Science Vs - The Real Anti-inflammatory Diet

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

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

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. If you're not feeling well, you most likely have inflammation. The number one health trend of 2024 is reducing inflammation. 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. 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. 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. Inflammation in our brains can cause all kinds of problems, including anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue. Inflammation gets in the way of your brain neurons talking to each other.

You're feeling a little more anxious, have a bit of depression. This is a huge sign of chronic inflammation. 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. Over-exercising can cause a lot of inflammation especially in the gut. And the biggie is to change your diet. You can read countless books about

anti-inflammatory diets and it feels like everyone's got advice about what to eat or not to eat to lower your inflammation. Question, what are some good anti-inflammatory foods? Blackberries, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries. Anti-inflammation juice. Celery, ginger. And if you can get turmeric, absolutely add the turmeric. Turmeric is the one when it comes to fighting inflammation.

Let's talk about nightshades. Tomatoes and nightshades are going to kill you. 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.

In fact, there has been this explosion of research in this space. In the past year, there were over 60,000 new scientific papers written about inflammation. 60,000! And we read some of them to find out what is the ground-breaking research on inflammation. What is it doing to our bodies and our brains? And if this is a problem for you, how can you tamp down that inflammation? When it comes to our health, a lot of us have been wondering if we... Most likely have inflammation. But then, there's science. When it comes to our health, a lot of us have been wondering if we…

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Box Deal will be over before you know it. Love that chicken with Popeye's! Welcome back. Today we are looking at inflammation. How big of a problem is this? What can we do to tamp it down? Beryl Haard, Senior Producer at Science Versus. Hi Wendy. Are you worried about your inflammation?

I kind of am now. I wasn't before doing this episode, but now I'm like, uh, it's going to be real. So yeah, it's been a journey. Well, let's start that journey at mental health. Cause I'm hearing a lot about how chronic inflammation is affecting our brain and our mental health. So what do we know here? Yeah, it's interesting.

Because one of the first clues that we got that maybe inflammation can actually affect our mental health, it kind of goes back to the classic role that the immune system can play in our bodies. So it fights viruses and bacteria, and that's a good thing. Right, yes. 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. If you have a flu or a cold, your immune system is fighting against this virus, you feel it. With that kind of Blair feeling when you have a cold, like that's inflammation.

Yeah and generally you're not going to feel like going running or doing a lot of like super hard activities, you're just going to be like I'm going to stay in bed, I'm going to rest. So yeah, being sick can actually give people symptoms of depression, like feeling sad and unmotivated. And we also have these cases where doctors have used drugs that really ramp up people's inflammation because it can help them fight diseases. And the doctors noticed that this treatment was making a lot of their patients really depressed.

Oh, wow. So like there's evidence that inflammation itself can like make people's mental health worse. And so how does all of this work? How exactly does inflammation affect our mental health? Well, scientists are finding that out right now and one of the big discoveries in the field was made by Caroline. Not only I see it but I know I'm the first person in the world ever to see it. And so the first time I saw it, I was very happy. I went to get a couple of IPAs because I thought that was really cool.

So what did she say? Okay. So to explain what she saw, let me first explain how her lab researches this. So they use mice and they have this kind of terrible way of sparking inflammation in the mice. So with people, we know that if you experience social stress, like if you get bullied a lot, you are more likely to have chronic inflammation. And so to mimic this in mice, here's what they do. First they get a little like black mouse, and then they put it in a cage for like five or ten minutes every day with a larger, meaner white mouse.

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. Other times it will just stare it down, looming over the mouse, and it will sometimes like rattle his tail on it. But that's not the end of it. What we do after that is we house them in the same cage and they have a plastic transparent divider so they can see each other and smell their holes. So they don't physically interact but they see the big bully on the other side.

I say it's a bit like in the schoolyard, you know, when you see the bully on the other side of the schoolyard, you don't know if it's going to come for you. Oh no. Oh, that poor little mouse. Yeah. I mean, so funnily enough, some of the mice are actually okay with all of this, but other mice seem like it messes them up a little bit.

