14. The Anti-Inflammatory Diet Part 1: Understanding the Benefits of Inflammation in Your Body

When most people hear the word “inflammation,” they think of something to fight or avoid. But what if inflammation is actually one of your body’s most powerful healing tools?

In this first part of Dr. Anikó’s anti-inflammatory diet series, you’ll learn:

Key Takeaways:

• The difference between acute inflammation (your body’s natural repair process) and chronic inflammation (when things go wrong)
• How healthy inflammation protects you from infection, injury, and disease
• Why balancing inflammation is key to better energy, mood, and long-term health
• How lifestyle and nutrition choices can reduce harmful inflammation while supporting your body’s natural defenses

Episode Highlights:

1:00 Why the anti-inflammatory diet benefits everyone, from lowering disease risk to boosting energy and mood.
3:00 Redefining the word “diet” as a joyful, sustainable way of life rather than restriction.
5:00 The surprising truth: inflammation is essential for healing and survival.
9:00 The difference between acute inflammation (healing) and chronic inflammation (harmful).
13:00 How an anti-inflammatory diet can help manage autoimmune conditions and reduce reliance on medication.

Whether you’re looking to lower your risk of chronic illness, manage autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis or inflammatory bowel disease, or simply feel more vibrant every day, this episode will give you a fresh perspective on how inflammation works and how an anti-inflammatory lifestyle can help you thrive.

Subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss Part 2, where Dr. Anikó will share exactly how to start bringing these anti-inflammatory principles into your daily life.

Connect with Dr. Anikó:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.aniko/

Website: https://www.draniko.com/

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Disclaimer:
The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding your health or a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello, hello, and welcome back to Nourished with Dr. Aniko. Today I get to talk with y'all about one of my favorite topics, and I know I say that a lot about a lot of different topics, and it's always true and I just love talking with y'all. But the reason that. Or One of the reasons that I love talking about this particular topic so much is that it applies to virtually.

Dr. Anikó: Everybody, [00:01:00] because the effects of making these kinds of changes in your life are really widespread and also both immediate and like long term. Right? So the topic I'm talking about is the anti-inflammatory diet. So at this point there is a lot of research supporting the anti-inflammatory diets benefits on our overall health.

it Lowers The risk of heart disease, lowers the risk of certain types of cancers, Alzheimer's disease, things like anxiety and depression, allergies. I mean, it really is so widespread. Some of the evidence is more robust in some areas than others, But there really is so much evidence at this point that it impacts us so widely that it really can apply to basically anybody and everybody, and this is all wonderful and really important.

But I do find that when we sort of focus on how it lowers the risk of developing [00:02:00] certain conditions, that's a little bit hard to grasp, right? Because like, what does it mean to have a lowered risk? Of an illness or a condition that you don't have yet. And so what I find really helpful to talk about is that.

The anti-inflammatory diet can lead to better energy, better mood, more vibrancy, and ultimately better quality of life. And that to me, feels super accessible and that I can sort of experience in my body as something that I know. I would really benefit from, and almost anybody that I've ever talked to could benefit from that as well.

 Before we get into the nitty gritty of the anti-inflammatory diet itself, I did want to talk about. A couple things. So first I wanted to talk about the fact that when I use the word diet, I don't mean like a short term change to how you're eating to [00:03:00] get some short term result, whether that's gaining weight or losing weight, or some, other outcome entirely.

When I talk about diet, I am really talking about. Lifestyle. And when I talk about diet, in relationship to food, I am talking about an approach to eating, like a philosophy on eating that is rooted in nourishment and in joy, right? And actually when we look at the word diet. It comes from the Greek word Dita, which means way of life.

So that's exactly what we're talking about when we talk about the anti-inflammatory diet. It's not just food choice. It's when you eat, it's how you eat, it's who you're eating with. It's how you're getting out into nature.

It's all of these different things that are so much more than just the food that we're choosing and ingesting.

