← The Dr. Josh Axe Show
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All right, let me ask you a question. Are you one of those people where you're taking every supplement under the sun? You're taking turmeric capsules, you're taking a fish oil supplement, you're taking a super greens powder, yet you are still waking up feeling stiff, low energy and just not your best? I want you to hear me out on something because it's critically important. Your problem isn't discipline. It's something else entirely. Now, in the next 25 minutes, I'm going to give you these seven foods that lower inflammation better than any supplement out there with the studies behind it and how you need to implement these into your diet. And stay to the end because number seven is already in your kitchen. You own it and it's the biggest needle mover of all. Here's the problem. You're just using it wrong and there's a two second fix that multiplies it by 20 fold. Welcome to the Dr. Axe Show. So the first thing you have to understand is inflammation is good. That's right. Okay, I said it. Inflammation is good. It's how you heal a cut. It's how you fight a virus. The problem is chronic inflammation, which is a low fire that never goes out it's the common root of heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer's. By the way, if anything says itis at the end, itis. Did you know in Latin that means inflammation? So arthritis, that's inflammation of your joints. Ulcerative colitis, that's inflammation of your colon. The root cause of almost every chronic illness today is inflammation. Here's the problem, though. Most people are spending way more of their money and focus on on reducing inflammation with supplements rather than food. And the reality is the food that you eat every single day will reduce inflammation far more than any supplement ever could. Now, here's the core idea. Three in five people worldwide die of an inflammation driven disease. Think about that. 60% of people that die early die from inflammation. I'm talking heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes. Chronic inflammation is the connector with all of those things. And getting it down is the highest leverage thing most people can do to transform their health quickly. Now, I want to mention in my clinic, I look at thousands of different blood tests a year and blood work of patients coming in constantly. And one of the biggest things I see that's causing chronic illness is inflammation. Now, there can be different reasons for that. It can be tied to blood sugar imbalance, it can be tied to high cortisol. But generally speaking, inflammation is one of the single biggest things causing people to age more quickly. That's fueling autoimmune disease, gut issues, and a number of other health problems. And what I see most people do is saying, hey, Dr. Axe, what is the one supplement I can take that's gonna fix my inflammation? Here's the truth. Supplements can be helpful, but they aren't near as helpful, not even in the same ballpark as the food you eat. And let me give you some evidence here. This is on a very large clinical trial, okay? And here's what it found. It found that supplements didn't deliver. So not one trial, but across 78 trials on nearly 300,000 people, antioxidant supplements showed no benefit at all. Now this is on antioxidant supplements. Now, there are many other types of supplements, like Omega 3s and others, but those didn't make as big of a difference as food did. But again, it is a very large scale study versus let's look at food, okay? Food delivers in the same kind of trial. A Mediterranean diet built on extra virgin olive oil cut C reactive protein, which, by the way, CRP or hscrp. That is the number one blood test for testing cellular inflammation in your body. So if your body is inflamed, okay, it's called HS high sensitivity C reactive protein. In this study where people started adopting a Mediterranean diet built on olive oil, it cut inflammation and CRP levels by 45%. And as a secondary marker of inflammation, IL6 was cut by 35% in just 12 months. So when you're comparing changing your diet and adding in anti inflammatory foods to supplements, food wins every single time. Now I'm not telling you, never take a supplement. There are some great anti inflammatory supplements and I'll touch on that at the end. But overall there are foods that can greatly reduce inflammation more than supplements ever could. By the way, I do want to mention in that trial I mentioned on the Mediterranean diet, they had a couple of groups there. One, so we had the Mediterranean diet group. There was another group though that followed a diet that was maybe even somewhat healthy, but lower fat, they said, hey, we're going to cut out saturated fats and focus on a lower fat diet. In that group, inflammation went the wrong way. They ended up more inflamed and more sick. So just know this. Healthy fatty acids are critical when it comes to reducing inflammation. So you might be asking the question, hey, why does food win? Why is food, generally speaking more powerful and, and more anti inflammatory than supplements? Here's the reason why. Because a whole food isn't one compound. It's hundreds of compounds arriving together in the ratios that nature and God created them to be in to best benefit our bodies. Scientists actually call this the food matrix. So if you're eating an avocado for instance, or having some walnuts, you're getting fiber, you're getting fat, you're getting polyphenols, you're getting vitamins and minerals, you're getting omega 3 fatty acids. You are getting all of those in a single food. So it's like 20 supplements packed into one. And here's what happens when you pull one of them out and put it into a capsule at 10 times the dose. Oftentimes the absorption and the synergy of