properly as it is. Once you get to the point, here's how I would approach it is like, you examine that, you understand what you need, and then you look at, okay, so how much of my diet now is ultra processed foods? Yeah. From there, looking at what your lifestyle is, what your situational circumstances are financially, et cetera, and figuring out if 100% of your diet is ultra-processed foods, then yes, maybe we should work on that. We should talk, yes. But a few ultra-processed foods, I would say, no, that's probably going to be helpful in the overall context of things.
Zoë: So, what about energy balance? How important is that in the context of inflammation?
Kylee: Is where overall eating and getting in enough nutrition is king, because under-fueling does actually increase inflammatory markers. Because of the stress on the body, it increases inflammatory markers, so.
Zoë: Oh, right. I think we so often forget that under-fueling is a stress, right? Like, because we're so constantly bombarded, you know, with the RFK of it all. Oh my god, be afraid of these things. This causes inflammation, like seed oils, that we forget that, like, so many dietary choices function in trade-offs, and not eating enough is stressful and harmful for your body. And I just don't think that gets talked about enough.
Kylee: Well, and here's where it becomes more complicated, is when we look, and we've talked about this on other episodes, markers like A1C being high and you being an athlete and you under-fueling, but then getting told by your doctor that you need to watch your carb consumption. Right. You know, it starts to get really confusing and you're like, well, now what do I do? I guess I gotta eliminate sugar. I gotta to eliminate ultra-processed foods. I gotta back to the elimination piece. Cut it all out. I guess on one hand, I don't want people to just hear all the time that like, oh, we're just saying like, eat enough. And the energy balance is king thing, and that's the only thing that we're talking about on this podcast. But the reality is, is in the population that this podcast oftentimes reaches, this is a problem, right? It is a larger problem that would be in the general population.
Zoë: Multiple things can be problems at once. It's 2026. We are doing it all. We have all the problems. What are some specific nutrients or what are the inflammation balancing properties?
Kylee: You're using the term, inflammation balancing, dish balancing, I'm going to go back to that.
Zoë: T.J. Is going to hate me, he's going to be so upset with you for enabling me.
Kylee: Awesome. Omega-3 fatty acids. That's gonna be our big inflammation balancing component of the diet. That's oftentimes found in our EPA and DHA from our fish products. Now things like, I'm gonna get people that are gonna ask, well, what if I don't eat fish? Walnuts, almonds, chia seeds, flax seeds contain something called ALA. And that is an omega-3 fatty acid that might not have the same direct inflammation balancing properties, but it is converted from ALA to EPA and DHA, which are going to have inflammation balancing property.
Zoë: Get on this walnut PR, people, you're leaving balancing on the table.
Kylee: I think the big thing that I want to emphasize with this specific nutrients or components that are inflammation balancing is that it's not just eat omega-3s and you won't have any inflammation. These are things that you can include. Again, we're talking about adding in. These are the things you can including in your diet that can help with inflammation silencing in the body without dumping a full-on water hose on a fire or something like that.
Zoë: So like okay TJ has some relatives that have a nut farm out in California every year for Christmas. We get 30 pounds of nuts. So our freezer is always full of these and they're taped up like bricks of weed. It looks like we are storing illegal substances. But it's all just walnuts and almonds and I'm always doing my best to just every day handful of walnuts every day. Almonds in the salad some sort of nut goes in my smoothie.
Kylee: You're like little squirrels, you guys.
Zoë: We are. That's what people often comment on our squirrel-ishness.
Kylee: Well, you're getting your omegas in then, Zoë.
Zoë: Absolutely.
Kylee: Omega-3s.
Zoë: I used to have a chiropractor that would say you know that walnuts are good for your brain because they're shaped like brains. And that's science.
Kylee: That's something I feel like our current administration would say. I know. I mean, like, looks like a brain. And also, kind of.
Zoë: This eggplant, you know what it looks like. You know what this eggplant's good for. Tell me what, fellas. Take this nightshade into the bedroom, throw in some shade at your night, show you my nightshade. Tomato juicy.
Kylee: Moving forward, we're going to go into fiber next. Ooh, fiber maxing. I don't know about maxing, but.
Zoë: Fiber, being normal about fiber, boo. Okay.
Kylee: We can do a whole episode on Fiber. Normal-maxxing.