And also, again, like we've discussed in previous episodes, the intention behind the changes matters [00:04:00] so much, right? Because changes to your diet that are done from a place of joy and love for yourself impact you so differently than changes to your diet that are motivated by ultimately a kind of.

Self-hatred, and I hate to use that word because it's such a big and unpleasant one, butwhen we used the anti-inflammatory diet from a place of. Loving ourselves and wanting to enjoy our food and our life, and wanting to create better mood and more joy and more energy.

The impact of it is so different than when we come at it from a really restrictive and kind of controlling angle. So I want to also just name that, because it can truly have a huge impact in how these shifts change our lives. So the second thing that I wanted to talk about before we get into any details [00:05:00] about this anti-inflammatory lifestyle itself is inflammation itself.

Because inflammation, much like stress and sympathetic nervous system, really gets a bad rap in our society, in my opinion. So like we talked about in previous episodes about the sympathetic nervous system and stress. Both are absolutely necessary to our life, to our growth without stress there's no growth.

Right? And without our sympathetic nervous system, I mean, we would drop dead. We need our sympathetic nervous system. So similarly, inflammation is absolutely essential to our survival. Inflammation is our body's natural and necessary response to any kind of acute tissue damage, whether that's from cancer, from infection, from an injury.

Our body creates an inflammatory response, which I'll explain more a second, that. [00:06:00] Addresses the tissue damage and helps heal the body. So without that, we would not be able to survive. So acute inflammation is absolutely necessary. We are so happy we have it. It's when acute inflammation becomes chronic.

That we have a problem. It's when we develop something that Dr. Andrew Weil, calls purposeless inflammation, and I think it's a really good word to describe that. there's, damage, there's an infection, there's sort of an invader that we need to address with chronic inflammation, it's the inflammation itself that's the problem.

 Inflammation is your body's normal physiological process and your immune system when you have inflammation, increases the blood flow to the area and releases things like white blood cells and chemicals like cytokines to fight the infection or repair damage tissue.

And I'm gonna throw some Latin at y'all because that's just how I [00:07:00] roll. There's these hallmarks of inflammation, so it's ur, which is redness. Which is heat, which is pain, and two more, which is growth or swelling. And when you think about each of these different sort of fundamental hallmarks of inflammation, you see the wisdom in it, right?

So the heat and the redness comes from the increased blood flow and the increased sort. Vasodilation that happens. So your blood cells basically are releasing more cells and chemicals so they can all get to that area and start finding the infection and start helping to repair the tissue. And the pain also has a purpose, right?

So pain also occurs. You have the cytokines, you have the prostaglandins, you have histamine that are all creating pain. Because when you think of, for example, like spraining an ankle, right? It's hot. It's painful, it's stiff. So the stiffness also comes from that tud, which is the swelling of that area.

'cause [00:08:00] you're getting more kind of capillary permeability there, meaning more stuff is kind of coming out of your vessels. And all of that has a purpose because that. Swelling means that you're not gonna move that area very much, and the pain too means you're not gonna move that area very much because the last thing you wanna do is move around an injured area or an injured joint.

Right. So of course you still want to go get an actual splint or actual care at, a medical center, but your body itself is creating its own kind of splint with the swelling and also with the pain that's preventing you from moving that joint. So just to for a moment the true wisdom of our bodies and that inflammation is so necessary, But when we get into chronic inflammation, which we talked about is purposeless inflammation, and there's also a term called smoldering inflammation that I think is really descriptive [00:09:00] where it's just sort of this like ongoing kind of fire that doesn't really ever go out.

That's the kind of inflammation that in itself can cause damage, right? So acute inflammation is the one that's trying to heal the damage, address the damage. Chronic inflammation is inflammation that is itself causing damage.

So two really classic examples of chronic inflammation are rheumatoid arthritis, where you have those hot, swollen, painful joints and something like inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, or ulcerative colitis where you have this chronic damaging inflammation in the GI tract.