these things working together to help your body is diminished. And if you think about it like this, it's like taking one instrument out of the orchestra and asking it to play a symphony. And so these nutrients work in synergy together as a symphony to help your body heal. Now, before I dive into the top seven anti inflammatory foods, do me a quick favor before we get in. If you're getting value already from what I'm sharing, hit the subscribe button. It's free, it takes two seconds. And it's the single biggest thing that helps this show reach the people who need it the most and it's also gonna help our top content show up on your feed. If not, you can miss out. So do me a favor, subscribe and also just thank you to you subscribers out there for being on mission with me. We are changing the health of this world together. My new book, Heal youl Cells is now available for pre order and if you've gotten value from this podcast, I would be so grateful if you picked up a copy directly through our own channels@Healyourcellsbook.com now listen, when you pre order with me, you'll get the Cellular Peptide Guide, the Cellular Supplement Guide, the Heal yourselves masterclass, and 40 healing recipes. That's actually over $500 worth of content for free. Plus if you'd like, you can get an at home blood work kit for only $79, our lowest price ever with a one hour consultation included. So you'll have your results before the book even launches again. That's healyourselvesbook.com and just know that this offer won't last long. All right, now let's dive into the food. Number one, fatty fish like salmon, sardines and mackerel. Number one is fish. Now here's the irony. Fish oil capsules have a mixed track record in trials while eating fish itself performs beautifully. Same omega 3s, very different results. The EPA and DHA, which are types of omega 3 fatty acids, get built into your cell membranes where your body uses them to make resolvins. These are the molecul that actively shut inflammation off in your body. Okay, and I want to share a personal story. I have discovered this in myself. My body responds very well to eating wild caught salmon. I mean I could eat it three times a day. My body just feels better the more that I eat it. However, when I take fish oil capsules or had historically, my body would not respond well at all. Okay. I would sometimes it would cause my skin to even break out. I would burp. I could just tell my absorption was very, very poor on them. And so let me also say this though, if you are taking by the way, I still think fish oil capsules are very helpful. So here's what I'd recommend. If you eat salmon that day, or sardines or fatty fish, you typically don't need to take a supplement in addition to but if you're not getting fatty fish during a day, I do think there's still benefits of taking an Omega 3 supplement. However, you need to take it in the right form. Ideally a triglyceride form something like a cod liver oil. You can also take a DHA with phospholipids. That's from algae oil, that can be really beneficial. But overall, if you think about it like this as well, if you're eating a piece of. If you're eating salmon, you're getting omega 3 fatty acids of EPA and DHA. You're also getting protein, you're also getting some phospholipids. These are really unique fatty acids that actually help restructure the cell membrane. You're also getting astaxanthin, one of the world's most powerful antioxidants for anti aging. You are getting actually, if you're eating the skin, you're getting loads of collagen. So when you're eating fish like salmon, you are getting so many nutrients in one, it's gonna beat out oil supplements all day. Even though fish oil supplements can be beneficial, wild caught fish is always going to win. Now here's why fatty fish shuts off inflammation. Most anti inflammatory drugs work by blocking, okay? They jam an enzyme and force the fire down. Omega 3s do something even better. EPA and DHA get built into the wall of every cell. So when inflammation starts, your body converts them into resolvins, molecules whose whole job is to actively end it and clean up the damage. Think about it like this. Let's say you had a house and you had an extra room there attached and you literally have a fireman living with you and he's constantly going through the house saying oh, that's a fire hazard, we're going to turn this off. Literally constantly protecting your body, ready to put out any fire. That's what it's like when you eat wild caught fish. And these omega threes literally become part of your cells and body. So your cells more than anything else are made up of fat and then secondarily protein. And so when you hear something like you are what you eat, it is likely most true with the fatty acid you eat. And this is why if there's one perfect food in nature, it's salmon. It is probably the most anti inflammatory of all of the food you could ever consume. That along with other types of wild caught fish like sardines. Okay, number two food that reduces inflamma more than supplements is extra virgin olive oil. I'm talking about the food that is most prized in the Bible. It's talked about in the Bible hundreds of times. It's the key component of the Mediterranean diet. It is the most healing oil out there along with omega 3 fatty acids. And in 2005, researchers discovered why good olive oil stings the back of your throat. This is a compound called olukanthal, and that sting is the same receptor that ibuprofen hits. And olacanthal blocks the very same COX enzyme that ibuprofen blocks. You ideally want to do about two to four tablespoons a day of extra virgin olive oil. It should be a dark glass bottle. And again, it should be potent, it should sting your throat. It should be spicy, it should be herbaceous, it should be strong. And this is typically