Zoë: Balance-maxxing? When you just are normal and you need a balanced amount of things? That's our new YDS term. Balance-maxxing. You heard it here first. We are maximizing how moderate you can be. Moderation-maxxing.
Kylee: Okay, so fiber. When we're looking at fiber, I think we are thinking about our microbiome and our little critters living in the microbiome trying to help us with production of something called short-chain fatty acids. And those produce inflammation balancing compounds in our gut, which can help overall in the body. Oh, love it. This is where, again, like if you're on a plant-based diet, increasing your fiber consumption can help your little microbiome bugs thrive.
Zoë: I love it! Yay! I always think of them talking like cute little faces.
Kylee: I mentioned plant-based diet, but, like, it could be you eat meat and you add more plants to your diet to get more fiber in, or you add whole grains in. Doesn't have to be vegetarian or vegan. You don't have like a dinosaur. You can just be cool. Be cool. Polyphenols. Do you know what this is? That's in wine.
Zoë: That's not the only thing I know that's in wine.
Kylee: Exactly. Nutrition expert here. I love quizzing you on what your initial thoughts are because I feel like the general population probably is like, oh yeah, wine. I'm a woman of the people, Kylee. I think of, when I think about polyphenols, I think berries, wine and berries.
Zoë: I think of like me in an ancient Greek painting having like nubile young men in togas feeding me wine out of a chalice and dropping grapes and berries into my mouth as I lounge on a divan.
Kylee: Alright, so if anyone wants to think of an anti-inflammatory component for their diet, think on that. And these are the components that help protect plants, and they help with tampering down inflammation through quenching that oxidative stress in the body. Wine and berries. And protein. Protein. That's our last component. Moderation, maxxing your protein. If you think of that acute inflammatory response that occurs as a result of exercise, then we need to have something to help us with that tissue repair. Yeah. So we've got to get in adequate protein. That might be higher than the general population recommendation. And so. For endurance athletes that 1.6 up to 2.2 grams per kilogram body weight. Sometimes in ultra runners, it could go up to two point five grams per kilogram.
Zoë: Anyway. All right.
Kylee: So what about what you're not eating? That's helpful. If it's not gluten. Well, according to the current administration, alcohol is included in the new food pyramid. My god. But I would say. Cheers to that. But I'd say we know that excessive alcohol consumption is inflammatory. I mean, in all fairness, they said moderate alcohol consumption. I would even say this is debated. And I would also say. Merits almost. An entire new episode, but yes. Yes, being cautious with your alcohol consumption, you know? At YDS, we're never usually like to say all or nothing. But drink with reckless abandon. Don't have three drinks at breakfast is probably not a good idea. Cocktail maxxing.
Zoë: Mimosa maxx!
Kylee: And then, we already talked about it, but if 100% of your diet is coming from ultra-processed foods, we might want to revisit that, and we can take small steps, slow steps, to introduce some plant foods to maybe help balance.
Zoë: This is my friend, the eggplant.
Kylee: Everyone's gonna love eggplant. You're working on the marketing squad.
Zoë: I am the eggplant's number one hype woman. I love an eggplant. That and beans. And beans. Yeah. Beans and eggplant. I have a very normal diet. So you mentioned some specific nutrients and components of a diet that could be helping to balance inflammation. What are some actual foods or supplements that someone could look into using that might actually help, that might move the needle in some way?
Kylee: So I already went over like the food categories. We've got our Omega-3s, polyphenol-rich foods, and then fiber. Okay.
Zoë: Every influencer has their anti-inflammatory supplement stack.
Kylee: The main point, if we haven't made it clear already, that supplements might provide a modest benefit, but they're not a miracle cure. The best stack is a stack of pancakes in my book. So omega-3s from your algal oil or your fish oil have the best evidence behind them, particularly the people that are not eating fatty fish regularly. I mean, I know you said you eat a large amount of walnuts, Zoë, but unfortunately that conversion rate of ALA to EPA and DHA is pretty low.
Zoë: Yeah, even if I eat a seriously bizarre amount of walnut. That, you might have other problems if you're doing that. Yeah, probably. For sure I have other problems. I have problems that go far beyond my nut consumption.
Kylee: I feel like the problem that we run into with omega supplements, too, is the marketing. Yes. And a lot of omega supplements are not that high in EPA and DHA, and the research that's done shows benefits at high doses of two to four grams per day of EPA and DHA. Now to give some context... If you ate a salmon filet that was like four to five ounces, checkbook size, that would be about two and a half grams of EPA and DHA.
