Short Wave - What social media gets wrong about inflammation

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Inflammation is all over our feeds. Influencers claim it’s the reason you're bloated or fatigued, the source of digestive problems and the cause of more serious illnesses like Alzheimer's or cardiovascular disease. But how much of that is scientifically backed, and how viable are the solutions you see on social media? Short Wave talks to immunologist Shruti Naik to separate the health from the hype. Interested in more wellness science? Email us your question at [e-mail] public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. If you've been online lately, you probably noticed that health influencers can't stop talking about inflammation. According to the internet, it's the reason you're always sick, tired, or bloated. Ever wondered why your face looks puffy, tired or bloated no matter what you do? It's not always fat. It's inflammation. You're not ugly. You just have inflammation that's trying to make you ugly because of pathogens and toxins. Inflammation is so common these days, but that doesn't mean it's normal. And it's not just online discourse.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., weighed in two. I'm looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street. And I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation. And while it might seem like inflammation is getting a bad rap, there is some truth to the hype. inflammation is at the heart of nearly every disease in the body. And more and more we're realizing that even diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cardiovascular disease, of course, cancers, they all have a connection to inflammation. That's Shruti Nyack. She's a professor of immunology at the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Shruti says that not all inflammation is harmful. And in fact, it's sometimes necessary.

Acute inflammation or responsive inflammation is key for your immune system. Now, when things will arise when you have chronic inflammation, so long-lasting inflammation that never stop, sometimes it's low grade, sometimes it's high grade and you have an inflammatory disease. Chronic inflammation is this gray zone that sent the Internet into a tailspin. And while influencers are quick to promote fat diets and supplements, shudy believes were misdiagnosing the problem. and overstating the solution.

Generally, if you have an inflammatory disease, it's not a failure of wellness. There are genetic components, there are environmental components, lifestyle components. So this narrative that everyone needs to wholesale stop inflammation is not good. You need the right response in the right place for the right amount of time. And when that gets out of balance, then you have a disease state. And if you have a disease state, it's not going to be your turmeric milk that's going to fix it. going to fix the issue. So today on the show, should you actually worry about your chronic inflammation levels? And can you even do anything about it? I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave,

the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Shruti, I've been hearing a lot about inflammation. Has it come up in discussions with friends and family for you, too? And like, what kind of things are people asking about? For sure. I think inflammation is sort of on everyone's mind, because there's so much out there. They're in social media about how seed oils and juice cleanses and turmeric, you know, all of these quote-unquote anti-inflammatory diets. Exactly. And being an immunologist, my friends and family often come to me and say like, what should I do? Is this something that's going to help me?

Is that something that's going to help me? And what I can say is really that a lot of the stuff that's out there are just like blanket claims, right? And what I mean by blanket claims are they're in the media. They're very nice little talking points. But none of them have really been tested. So it's sort of like, great, I can make a video and put it on Instagram that says, like, everyone to give up gluten. Gluten's bad. And in some cases, if you have psiliac's disease or certain other conditions, it is bad.

That is correct. But that doesn't mean that we need to wholesale give up pizza. And, you know, and like delicious bread. So I think one thing that I tell my friends and family is someone may make a great video, but take a step back and say, like, why are they saying that? Where's that coming from? What is the evidence? You talked about this chronic low-level inflammation.

Can you tell me what that is? And when does it occur? So chronic low-level inflammation is something that we cannot see. it's low-grade accumulation of inflammatory proteins, inflammatory factors that may not lead to overt disease, but it is something that is actively affecting our health span, so how healthy we are, right? So that manifests in many, many different ways. We know that this is associated with these conditions. What we don't know is how do we target it?

How do we reverse it? And will that sort of make us maybe not live longer, but live healthier longer? Yeah, I want to live healthier longer. So how much of a factor is stress and other environmental risks in having chronic low-level inflammation? Yeah, I mean, they're definitely factors. Stress can influence our hormonal system, and we know that hormones influence the immune system. In some cases, cortisol and some cases, other hormones. there's neurological factors. We also know now that the nervous system and the immune system

actively talk to each other and actively influence each other. So there's evidence that if you're stressed, you're more susceptible to inflammatory diseases, et cetera. That being said, I want to go back and just give a little bit of caution to say, like, we need evidence-based interventions. Yeah. It sounds like you're saying inflammation isn't necessarily the direct cause or effect. It's more part of this nervous system and immune system loop. Is that what makes it so hard to understand? Your immune system is everywhere. So unlike your heart or your liver, which stay in one place, your immune system is in every tissue in the body, every cell in your body, it's everywhere. It's ubiquitous.

That's right. Let's put those SAT words out there for any, you know, any high schoolers listening. And we're starting to realize now that these diseases are all, even though they may appear, in different organs, they're all connected through one immune system. And so what we want to start doing as physicians is, instead of having fragmented care, somebody's being treated in neurology, somebody's being treated in rheumatology, somebody's been treated in TBD, we want to think about these diseases as one class of disease and start thinking about how we can treat them rationally by targeting the immune system. In the same way that folks that treat cancer are using.

your genetics to treat rationally and precisely. Last year, RFK Jr. claimed that he could tell kids were visibly overburdened with inflammation. And I think a lot of us are also concerned whether our bodies are experienced too much inflammation. How can we tell if somebody has chronic inflammation? Or is there a test I or anyone can take to measure inflammation and know if it's abnormally high? I have not yet come across any such test or measure or visible tell that you have chronic inflammation and I don't have chronic inflammation. I don't think immunologists have that kind of superpower.