finding an extra virgin olive oil that is higher in polyphenols. So when you're searching, whether you're buying online or at a market, you want to find a high polyphenol. Extra virgin olive oil in a dark glass bottle tends to be the best you can find. And here's how olive oil works against inflammation. Olcanthal blocks COX1 and COX2, and that's what a lot of these NSAID drugs do, but it does it naturally. Now, here are two other things. It contains a compound called hydroxytyrosol, which switches off NRF2. This is your cell's own defense system. So it's literally switching off cellular inflammation. Also, the monounsaturated fats quiet something called TL4. And this is one of the main alarm bells of chronic inflammation. So really, olive oil has three ways. It's turning off inflammation in the body, helping your body heal. And so typically, you want to do about two to four tablespoons a day of extra virgin olive oil. I also want to mention there was this myth out for a long time that you should not heat olive oil. Now, listen, it's probably best uncooked, but if you are choosing between all of the different cooking oils to use on low and medium heat, you are probably still better off using extra virgin olive oil. Reason being, even though it's smoking, you might be losing some of the polyphenols. There is a level of oxidation there, but it's still healthier than likely any other oil. Now, I do think there can be some benefits of avocado oil, coconut oil. Those are my number two and three oils for cooking. But number one oil you want to have in your cabinet and use for almost everything is extra virgin olive oil. All right, the number three group of foods that turns off inflammation better than supplements are berries, pomegranates, and tart cherries. Those deep red and blue and purple pigments are called anthocyanins, and they switch off inflammation. Now, tart cherries are really a standout. In a controlled trial, four weeks of tart cherry dropped C reactive protein, the main inflammation marker, by 23%. That's really phenomenal from one single food dropping C reactive protein and inflammation that much. Now you can buy frozen tart cherries. You can do tart cherry juice powder now in our house. One of the reasons why I consume this a lot and I have my daughter consuming this a lot is for athletic recovery. I have a daughter who started swimming trying to support her body in recovery. So we buy these unsweetened tart cherries and she'll eat those as a snack. When I'm working out, I make a shake of protein powder, creatine, and then I put tart cherry juice in there. Now I don't do fruit juice unless I'm in the middle of a workout. That's when I'll do it, is if I'm working out, I'll actually do some of this tart cherry juice. You could also just buy tart cherries, fresh or frozen. But tart cherries are very powerful. Berries are very powerful and so are pomegranates. One of the interesting thing about a lot of these berries is the switch that they're turning off inflammation wise is it's actually turning down a gene that produces it. And so you've probably heard this. All of us have genes that are very helpful for us, genes that may make us more susceptible to things like cancer or heart disease or methylation. And you can actually turn on and off those switches. Right. So one of the ways that berries work is they actually turn off inflammatory genes that can be linked to cancer and heart disease. So really getting a lot of berries, pomegranates and tart cherries in your diet, it's amazing for reducing inflammation. And another thing I want to mention is, you know, so far we've talked about wild caught fish, we've talked about extra virgin olive oil, we've talked about these very pigment rich and anthocyanins berries and fruits, they're all turning inflammation off in different ways, unlike what most supplements can do. That's why following an anti inflammatory diet, like a Mediterranean diet, like a biblio diet, or just incorporating these foods as the main part of your diet, incredibly healing for your body. Now the number four group of foods that can reduce inflammation in a powerful way are leafy green vegetables and cruciferous vegetables. So I'm talking about broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, brussels sprouts, Spinach, watercress, and also sprouts and microgreens, things like broccoli sprouts. Chopping or chewing them releases something called sulforaphane, which switches on NRF2. This is your body's master antioxidant, by the way. The studies on sulforaphane for fighting cancer, for detoxifying your body of excess estrogen, so these are very hormone balancing as well, is incredibly powerful. You know, it's also very different than swallowing a pill. When you swallow a pill, you can take a sulforaphane capsule or pill, and it is beneficial for you. And this is something my mom did when she was fighting cancer and beat it naturally. So I do recommend supplements that have some of these compounds. However, it is always more powerful when you're taking it as a food. By the way, broccoli sprouts are probably the single most powerful sulforaphane food on the planet. And if you want to know the greens that are probably the most beneficial, broccoli, sprouts and watercress are maybe the best of the best. But overall, you want to get a variety. Have some broccoli, have some cauliflower, have some kale, and a lot of different vegetables on your plate. Here's something that's really interesting about this as well, of how the food actually works in your body versus a supplement. When you eat broccoli, for instance, you get sulforaphane, and these activate NRF2, okay, which switches on more than 200 of your own antioxidant and detox genes. Your body then makes its own defenses for days. So sometimes when you take something, you're getting a benefit sort of immediately and then it goes away. In this case, you're getting benefits for days on end. A supplement hand you a fish. Sulforaphane teaches your cells to fish, so it allows your body to continually reduce inflammation on its own. It's like we talked about earlier. When you're consuming wild caught fish with omega 3 fats, those actually become part of your cell. So your body is just continually reducing inflammation because of what your cells are made out of. In a very similar way, when you eat broccoli or these cruciferous vegetables that have sulforaphane, your body is constantly reducing inflammation. Number five, fermented foods. And I will tell you, according to a lot of these studies, fermented foods surprised even a lot of the researchers doing the studies. Sauerkraut, kimchi, kvass, kefir, yogurt, miso. These traditional fermented foods reduce inflammation in a Powerful way completely different than any other food we've talked about so far. Stanford ran a head to head medical study. They did fermented foods against a high fiber diet. The fermented group's inflammation dropped across all 19 inflammatory markers in the high fiber group. Not one of them moved. So when you're talking about reducing inflammation, fermented foods win even against high fiber. Now listen, fiber does have benefits for detoxification, but it doesn't have the same level of anti inflammatory benefits, not even close to to fermented foods. And here's how fermented foods work. Your gut lining is one cell thick and when it gets leaky with leaky gut or intestinal permeability, fragments of bacterial cells slip in your bloodstream. Also undigested food proteins like gluten and casein, toxins, microbes like parasites, those start to get into the bloodstream and your immune system treats every single one of them as an invader. So then the alarm is constantly running all day. Well, fermented foods bring in these live microbes and good bact and the acids that help feed them like a fertilizer to help them grow. And what that does is it starts to help create an environment and a terrain where your gut lining can now heal and those tight junctions start to close up. And so what it does is the majority of inflammation today actually starts in your gut and your gut lining. And so fermented foods most directly start putting out the fire in your gut. And so one of the greatest things you can do to reduce inflammation is improve the health of your gut. Microbiome and ferment, fermented foods are the number one way to do it. Now I do want to say this. If somebody has severe histamine reactions, right, you have histamine reactions. Sometimes eating fermented food can cause your skin to flare up. In that case, you want to do things that are maybe a little less sour. You might want to start with a probiotic supplement and soil based organisms. Let the histamine reaction calm down and then add small amounts of fermented foods to your diet. The number six food group that reduces inflammation better than supplements are nuts and seeds, especially walnuts, flax seeds and pumpkin seeds. Walnuts, flax and chia in particular bring plant based omega 3s plus magnesium, vitamin E, fiber and polyphenols all in a single bite. In the big Mediterranean diet trials, the groups given extra nuts saw their inflammatory markers fall even more and their heart disease risk fall with them. So if you're choosing between nuts and Seeds to eat. Probably walnuts are going to be the single best you can do along with ground flax seeds. Now, if your goal is to support testosterone and balance hormones and boost immunity, pumpkin seeds may be the winner. But overall, walnuts and flaxseeds generally are the best for reducing inflammation. The biggest myth about inflammation and chronic symptoms is that they're all separate issues. In reality, your symptoms behave more like a chain of falling dominoes. When one goes down, it triggers several more and before you know it, everything feels off. This new test completely changes things and I know exactly what to look for. I'm currently offering a simple at home blood test that actually tests for the right things. Targeted biomarkers that reveal the very first dominoes impacting your hormones, inflammation, your thyroid and your metabolism. Plus a full hour with one of my senior health advisors to review your results and show you exactly how the Health Institute can help you stop the chain reaction and finally balance your hormones and heal. If you want to check it out and grab one before they're gone, just go to mybloodwork.com now. And the number seven food group that most reduces inflammation are the herbs and spices in your own medicine cabinet. Herbs and spices like turmeric, ginger, garlic, cinnamon, rosemary, oregano and cloves all have powerful anti inflammatory benefits. Curcumin, which is found in turmeric, hits more inflammatory pathways at once than almost any compound we know of. It reduces NF kappa COX2 cytokines, almost every inflammatory marker we look at on blood work. Turmeric or the compound curcumin reduces those inflammation pathways. Gram for gram, dried herbs and spices are the most antioxidant dense foods on the entire earth. Now here's a tip that could radically improve your life. Combining certain spices together can improve the absorption. So for instance, curcumin with piperine or turmeric with ginger or black pepper. What history teaches us Traditionally and medical studies have shown that when you consume a warming spice that makes you sweat a little bit, that opens up your capillaries and blood vessels, it improves circulation. It actually helps get compounds like curcumin out to the rest of your body. That's why there's a tea I drink regularly and it's turmeric ginger tea. Ginger is warming, it's spicy, it helps open up