And so Caroline kind of looks at those mice that are really affected by this, and she does see that they have higher inflammation. Okay. So this is basically chronic inflammation in the mice. And then the question is, well, what is this all doing to their brains? Exactly. 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. Okay. 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. 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? Well, that's what Caroline wanted to look at. 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. 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.

Okay, great. Wait, what is this? It looks like two eels kissing on a thermal camera. What am I looking at? I mean, I guess I could see that. So the picture, 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.

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

Yeah. I mean, it almost looks like it's been ripped apart. Yeah, exactly. And this is where the inflammation is sneaking. The inflammation is sneaking in. Is that what she said? 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. And the cytokines can actually mess up the production of neurotransmitters, like dopamine and serotonin, which we know can play a role in depression. And so how much of this evidence is in humans now?

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. And she could check, like, did they have the same little holes in their blood brain barrier that the mice did? Yeah. And so we were able to see the same phenomenon in the human brain as well of individuals who die by suicide. Compared to? Healthy control. So healthy control who die from other reasons. For example, a car accident or something that was not related to depression.

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. Wow. So, I mean, of all the people who are struggling with their mental health right now, do we have any idea how many might be able to blame inflammation for this? That's still a little unclear. So like for depression, there is one small clinical trial that found

roughly a third of the people in that study with depression had high inflammation and they were the ones that felt better after they got treated with an anti-inflammatory drug. So it's not going to be everyone, but it could be a pretty big chunk. 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, 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. I never used to have this effect and I got a pretty nasty case of COVID. Yeah, I asked Caroline about COVID actually, since I think a lot of people might have that experience now. And like, yeah, of course, we've known for a long time that COVID causes a ton of inflammation. But then Caroline told me about this study that came out recently that was looking at the blood-brain barrier of like 75 people who had COVID.

Oh gosh, I'm so nervous. It's not going to be good. Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. The barrier of the brain became way more leaky in those individuals who had very strong case of COVID. And then even with the brain fog, the long term COVID, they see this weakness of the barrier. So maybe the inflammation was so intense that the barrier became a bit more fragile. 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? Basically, yeah. And they could see this leakiness in people's brains who had brain fog, even a year after they had COVID. Oh. Maybe this can help explain why people with long COVID have brain fog. And so, yeah, scientists definitely think now that chronic inflammation can play a huge role in cognition and mental health, but it also messes with stuff besides our brains. Do you know I can almost feel brain fog right now from the stress of what you have just told me there?

Oh no. 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. One reason is that if your blood vessels are a little bit inflamed a lot of the time, that can make plaque buildup.

Chronic inflammation is also linked to type 2 diabetes, cancer, asthma, and then of course there's a ton of autoimmune diseases. So it's a long list. 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, where does this chronic inflammation come from? Stress, as you've talked about. 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 pro-inflammatory signals. So people who are fatter might have more inflammation and air pollution can cause inflammation too. So one paper estimated based on this common marker for inflammation called CRP, that about 35% of US adults have chronic inflammation.

Wow. 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. Wow, wow, wow. I mean, I wasn't sure, just because there's so much talk about chronic inflammation, I really am a bit surprised by

this that scientists really do believe that this rumbling of chronic inflammation is truly the cause of quite a lot of our illnesses. Yeah, 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. There's no way that there's like a one process is like responsible for all these different things.

Right! Exactly! But it seems like there's actually a lot of evidence backing it up that this is this puppet master of health inside of our bodies. Okay. Okay. So then the question becomes, how do we fix this? Can we fix it? Yeah.

And a lot of people say that the key to lowering your inflammation is through diet. Right. Yes. 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. Yes. Like one thing that surprised me was nightshades, which includes vegetables like eggplants, potatoes, also tomatoes.

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? 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 might have some kind of toxin in them that makes them bad for us. Yeah.

Right. 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 have found that it may did make their gut kind of messed up. 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 blame that on the solanine.

That's such a thing that would happen to schoolboys in England. Yeah, poor lads. We ate the old potatoes. This was just like a Charles Dickens story. So like, yeah, there was those studies, but I felt like none of that was that convincing. 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 advice, right? Yeah, no, 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. So yeah, there really does not seem to be any convincing evidence that cutting out nightshades can lower inflammation. You're not cutting eggplants out of your diet anytime soon.