Zoë: So you gotta be eating like, you gotta eat like a salmon, like a full salmon.
Kylee: Well, if you're, so on a weekly basis, like it would be quite a bit of salmon. You might have to eat nuts, seeds. That would be like a dump truck of walnuts. But this is why if you think about it, the Mediterranean diet, this could be the reason like it is high in that Omega-3 consumption from the foods that are eaten more often on the Mediterranean diets. So the big thing when you're purchasing an Omega-3 supplement is to look at the label.
Kylee: And turn that label around and might say a gram of Omega-3s on the front, but you've got to look on the side to see if it actually has a gram of EPA and DHA in it. Because when you actually look closely, They can have other omegas in there and it takes the place of that EPA DHA. So do your research because there's a lot of sketchy omega supplement companies.
Zoë: Yes, the last thing I want is sketchy fish goo inside of me. Thank you, but nope. What about curcumin or turmeric? I feel like this is one we hear about all the time with golden lattes and putting turmeric in everything. Turmeric kombucha. Turmeric, turmeric, turmeric.
Kylee: Curcumin is the active component of turmeric that has the inflammation-balancing properties. So that's why we're kind of mentioning both of these here. But what I like to tell people is that if you think about the spice itself, you're going to have to eat a lot of that spice. Like you're going to straight up— A dump truck full of turmeric spice on the daily. The bioavailability of turmeric is pretty low unless you're taking it in with black pepper and a fat source. So it's like kind of this weird obsessive thing that you have to be very particular. About does your supplement have a fat source? Is the curcumin in a fat-source? Is there pepper in there? And if there's not, are you eating a meal with a fat source and then do you have pepper at your meal? It's like this weird thing. Are you eating bland food with no fat? And— Call 1-800-YDS, we can help. It might have a small effect in some studies, but— Okay, you guys, the face she is making right now— It's not super high. Is not promising. And the dose is like really important. So you're going to have to have a high dose and taking a high-dose of a turmeric supplement, we should be a little bit skeptical in the long-term because there could be potential downsides for your liver causing liver damage.
Zoë: Cause that's what I was curious about is taking this chronically. Again, understanding that if you have chronic inflammation, that might actually just be a disease you need to treat. But most people, athletes, active folks who like have, are on our individual hero's journey in and out of inflammation, probably just shouldn't be shotgunning turmeric all day, every day. You shouldn't being buying $6 turmeric shots at Whole Foods or whatever.
Kylee: If you're doing turmeric juice or turmeric spice, it's gonna take a lot of that to even have an effect in the body. But that's not to say— One latte is not gonna make you not feel inflamed. Here's the thing, if you like turmeric lattes, great, but I wouldn't go out of my way to drink a turmeric latte. So she's making a face.
Zoë: It's like the missionary position of lattes, just drink real coffee like an adult.
Kylee: Here's the thing, though, when you're injured, sometimes you become desperate, so I've been there myself. Yeah, drinking some golden milk. I don't see harm in doing it if you like it, like add some turmeric in. Paella is dope as hell. If you want to do a short-term turmeric supplement, you can do it. The point we're trying to make is there's modest research, modest effect, but it might not have a miracle cure that you're hoping. It's not going to cure your tendon injury, is the point. That makes sense.
Zoë: Yeah, sorry turmeric. What about ginger? I feel like this is another one that we hear about a lot and I think is a component of the golden milk latte.
Kylee: So Ginger does contain something called gingerols and shogaols, which are potent anti— Oh, like life of a shogaol. Yeah. Cool. Exactly. Which are potent antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents that target our inflammation pathways. So there's limited evidence here, though, on them, reducing exercise-induced muscle soreness and inflammatory markers. But the studies are small and modest, so I think for turmeric, for ginger, I'd love to see bigger studies, more robust. Studies robust. We're using this a lot. Ricerco robusto. Bigger studies that are done well to kind of see what effect could this have if we were doing a targeted ginger supplement or something. I love ginger. So right now, I would say not enough evidence to recommend it as, again, the miracle cure. But put a—
Zoë: Put it in your food because it tastes good. You don't like ginger. This is like one of the few things we disagree on. Ginger and cilantro. It's because sometimes I buy ginger sack. I can like take or leave cilantro, I'm not like all about it, but I really like ginger. Ginger ruins things for me. I love it.
