Recap: Reduce inflammation with a sprinkle of spices | Kanchan Koya

Summary

ZOE Science & Nutrition Podcast Summary

Episode: Recap: Reduce Inflammation with a Sprinkle of Spices | Kanchan Koya
Release Date: December 10, 2024
Host: Jonathan Wolf
Guest: Kanchan Koya
Podcast Description: The world’s top scientists explain the latest health, nutrition, and gut health research, translating it into practical advice to improve your health and weight. Join ZOE Science & Nutrition on a journey of scientific discovery.

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Introduction

In this engaging episode of ZOE Science & Nutrition, host Jonathan Wolf welcomes Kanchan Koya to discuss the remarkable health benefits of spices, particularly their role in reducing inflammation. Koya demystifies the use of spices in everyday cooking, making the science accessible and practical for listeners looking to enhance their meals and overall health.

The Science Behind Spices and Inflammation Reduction

Kanchan Koya begins by highlighting a pivotal study from Penn State that examined the impact of adding a spice blend to a standard American hamburger meal. The study revealed significant reductions in inflammatory markers post-meal when the spices were included.

"They basically found reductions in inflammatory markers right after the meal when the meal had the spice blend. And I think that's really empowering and exciting because... there was this real reduction in biomarkers of inflammation right after the meal."
— Kanchan Koya [00:39]

This finding is particularly significant as it transitions the conversation from in vitro and animal studies to human trials, demonstrating real-world effects of spices on inflammation.

Impact of Specific Spices on Health

Koya delves into specific spices and their health benefits, emphasizing their high polyphenol content and anti-inflammatory properties. She discusses studies on turmeric, noting its efficacy comparable to NSAIDs in managing arthritis without the associated gut health side effects. However, she also points out the challenges in achieving therapeutic effects through dietary intake alone due to the high concentrations of curcumin required.

"If you are looking to lower inflammation and you know, just prevent an inflammatory condition, I think that a case can be made for just adding more of these anti inflammatory spices to your kind of regular rotation."
— Kanchan Koya [04:02]

Practical Tips for Incorporating Spices into Daily Meals

Koya emphasizes the importance of integrating spices seamlessly into existing meals rather than overhauling cooking habits entirely. She provides actionable advice for listeners to start small by adding at least one spice to dishes they already enjoy.

"My biggest recommendation is to take the foods that you're already eating, that you already enjoy, that your kids already enjoy, and start to challenge yourself to add at least one spice to that dish."
— Kanchan Koya [02:30]

Examples Provided:

• Avocado Toast: Add sumac, chili peppers, cumin, or coriander.
• Snack Ideas: Incorporate spices into yogurt-based snacks or make spiced popcorn using blends like garam masala or curry spices.

Listener Engagement and Practical Applications

Listeners actively participate by asking questions about the efficacy of daily spice intake and seeking additional snack ideas. Koya responds by referencing the Penn State study, suggesting that a teaspoon of spice blend daily is both achievable and beneficial.

"You can easily achieve a teaspoon of spices through the day if you sprinkle it onto like every meal. So I think it's very achievable to get to that one to two teaspoons a day for some of those anti inflammatory effects."
— Kanchan Koya [04:49]

Snack Suggestions Include:

• Sweet Yogurt Snack: Greek yogurt with berries, nuts, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom.
• Savory Yogurt Dip: Greek yogurt with olive oil, crushed garlic, sumac, chili, cumin, and coriander served with cut vegetables.
• Spiced Popcorn: Homemade popcorn tossed with spice blends like garam masala or Indian curry spices.

Incorporating Spices into Dinner

Addressing concerns about using spices in more complex dishes like dinner, Koya advises adding familiar spices to traditional recipes to enhance flavor and health benefits without adding complexity.

"If you are making a bolognese, a traditional meat bolognese, or a lentil bolognese, which would be packed with more fiber, you can add sweet or smoked paprika. You can actually add cinnamon to a bolognese for a lovely complexity of flavor."
— Kanchan Koya [08:18]

She also mentions the cognitive benefits associated with regular ingestion of certain spice blends, citing observational studies linking curry spices to improved cognitive health.

Empowering Home Cooks

Koya's overarching message is to empower listeners to confidently incorporate more spices into their cooking without feeling overwhelmed. By starting with simple additions and gradually exploring new flavors, anyone can enhance their meals' nutritional profile and taste.

"There's so many ways to take existing dishes that you already make, you already know how to do, and just add spices to that instead of sort of starting from scratch, which can be way more intimidating for people."
— Kanchan Koya [09:46]

Conclusion

The episode wraps up with a reinforcement of the benefits of adding spices to everyday meals as a practical strategy to reduce inflammation and improve overall health. Koya encourages listeners to experiment with spices, making small changes that can lead to significant health improvements.