What we are thinking about is measuring the immune system through the blood, which is where the immune system uses to travel to different parts of your body. Technologies in the last 10 years have really evolved to the point where we can monitor your immune system in real time. We're in a renaissance, an immune system renaissance, or era. We are. It's this technology called single cell sequencing technology, which is profile your immune system at a single cell level, taking immune cells from the blood. These are your white blood cells. And looking at what is your immune system today? What is your immune system six months from now? What is it one year from now? And we call that your baseline health. But what we need to do now is collect that information from large groups of people, right, over time. And then create a measure that folks can use to say, okay, something off in my body. Like, I'm seeing a deviation from that healthy system in the same way that you take, for instance, a glucose test for diabetes. Okay, so we know that a lot of the things that social

media says helps with inflammation maybe doesn't have a lot of evidence. Like, what can people do in real life? Like, what can they actually do to help reduce chronic inflammation? There's no magic bullet. There just isn't. The evidence supports, like, the least sexy approach, which is exercise. sleep, eat a balanced diet, you know, don't eat like McDonald's fries every day or whatever, although who can say no to McDonald's fries? Like, they're delicious. Right. Yeah, everything in moderation. Everything in moderation. So the evidence is sort of the things we already knew. Like, you need to work out. You need to sleep well. You need to have a balanced diet. High fiber, low sugar, things like that. We sit a lot. And that's not how we evolved as humans.

Sedentary lifestyles are a problem. And so even if it is, just take a 10-minute walk after lunch. Movement, exercise, sleeping. The importance of sleep cannot be overstated. As somebody who loves sleep, like, this is my favorite recommendation. If you just do the uncool, simple things, that mitigates a lot of these issues of chronic inflammation. Well, let's stop there for a second. Why do you say sleep is like a really good thing to reduce inflammation?

Yeah. So there have been some studies in my. which are now being extended to humans, but there have been studies that show that if you sleep well, some of your low-grade inflammation goes away. There's a lot more research to be done, but that resetting is really important. And sleep, by the way, is not just important for the immune system.

It's also important for cognitive function. It's also important for aging. And sleep is one of the things that gets really disturbed when you have inflammatory diseases. And when you have stress. And when you have stress, exactly. And then diet. I mean, unfortunately, you really are what you eat.

Yeah, I mean, when I eat salmon or I eat ginger or a handful of blueberries, which I did yesterday at my desk, like, what is that actually doing to my body to help inflammation? Yeah, I mean, so omega-3's fiber, we know that fiber in particular, it helps your microbiota produce certain factors that are directly speaking to the immune system in your gut. It also helps with many things in terms of keeping your intestine healthy. And so these are just normal ways in which you can maintain that healthy immune balance and moving from saturated fats to unsaturated fats, right? Yeah.

So maybe don't eat the T-Bone steak every day. Maybe move to salmon. I do love the gristle, though. It's so good. I know it's so good. Okay. I've also heard about like maybe GLP1 drugs help. inflammation too. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah, I mean, GLP ones are just like

a revolution. They were initially put on the market to help with type two diabetes and obesity. But we're seeing that GLP ones seem to have a anti-inflammatory effect. In patients with some inflammatory diseases, we're seeing that their disease flares are going away. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so now we, you know, at Mount Sinai, we have some really exciting clinical trials going on. to look at the effects. What we don't understand fully is how much of that effect is directly on the immune system, right, versus by changing metabolism or by affecting other cells. We still need to gather the evidence.

But the early data really suggests that there are some powerful effects on the immune system and on inflammation. So who all actually has to worry about chronic inflammation? Yeah, I mean, the word chronic inflammation, I think, scares a lot of folks, right? It just sounds sort of horrible. Unless you have an inflammatory disease, if you feel that you're relatively good health, I don't think that you need to stress out about it. This is not about, like, oh, my God, at some point, chronic inflammation is going to get me. It's just sort of like, how can I live to optimal health?

And I think that's a very positive approach, because it's basically saying that you can make choices to make your health better and keep it that way for longer. And those choices are exercise, sleep, and diet. Yeah. So like the number of people that are getting like the anti-inflammatory diet Instagram reels and the number of people who really should be going to their doctor and checking it out, not the same number as you're telling me. No, not at all. I mean, you know, at least from my friends, Like, I see them have anxiety about chronic inflammation. And all I say is, like, you don't have an autoimmune disease. You don't have an inflammatory disease.

Yeah. If you do, then, yes, you need to go get treated. But if you're not, then I don't think you need to be crippled by anxiety about chronic inflammation. I think you just think positively about how do you keep your health on track. To me, I always take on approaches to maintain health in a practical manner. Right. I'm not going to go to the gym 50 times a week. I'm just trying to go twice, though.

Yeah, that's great. This is not about sort of like health maxing or whatever. Right. It's being practical, also addressing that you can't just ignore the issue. You have to eat well as best you can. You have to sleep well as best you can and move. Yeah. Well, Shruti, thank you so much for talking to me today.

I have less anxiety now. Mission accomplished. Thank you for having me. It's really been a pleasure. This episode was produced by Arundati Nair and Hannah Chinn. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Lauren Gonzalez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keely was the audio engineer.

I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR.