Anti-Inflammatory Diets: Do Certain Foods Reduce Inflammation and Help You Live Longer?

This is one of the scourges of life in the modern world: chronic inflammation. This unhelpful response of the body’s immune system is linked to accelerated aging and conditions such as stroke and heart disease.

What if we could mitigate it by eating certain foods like spinach, walnuts, and salmon? These are the promises of anti-inflammatory diets that are often vaguely promoted by the media and the food industry. This may cause the scientifically minded to roll their eyes. But recent research shows that this approach is not as surprising as it sounds, and paints a nuanced picture of the connections between food, inflammation and our long-term health.

Inflammation is an important part of our response to injury and disease. But when the body continues to deploy it, even when there is no injury, it leads to chronic inflammation. Exactly why this happens is unclear, but genetics, environment, and lifestyle all play a role. It can be detected by measuring certain chemical markers in the blood and is increasingly associated with poor health.

“Chronic inflammation is a driving force behind many common diseases, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis and dementia,” says John Mathers at the University of Newcastle in Great Britain. It has also been implicated in some mental illnesses.

But how…