"Start by just going to the store, buying a reputable brand of, say, ground cumin, ground coriander, keep it away from heat and light, and sprinkle it onto your avocado toast."
— Kanchan Koya [03:42]

Listeners are invited to explore more detailed discussions by accessing the full episode through the provided links and are encouraged to take the free health quiz available at Zoe.com podcast to personalize their health journey.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Kanchan Koya [00:39]: Discussing the Penn State study on spices reducing inflammatory markers.
• Kanchan Koya [02:30]: Encouraging the addition of at least one spice to favorite dishes.
• Kanchan Koya [04:02]: Making the case for anti-inflammatory spices in daily diets.
• Kanchan Koya [04:49]: Explaining achievable daily spice intake for health benefits.
• Kanchan Koya [08:18]: Suggesting spices to enhance dinner recipes.
• Kanchan Koya [09:46]: Empowering listeners to add spices without intimidation.
• Kanchan Koya [03:42]: Practical advice on purchasing and using ground spices.

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This summary provides a comprehensive overview of the episode, capturing the essence of the discussions, key insights, and practical advice shared by Kanchan Koya. Whether you're a seasoned cook or new to using spices, this episode offers valuable information to help you enhance your meals and support your health.

Transcript

[Zoe]

Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're discussing spices. Are you ever intimidated by spices? Unsure what spice to add to which meal? If so, you might be missing out on some incredible health benefits. Spices are packed full of polyphenols, which means they offer our bodies something really unique. Oh, and they taste great too. So how can we introduce more spices into our meals? Kanchan Khoya is here to share the science of spices and show us how easy it is to make them a staple of our cooking.

[Kanchan Khoya]

So a study that I would love to mention is the one out of Penn State that looked at the addition of a spice blend. It was many spices in the blend and they added this to sort of a standard American diet, typical hamburger meal. So, you know something that isn't great for you. And they gave people the meal either with or without the spice blend. And they basically found reductions in inflammatory markers right after the meal when the meal had the spice blend. And I think that's really empowering and exciting because again, it was culinary amounts of spices. I'm sure the burger tasted better with the blend versus without the blend. And there was this real reduction in biomarkers of inflammation right after the meal. So, you know, that got people really excited because up until then we only really had some in vitro and like animal studies on the inflammatory effects of spices. And now we had an actual human trial and since then there have been some more studies looking at the impacts of specific spices on inflammatory conditions like arthritis. So there was a study that got quite a bit of buzz looking at turmeric supplementation versus traditional sort of NSAIDs or non steroid anti inflammatory drugs that many people use for arthritis, but have some side effects, especially on gut health. And they found that turmeric supplements worked as well as the nicids without the negative side effects. Now the issue there is that they did use quite high concentrations of curcumin, which is the bioactive polyphenol in turmeric. So I think it, it's not clear that you can achieve the same therapeutic effect with turmeric in the diet if you have full blown arthritis. But if you are looking to lower inflammation and you know, just prevent an inflammatory condition, I think that a case can be made for just adding more of these anti inflammatory spices to your kind of regular rotation. What I really want to do is empower people to use more spices more regularly in their daily cooking. And so I think a mortar and pestle and freshly ground spices are lovely to showcase, but they can be intimidating for the sort of, you know, home cook who is busy, has kids, is sort of, you know, juggling a bunch of things and is thinking, now I have to buy a mortar pestle and grind fresh star anise. It's not happening. So I want to take a step back and say, like, with any habit change, whether it's adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet, whether it's adding more plant diversity, 30 plants a week, baby steps are really where the magic lies. So my biggest recommendation is to take the foods that you're already eating, that you already enjoy, that your kids already enjoy, and start to challenge yourself to add at least one spice to that dish. So if we just take some examples, you know, people might typically eat, like avocado toast. You mentioned sumac. You could add some chili peppers. If you like heat, you could add a little bit of cumin and coriander to your avocado toast.

[Sarah]

And when you said you just literally mean sprinkle it on top in all of those cases.

[Kanchan Khoya]

Exactly. So start by just going to the store, buying a reputable brand of, say, ground cumin, ground coriander, keep it away from heat and light, and sprinkle it onto your avocado toast.

[Sarah]

The cumin and coriander also have all of these high polyphenols and some of this evidence for helping our health that you've talked about with some of the others.

[Kanchan Khoya]

Yep. So the anti inflammatory study that I mentioned that look at the addition of the spice blend to the burger, actually had cumin and coriander in that blend. And there are lots of in vitro studies looking at the impact of cumin and coriander on antioxidant status on digestion. Animal models. So yes, absolutely. Wonderful. There's also some studies looking at coriander and blood sugar control. So pretty much every spice will have some beneficial properties. If you dig through the literature, I think cumin and coriander are just easy because you can sprinkle them on. You don't have to grind them fresh. And chili peppers are a similar example.

[Listener]

At the kind of doses that you're talking about us sprinkling on our breakfast or our lunches, for example, will they be enough if we were to have a sprinkle every day to have a health benefit?