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

more mixed. Okay, so nightshades back on the menu. Junk foods is still bad for us. What's up next? After the break, an anti-inflammatory diet that scientists are actually excited about. Wow, that's big! Plus, could exercise be causing chronic inflammation? Coming up.

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Your teen requested a ride, but this time not from you. It's through their Uber Teen account. It's an Uber account that allows your teen to request a ride under your supervision with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers. Add your teen to your Uber account today. Welcome back. Today we're talking about inflammation. Merrill has scared the s*** out of us, out of me at least, about our leaky brain barrier. How do you fix it? How do you lower your chronic inflammation?

Avoiding processed foods might help. What else you got for us? Well, there are lots of foods that people say can help with inflammation, but the one that seems to be really having a moment right now is turmeric. And that's been used for thousands of years in South Asia as part of Ayurvedic medicine. And it's thought to help with inflammation. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seeing a lot on tumeric shots.

Tumeric in this, tumeric in that. 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 tumeric, and they'll check to see, does it lower inflammatory markers in the blood. Great. 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. Huh. So what do you make of that? I mean, are you adding more turmeric to things now? I haven't been. No, I just feel like the science isn't solid enough yet. But then, 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. So I talked to one of the researchers who's been running it. My name is Rosa Casas. I'm an associate professor at the University of Barcelona. 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 PRETI-med study and it's on the Mediterranean diet. 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? All right, so here is like a classic meal that you might eat if you're on this diet. 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. Ooh, that sounds tasty.

It's very good and very healthy. So frito. Sounds delicious. 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. And one also encouraged to have stuff like fruit, beans, nuts, fish, and seafood. And one thing that's pretty great here is that people could eat as much of the stuff as they wanted. Like they didn't have to count calories. So that is the Mediterranean diet. Then tell me about this amazing study. Okay. So they got over 7,000 people who are at least 55 years old, and they had a higher risk for heart disease. And if you were in the Mediterranean diet group, then you'd meet with a dietitian who would, you know, give you advice about how to incorporate all these foods into your diet. But then just to make sure people really 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. One liter a week? Yeah. Yeah. That was for the whole family. For the von Trapp family? What family?

Yeah. I mean, I guess they wanted people to just go wild with this stuff, right? Like drizzle a little on everything. Okay, all right. It's expensive, but okay. And then if you were not in this group, what was the control? 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 dietitian.

And so what did she find? Okay, 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. After one year, we observed reductions in inflammation because of the Mediterranean diet. Mmm. So, yeah, they saw less inflammation. That marker that a lot of researchers look at, CRP,

was down by more than 40%. Wow. Do you remember the moment you saw that this diet basically worked? Yes, I remember the moment you you saw that this diet basically worked? Yes, I The moment and it was wow this very incredible No, and this work has been replicated by by other studies So according to one meta analysis going on the Mediterranean diet really does work to reduce inflammation. That's awesome

So what's it doing? Why is it helping? 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 super food that's the anti-inflammatory one that everyone just needs to eat. It's the fact that like there's all these different foods that are kind of dialing down inflammation in our cells in all these different ways. So for example, if you're eating a lot of fish, stuff like salmon, you'd be eating omega-3 fatty acids. And they might be reducing inflammation in a few different ways. So for example, you have a layer of fat surrounding all of your cells. And when you eat more omega-3s, they can literally get inserted into this fatty layer

that's surrounding all your cells. And that will make it harder for your cells, for your immune cells to like become inflammatory. Oh, that's cool. And then of course, there's other things going on 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. And just by the way, I noticed that, you know how you see all these lists of top five anti-inflammatory

foods? Of course, of course. 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. Right. It's not the food on these lists. They don't have some magical anti-inflammatory power. Yeah, basically.

I mean, if anything, fiber is the magic. But then Rosa and her team wanted to find out like, okay, we know that the Mediterranean diet lowers inflammation, but like does this all actually lower your risk of getting diseases? Like if you're on this diet for years. Oh, of course, of course inflammation is one thing, but you really want to just not be sick. 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. And they found that it helped.