Kylee: But what I would say is, if you enjoy it, add some ginger juice in. But you're probably not gonna make you a farmer. My Achilles injury is not gonna heal from a ginger shot.
Zoë: That's disappointing. So okay, if you had to give the audience some main takeaways about anti-inflammatory foods and diets, what would you say and how many eggplant are we eating tonight?
Kylee: We don't agree on the eggplant, though. TJ and I are on the same page. I do not like eggplants. I'm surrounded by eggplant haters. We want to know who our eggplant lovers are out there. Shout out, get in my DMs and send us a DM.
Zoë: Shout out, get in my DMs, send me a string of the eggplant emoji to make TJ so jealous. Why is everyone just sending you eggplant pictures?
Kylee: Wow. I guess the overall message that we want to convey is chronic inflammation is real, but typically it's associated with like a medical condition. And oftentimes as athletes, when we talk about inflammation, it's an acute response to exercise. Yeah. And it's not something that we need to be over-obsessing about and trying to like is tamper it down. Also, when we get onto the topic, foods that are demonized as inflammatory, the sugar gluten, nightshades, the eggplant, aren't causing inflammation in healthy people, especially if you're eating them in normal amounts. Just being normal with your eggplant. Be normal. Be cool. Just be cool. Don't harass your eggplant! So, the real drivers when we look at chronic inflammation. Are things like energy imbalance. If you are an athlete that's under-fueling, then yes, you should probably be concerned about that. Probably not the tallow.
Zoë: You just need to eat more.
Kylee: If you're sedentary.
Zoë: Which a lot of our population is not. I guess if you're sedentary, you have enough time on your hands to listen to a 90-minute podcast about inflammation in athletes. It's a choice, you can make that choice.
Kylee: I rest all the time. This one's hard sometimes to contextualize, I feel like. If you are exercising, working on the time, don't sleep. Hardly know her. Not me. Yoga is for you. Yoga will save me. Yoga will save you. It's anti-inflammatory. It might be. I mean, probably doesn't make it worse. If you do have some kind of like metabolic condition, you know, we were talking about if you have diabetes or something then that is a situation where you would have a chronic inflammatory situation going on. And that's a different thing. These are things that can be corrected and they don't require like a weird wellness or weird diet even.
Zoë: Yeah, no $11 shots, no 32-part supplement stack, no plunging or dipping or dunking, diving or dodging.
Kylee: Right, and then we can look at the foods that do have anti-inflammatory properties, not going to solve chronic inflammatory states. Being normal and eat a sufficient amount of good foods without hyper-fixating on berries will save me.
Zoë: Right, our omega-3s, our fiber, our polyphenol-rich foods, you don't have to eliminate all foods and only eat these foods, is what we're saying. Only wine, the wine diet. The wine diet, Zoë, is this the new thing? Eggplant and wine. The real housewives diet. Eggplant. Where you just live off drama and white wine. My closing message is if you wanna reduce inflammation, eat enough food, fuel your training. Sleep, recover, and stop restricting entire food groups based on your Instagram wellness influencer that's showing up on your feed. Yes.
REFERENCES
Meta-Analyses & Systematic Reviews
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Lyon Diet Heart Study
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Plant-Based Diets & Inflammation
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Omega-3 Fatty Acids
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Turmeric/Curcumin
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Gluten & Inflammation
Biesiekierski, J. R. (2017). What is gluten? Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 32, 78-81. https://doi.org/10.1111/jgh.13703
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Exercise & Inflammation
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NSAIDs & Training Adaptations
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Historical & Cultural Sources
Keys, A. (1995). Mediterranean diet and public health: Personal reflections. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 61(6), 1321S-1323S. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/61.6.1321S
Nestle, M. (2013). Food politics: How the food industry influences nutrition and health (Rev. ed.). University of California Press.
Pollan, M. (2008). In defense of food: An eater's manifesto. Penguin Press.
Books Referenced
Perlmutter, D. (2013). Grain brain: The surprising truth about wheat, carbs, and sugar—your brain's silent killers. Little, Brown and Company.
Davis, W. (2011). Wheat belly: Lose the wheat, lose the weight, and find your path back to health. Rodale Books.
Weil, A. (2005). Healthy aging: A lifelong guide to your physical and spiritual well-being. Knopf.
Perricone, N. (2002). The Perricone prescription: A physician's 28-day program for total body and face rejuvenation. HarperCollins.