And both rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel diseases. So not to be mistaken, IBS is irritable bowel syndrome. IBD is inflammatory bowel disease. So inflammatory bowel disease are things like. Crohn's disease and [00:10:00] ulcerative colitis. So both rheumatoid arthritis and IBD are autoimmune conditions where the immune system is mistakenly attacking healthy cells in the body.

And you see that in these conditions, right? Because it is the immune system that is causing the damage. It's the immune system in RA that's causing the joint degeneration. the immune system in IBD that's causingGI disease and GI damage in addition to systemic systems. So systemic means that there's symptoms in other parts of your body as well, not just that one local area.

Something I like to use to kind of illustrate this delicate balance of a system. is a cytokine called tumor necrosis factor alpha. And as I say this aloud to y'all, I'm once again aware of how intense some of these names are. Like when we talked about natural killer cells in previous episodes, that's an intense name.

Tumor necrosis factor is [00:11:00] also an intense name, but it's very descriptive, right? So this cytokine can activate the immune system to kill cancer cells, right? So that's amazing. We want that right?

But when we have too much activation or production of TNF Alpha, that can be harmful and lead to disease, right? Because then you have too much inflammation. So a medicine that we use, a medication that we use for rheumatoid arthritis and IBD and a few other conditions as well.

 Is a class of medications called TNF Alpha inhibitors, and These medications can be absolutely life changing for people who are living with rheumatoid arthritis or inflammatory bowel disease, but we are inhibiting inflammation, right?

So one of the side effects, the serious side effects of these amazing drugs is that people can get [00:12:00] serious and sometimes fatal infections when they use them, right? Because you are throwing inflammation out of. Balance,

It's already out of balance at baseline for these folks because their inflammation is an overdrive. But when you inhibit inflammation, even though you get a really wonderful effect on their pain and their joints and maybe their GI symptoms, you also reduce their ability to fight infection. So it's a real balancing act.

This is where I think integrative medicine can shine so much because there is evidence, some better quality than others, but there is evidence that the anti-inflammatory diet and different dietary approaches, it's a little trickier with IBD because you have a special kind of IBD anti-inflammatory diet.

In those situations, but different anti-inflammatory approaches to diet have [00:13:00] been shown to improve symptoms in both rheumatoid arthritis and IBD. So what that means is that if you're improving your symptoms with diet, with lifestyle, with all these other things, maybe you still need to use medications.

And we love medications. We are grateful for medications, but they do have side effects, So if you're able to improve some of your symptoms with diet, with lifestyle, with different approaches, even different medicinal approaches, you be able to reduce the dose of medication that you need to use.

Even if you need it, you might even get to a point where you don't need to use that medication. So that's why, again, my answer is always. All of the above. It's not just western medicine, just complimentary alternative medicine. When we use it all together, we can sometimes get astonishing. Absolutely.

Life-changing results.

What's more is that there's also [00:14:00] evidence that eating in a way that reflects the anti-inflammatory diet and approach, reduces your risk of developing these things in the first place, right? So we're able to address it both on the. Backend and the front end. So you may hear it in my voice that this is one of the reasons it is so exciting to me to offer this approach to people because it is not only a.

Not complex, right? We're just talking about lifestyle and food. You're not having to learn like a whole new kind of mathematics or a whole new language or anything like that. It's so accessible and the shifts are so realistic, but the results. Are so all encompassing, it really can change virtually everybody's quality of life.

And so that's why I love it so much. And As we explore the realities of what it means to live with these conditions, I [00:15:00] think it's very motivating to consider that adopting these different lifestyle approaches, right, like anti-inflammatory diet, can reduce your risk of developing it in the first place, 

Talk about powerful. Okay? So I think that's a big enough bite, absolutely intended for today. In the next episode, we'll get into more of the details of the anti-inflammatory diet, and specifically how I recommend starting to implement it into your life. But until then, I hope this inspires you to look at food and eating and just life with great joy and great appreciation for all the possibilities that are possible.

So take good care and see y'all next time. [00:16:00]