To follow a Mediterranean diet, reduce the cardiovascular disease by 30 percent in comparison with the low fat diet. Whoa. She said 30% lower. Yeah, and other studies find this kind of thing too. Nice. And then one more disease I wanna tell you about, they looked at breast cancer.

And in this case, the women in the Mediterranean diet group were a lot less likely to get breast cancer than the people in the control group. What's that? Is that an inflammation story as well? Is it because it's lowering inflammation? 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. Well, this is very exciting. So 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. On the frying part, it was like, you simmer it slowly with olive oil. Oh, I'm not a cook, I don't know, you shove it on a pan. I don't know, you shove it on a pan. I don't understand the rest. So this is amazing. 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. That's really not how we should be thinking about it. It's really your whole diet, which is a bit annoying. Yeah. Yeah. So then speaking of other things that are annoying, exercise. So what's the story here?

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. Do it, it lowers your inflammation. Don't do it, it actually ramps up your inflammation. 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. Yes. What's the science here?

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

will still be really high, even 24 hours later. It seems like this is because really intense exercise can damage or just put a lot of stress on your muscles. 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. 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. Wow, thank you. 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. 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? 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, 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. What we've shown is that it does not matter if you're doing any intervention that's lower or higher intensity exercise overall did not make a difference.

And so for the people online who are saying you shouldn't exercise, especially, you know, don't do like HIIT workouts if you're worried about your chronic inflammation. Is that right? No, that's not right. So engaging in higher intensity exercise like HIIT workouts is really unlikely to increase your risk of, you know, chronic inflammation. In fact, it's more likely to reduce your risk of chronic inflammation than anything. Reduce your risk of chronic inflammation.

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. I mean, that makes so much more sense. I mean, we know exercise is so good for us for so many different things. Okay, so M different things. Okay. So Meryl, what I have learned from this episode is that chronic inflammation is a problem that a lot of us have to think about, unfortunately, one more thing, add it to the pile and don't listen to people, try to sell you quick fixes, whether it's a turmeric

shot or someone telling you not to eat that tomato instead, you know what? Take that tomato, put it in a pan with some olive oil, simmer it, whatever that is. No simmer it. And enjoy. Meryl, what are you going to do differently as a result of this episode? You going to cook up a sofrito? Yeah, no, I actually do just want to eat more vegetables. Like, while I was working on this episode, we're also working on the fiber episode.

And so I feel like it's just like the universe is telling me to eat more vegetables. Yes. Researchers also told me some other tips that I liked. Try to get enough sleep because sleep is linked to lower inflammation and also stress. Like those poor mice getting bullied, like you know stress can cause inflammation so lowering stress has also found to decrease inflammation in some cases. I talked about this with Caroline Menard. I think it's really everybody can find their own recipe or 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 every metal concert. 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. 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 did this week's episode? We have 119 citations.

119! And if people want to find these citations, learn more about anything that we talked about on the show, where should they go? Well, you can go to our show notes and then just follow the links to the transcript. Excellent. And on Instagram this week, which is science underscore VS, what do we have for people? We will have those photos of the blood brain barrier that Caroline took photos of and the mice.

The eels kissing. I mean, I would love it if you guys, as you look at these photos, tell me what you see in this. Do you see the eels? Yeah. Are they eels? What are they? It kind of looks like stars, 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, Merrill. Thanks, Wendy. This episode was produced by Merrill Horne with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, along with Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler and Aketi Foster-Keys. We're edited by Blythe Terrell.

Mix and sound design by Sam Bear. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Music written by Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, So Wiley, Bumi Hidaka and Peter Leonard. Thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Susan Segerstrom, Professor Andre Nell, Dr Hannah Mayer, Professor Xiaoping Li, Dr Jennifer Felger, Professor Andreas Mikkelsen, 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.

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 where new episodes come out. And if you like the show, you like what you've heard, whatever app you are listening on, give us a five-star review. Makes us feel happy. Thanks. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time. You