those capillaries and improve circulation. Very similar. Black pepper does this, cayenne pepper does this. They improve circulation. So taking turmeric or curcumin with a warming spice helps get it out to every area of your body and this is why there is a ancient beverage that was consumed in Ayurvedic medicine that included either they would do coconut milk or ghee, so a healthy fat. And they would also do turmeric. And actually it was a three warming spice blend of ginger, black pepper, and I think it was long pepper, it was a type of red pepper. And so they would do all of those together with the turmeric, with the fat to also increase absorption into the cell in a very similar way. You could do this with, with, let's say you're making hummus at home, right? You could add in turmeric to the hummus recipe, you could add in black pepper, and you could add in extra virgin olive oil, or you could make spinach or kale at home and you could add in olive oil for the healthy fat. You could sprinkle on a little bit of turmeric. And then you could add in something like garlic, which is a warming herb or spice to help circulation and help absorption at the same time. That's one of the things I really love about Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medicine is they don't just think about the single food that you're eating as medicine. They try and create an entire meal as a form of medicine. And that's what you can do as you start to implement these foods in your diet. Think about this. Here are the top seven. We talked about fatty fish, extra virgin olive oil, leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables, berries and tart cherries, fermented foods, herbs and spices and nuts and seeds. Think about different meals throughout the day. How can you incorporate some of these foods into your diet? Right? You could easily make a dinner with fatty fish. You can use extra virgin olive oil. You can do baked or sauteed or steamed vegetables with those. You could do a little side of fermented food. You could add herbs and spices there to the mix. And then actually, then if you eat a snack later on that day of some tart cherries with some walnuts, you will literally have had every single one of the top seven anti inflammatory foods on this list. And if you're making your plate, it could look something like this. A third of your plate is vegetables and greens. Another third of your plate is a healthy protein source, fatty fish. Now you can swap in grass fed beef and pastured chicken and pastured eggs as well. But that's another third of the plate and another third are whole carbs or healthy fats, right? You're either doing something like a sweet potato or berries or pomegranate. You're adding in things like extra virgin olive oil or walnuts or avocado and then sprinkling spices on top of it all. And that's not a diet. That is a dinner that can help you heal, reduce inflammation and take your health to the highest level possible. And listen, the more we're eating these type of foods, the more we're living in tune with the way God designed us to live. I Love what Genesis 1:29 says. It says this and God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And then we know later on in Genesis, I think it's 6:3 or 9:3, where God tells Noah we can start to eat the things that swim in the ocean and creep on the land, things like wild caught fish as part of the optimal human diet. So here's what I want you to do this week. Use more olive oil, okay? Get rid of the other oil in your cabinet. Again, you can have a little bit of avocado and coconut oil in there and use those on occasion. But make extra virgin olive oil your go to and again, buy a good one polyphenol rich, spicy, herbaceous strong. Start using that regularly. Eat fatty fish two to three days a week and get a cup of berries or pomegranates or tart cherries on most days. Add in one fermented food a day or at least every other day and it could be something as simple as doing a couple tablespoons of coconut kefir in a morning superfood smoothie. And then start using more herbs and spices, more turmeric, more ginger. You could do these as herbal teas or just sprinkle them on your food. And if you forgot everything else today, remember this. You cannot supplement your way out of an inflammatory diet, but you can eat your way out of one. Okay? Many of these pills and supplements have not been effective in the medical studies. However, in most cases food makes the biggest difference. And by the way, if you want to go deeper and you want to have an ideal anti inflammatory eating plan that includes all of these recipes and a protocol. If you go to the show notes I've put in my anti inflammatory guide as a PDF, you can download that. So if you're wondering if you what's the most anti inflammatory dessert I can eat or what's some recipe ideas using these foods, you can go and download it. This is worth $100. This PDF. I'm giving it to you for free. If you go in the show notes and just download my anti Inflammatory food guide, you'll find it there. And as a second resource, you can check out my book Heal yourselves. It's on Amazon.com that book dives even deeper on how to reduce inflammation at the cellular level. I want to say thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Axe show where each and every week we're diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal physically, mentally and spiritually. If this helped you do two things for me, subscribe so the next episode find you and send this to one person who's fighting pain, stiffness, or a diagnosis that you know where this can help them. It takes just 10 seconds and it might change their year and their life. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you on the next episode.
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