From The Summer 2004 Issue of Natural Grocery Buyer

An Inflammatory Issue

Diet can cool risk for common age-related conditions

Laurie Budgar

Tired of being politically correct? How about being hormonally correct?

The next new thing, according to biochemist Barry Sears, will be diets that control inflammation, or what he calls “silent pain.” Conventional diets, he says, are hormonally incorrect—they don’t address the levels of insulin coursing through the body—and therefore can’t effectively help people control weight or prevent disease. “It’s excess insulin that makes you fat and keeps you fat,” he says. It’s also one of the hormones responsible for inflammation.

Sears, who wrote the best-selling diet book The Zone (HarperCollins, 1995), believes that inflammation is the culprit behind any number of diseases, ranging from Alzheimer’s to cancer to obesity. “Step back from every chronic disease,” he said in March at Nutracon 2004, “and … you see inflammation.”

Because of this correlation, Sears says, keeping inflammation in check can greatly slow the course of aging. “Nothing will age you faster than increased inflammation.”

While most consumers are familiar with the type of inflammation that occurs when they touch a hot stove or sprain an ankle, people with systemic inflammation may not know it—outward symptoms may not appear until the condition has become serious. But in a recent interview, Sears said pivotal studies have shown that heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease—affecting, respectively, the cardiovascular system, the immune system and the brain—are all inflammatory conditions.

Sears isn’t the only one talking about inflammation. In his book The Inflammation Syndrome (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2003), author Jack Challem says people who have one inflammatory condition, such as asthma or arthritis, are likely to develop others as they age, and the inflammation spreads and affects other parts of the body. “Inflammation is kind of like doing a slow burn on the body, smoldering for years and years before someone is like, ‘Hey, I smell smoke. There’s fire here,’” Challem says. And it takes a lot more to correct the situation than to prevent it, he adds. Fortunately, simple blood tests can detect inflammation.

The diet connection
Challem lays the blame for widespread inflammatory diseases squarely on the American diet. “So much of the same junk food leads to obesity, heart disease, cancer. I think the food companies basically addict people to junk foods. I’m not sure if they’re doing it intentionally,” he says. But the worst offenders, foods with highly refined sugars and starches, set up what Challem calls a prediabetic blood-sugar profile—a spike in blood sugar followed by a spike in insulin. “If you’re eating a diet with these roller coaster swings in blood sugar, you’re getting hungry every hour or two.” Insulin, in turn, increases production of C-reactive protein, widely acknowledged to be both a marker for and a promoter of inflammation.

Other foods that Challem says promote inflammation are common cooking oils, such as corn, safflower, soybean and peanut; foods with trans fats; and foods devoid of antioxidants. “The net effect is that people are primed for chronic inflammation.”

Lending further credence to this concept, researchers from the University of Buffalo published a report in the April issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, showing that people who ate an Egg McMuffin and hash browns for breakfast had high levels of inflammatory markers in their blood for three to four hours after the meal.

“Eating that 900-calorie, high-fat meal temporarily floods the bloodstream with inflammatory components, overwhelming the body’s natural inflammation-fighting mechanisms,” says Ahmad Aljada, the lead author on the study. “People who experience repeated, short-lived bouts of inflammation resulting from many such unhealthy meals can end up with blood vessels in a chronic state of inflammation,” Aljada says. In a still-unpublished study, the UB researchers found that a breakfast with the same number of calories, but comprising fruits and fiber, doesn’t promote inflammation. The natural foods industry can play a pivotal role in helping consumers eat right to avoid chronic disease, according to Sears. “If there were a terrorist plot to take American health care to its knees, it would’ve taken the form of the USDA food pyramid,” he quipped at his speech at Nutracon. “The real power of nutrition lies in understanding how food affects hormones. Food is the most powerful drug you’ll ever take.” And it’s a better choice than man-made drugs, Sears says. “Drugs can have undesirable side effects, such as death.”

Do the right thing
While eating foods that don’t promote inflammation is a good thing, even better is eating foods that actually fight inflammation. “Basically, if you stay in the perimeter of the supermarket, you do better. The center aisles are where you run into problems,” Challem says, and lists the following as anti-inflammatory favorites:

• olive oil
• cold-water fish such as salmon, mackerel, trout and tuna
• fresh vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, tomatoes and cucumbers
• dark leafy greens such as kale, spinach, collard greens and mustard greens
• nuts and seeds
• blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, kiwi and other fruits low in sugar.

Sears promotes a low glycemic-load diet (40 percent carbohydrates, 30 percent protein and 30 percent fat), similar to the well-studied and highly touted Mediterranean diet. Two-thirds of a person’s calories should come from fruits and vegetables and one-third from low-fat protein, with a dash of mono-unsaturated fats such as olives and nuts thrown in, he says.

Fishing for health
Sears believes taking high doses of fish oil is a potent line of defense against inflammation. He quotes studies showing that the degree of disability from multiple sclerosis can be diminished with fish oil, as can bipolar disease and dementia. And, he adds, fish oil helps the body burn fat faster.

Challem would add natural vitamin E and gamma linolenic acid to the shopping cart as well. Studies support vitamin E’s ability to reduce the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis as well as levels of C-reactive protein, he says. GLA, he says, is a powerful anti-inflammatory. “It’s an omega-6 that acts like an omega-3,” in synergy with omega-3 and -9. “They do seem to work as a team.”

Both Challem and Sears stress that the anti-inflammatory approach to wellness takes a lifetime commitment—not the easy fix Americans often seek. Speaking specifically to baby boomers, Challem says, “I would recommend that they start yesterday. It’s at this point in your life that I think you have your last best chance to change your major risk factors for serious disease.”

However, Sears noted that the approach itself is rather simple: “Eat small meals. Have some protein at every meal. Eat primarily fruits and vegetables. And take your fish oil.”