[Kanchan Khoya]

Well, I think we can extrapolate from the study that looked at markers of inflammation being reduced upon the spice blend, and it was about a teaspoon of the blend. So you can easily Achieve a teaspoon of spices through the day if you sprinkle it onto like every meal. So I think it's very achievable to get to that one to two teaspoons a day for some of those anti inflammatory effects.

[Sarah]

So you started with breakfast and you're saying like I think you talked about cumin, coriander, sumac is like really easy to sprinkle on.

[Listener]

What about snacks?

[Sarah]

I was going to go exactly the same place exactly.

[Listener]

What about, you know, snacks account for 25% of our energy intake in the UK and the US so I think that is would be a great way if we could get some spices into our snacks. Would be fabulous.

[Kanchan Khoya]

Yeah.

[Listener]

Any ideas?

[Kanchan Khoya]

Yeah. So I would suggest a yogurt based snack because we know yogurt is a fermented food. It's great for microbiome diversity, inflammation. So two options with yogurt. You could go in a sweet direction where you take some Greek yogurt, you throw in a bunch of different berries for those wonderful polyphenols. You throw in some nuts like walnuts, pistachios, almonds, and you sprinkle on some cinnamon, a little bit of grated nutmeg and cardamom. And you almost have a pudding of sorts because it has all these luxurious flavor profiles from the spices. You get the benefit of potential blood sugar balance with the cinnamon and these additional polyphenols. Really easy way to spice up sort of a sweeter yogurt snack. And then you could go in a more savory direction and prepare a yogurt dip for a plate of cut vegetables. So you can have your carrots, cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes and your Greek yogurt with a little drizzle of olive oil. Some crushed garlic for that allicin, which is another great bioactive found in garlic. And to that I would again add salt, a little bit of sumac, chili, cumin, coriander, Mix it up and it's almost like a Middle Eastern type of dip for your cut veggies.

[Listener]

Great. And any ideas for snacks on the go?

[Kanchan Khoya]

Yeah, I actually love popped home popped popcorn. So just, you know, get some corn kernels. Do this with your kids. It's super fun. A little bit of avocado or olive oil in a pot, throw the kernels in, let them pop. It's really fun to hear them popping. The kids can get involved and then just toss it with a spice blend that you love. It can be garam masala, which is an Indian spice blend. It can be the Bharat blend or a curry blend, you know, with a little bit of olive oil and salt. And now you have a spiced up polyphenol rich popcorn snack.

[Listener]

Great idea.

[Sarah]

That I have never tried. So it's like curried popcorn.

[Kanchan Khoya]

Exactly.

[Listener]

I'm going to be trying that one, like not just as a snack for me and the kids, but in the evening if I'm a bit peckish when I'm having my polyphenol packed glass of red wine.

[Sarah]

Yes.

[Listener]

I'm going to like boost it up.

[Sarah]

Yeah, that's after my time restricted eating window that I'm now told I have to stop eating. You see, this is all pulling me in the wrong direction, Sarah. So I've got to resist the after dinner eating. And what about. Because I feel like. What about when you go to dinner, which is, I think where I get intimidated because it starts to feel like you need to really understand what you're doing cooking with spices. So imagine that you're looking for that same sort of gateway access into using spices for meals at dinner. What would you, what would be your entry points that you might suggest?

[Kanchan Khoya]

Again, it's take the thing you're already making. So if you are making a bolognese, a traditional meat Bolognese, or a lentil Bolognese, which would be packed with more fiber, you can add sweet or smoked paprika. You can actually add cinnamon to a bolognese for a lovely complexity of flavor. We tend to think of cinnamon as a sweet dessert.

[Sarah]

It's definitely how I think about it with sort of very much so.

[Kanchan Khoya]

But traditional cultures, whether it's India and garam masala or the Middle east and bat blend or this shawarma blend, or even in Vietnam, cinnamon is often used in savory dishes. Chinese five spice, which is used in savory cooking, has cinnamon and star anise. So you can definitely add cinnamon to a savory dish. If you are grilling some salmon, you know, you can do some rosemary and garlic and smoked paprika on the salmon. If you're just oven roasting some cauliflower, you could throw in a curry spice blend. There has been an interesting study, observational, looking at curry spice blend in ingestion and cognitive readouts. So people seem to have better cognitive health in response to regular ingestion of the curry spice blend. So I think, you know, there's so many ways to take existing dishes that you already make, you already know how to do, and just add spices to that instead of sort of starting from scratch, which can be way more intimidating for people.

[Zoe]

That's all for this week's recap episode. You can find a link to the full conversation in the episode description. If you want to make smarter food choices for your body and transform your health for life, why not try Zoe Membership? The first step is easy. Take our free quiz to find out what Zoe Membership could do for you, Simply go to Zoe.com podcast.