Chronic inflammation is a driving force underlying almost all chronic diseases and is a leading cause of suffering and mortality around the world. Inflammation is influenced by many factors, with diet playing a pivotal role. As science gathers more and more data showing that dietary approaches can balance inflammation in the body, there is a growing interest in using plant-based diets to manage chronic inflammation.
Plant-based diets are rich in whole foods like fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, and herbs packed with phytonutrients, many of which have been studied for their anti-inflammatory properties. To address the growing burden of chronic inflammatory illnesses like stroke, obesity, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and chronic neurodegenerative and respiratory conditions, and help the body come back into balance, plant-based diets for inflammation reduction can play a decisive role.
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What is Chronic Inflammation?
Inflammation is a necessary process that your body uses to protect itself. Inflammatory responses help you repair tissues, heal after injury, and clear infections. As the immune system responds to these issues, your body sends white blood cells and chemical mediators to the affected area. This causes you to experience the classic signs of inflammation, including redness and warmth from increased blood flow, tissue swelling from increased permeability of blood vessels, pain, and a loss of function.
Acute inflammation allows you to clear the scene of injury or infection and restore the body to balance. However, if the inflammatory response persists and/or diet, lifestyle, and environmental factors trigger the inflammatory response unnecessarily repeatedly, chronic inflammation can develop. When this occurs, the inflammatory cascade becomes chronic and can ultimately lead to the development of a disease if nothing intervenes or changes.
Chronic inflammation has been shown to underlie the development of most common chronic diseases. Common factors that contribute to inflammation becoming chronic and imbalanced include dysbiosis in the gut microbiome, an imbalanced diet, physical inactivity, disturbed sleep, chronic stress, and environmental exposures to infections and toxins.
This chronic and persistent release of pro-inflammatory molecules, including cytokines and reactive oxygen species, causes widespread damage and dysfunction. Over time, this chronic inflammatory environment disrupts normal balance and function in your cells and tissues, causing dysfunction such as insulin resistance, atherosclerosis, fatty liver, and tissue remodeling. Chronic inflammation can also contribute to the development of autoimmune reactions when the immune system mistakenly targets healthy cells and tissues with its reactions.
Principles of Plant-Based Diets
Plant-based diets focus on deriving nutrition primarily from plant sources. Common foods that are incorporated into plant-based diets include a variety of fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, oils, whole grains, legumes, and beans.
When compared with omnivorous diets, vegetarian and vegan diets typically have different patterns of nutrient intake. While there can be many dietary patterns, plant-based diets generally have relatively high intakes of dietary fiber, carotenoids, folate, vitamin C, vitamin E, and magnesium and relatively lower intakes of animal-based protein, saturated fat, and heme iron.
These diets can take various forms, but all generally involve choosing to consume proportionately more of your foods from plant sources. When defining plant-based diets, some common eating patterns include vegan, vegetarian, and flexitarian. Vegan diets exclude all animal products, including dairy, meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, and honey. Vegetarian diets also exclude all meat and poultry but may include eggs, seafood, or dairy. Vegetarians who incorporate some fish, seafood, and/or meat are sometimes coined flexitarians. A Mediterranean and anti-inflammatory way of eating can often be characterized in this way.
Focusing one’s dietary choices on foods that derive primarily from plants is becoming increasingly popular. In fact, the number of Americans following a vegan diet increased by 600% between 2014 to 2018.
Plant-based diets have been studied for their many health benefits. These are especially prominent when looking at a whole-food, plant-based diet that prioritizes whole sources of plant foods and minimizes processed ingredients.
Plant-based diets have been shown to reduce biomarkers of inflammation, including high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), interleukin 6 (IL-6), and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) that are associated with the mechanisms underlying many chronic diseases. For example, vegetarian and flexitarian diets have been studied for their benefits on body weight, metabolic health, blood pressure, and other inflammatory diseases like inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease.
Plant-Based Diets and Inflammation Reduction
Whole foods-focused plant-based diets revolve around vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, seeds, herbs, and species. These plant-based foods provide a variety of nutrients as well as additional bioactive constituents like phytonutrients and fiber that modulate immunomodulatory and inflammatory processes. In this way, plant-based diets offer many nutritional benefits by providing antioxidants, phytochemicals, and fiber that help to reduce chronic inflammation.
Some of the nutritional aspects of plant-based eating that make them so powerful when addressing a variety of chronic health conditions center around reducing inflammation. Research on plant-based diets and inflammation points to several pathways that explain how plant-based diets combat inflammation.
For example, plant-based diets are rich in a variety of colorful fruits and vegetables that contain phytonutrients like polyphenols and minimize or exclude heavily processed foods. These factors help support a healthy and diverse microbiome and reduce excess inflammation.
One powerful way that plant-based foods reduce inflammation is by combating oxidative stress. Reactive oxygen species and reactive nitrogen species are produced as byproducts of many metabolic processes in your body. They can damage tissues and contribute to inflammation if they are not neutralized. Plant-based foods are naturally rich in antioxidants that help to neutralize these destructive effects.
Plant-based diets also include plenty of fiber. All unprocessed plant foods contain fiber, which makes up the structure of the plant. Consuming fiber, along with the variety of phytonutrients found in plants, not only helps keep your bowels regular, but it also feeds healthy microbes in your gut that help you keep inflammation under control. In this way, a plant-based diet helps you better absorb and process the nutrients from your food that support your immune system and reduce inflammation.
This way of eating also helps keep you full and balances hormones involved in appetite, satiety, metabolism, and weight balance. In fact, following a whole foods-based plant-based diet leads to significant improvements in weight, cholesterol, inflammation, and other risk factors for cardiac and metabolic diseases. Maintaining a balanced weight by following a plant-based diet can help you avoid chronic inflammation since excess body fat contributes to inflammation and hormonal imbalance.
Key Anti-Inflammatory Foods in Plant-Based Diets
Incorporating a wide variety of plant-based foods helps you consume a range of phytonutrients and bioactive compounds that reduce inflammation and prevent chronic disease. Essential anti-inflammatory foods in plant-based diets provide these powerful benefits.
Overall, studies show that the higher your intake of fruit and vegetables, the lower your risk of inflammation. Aiming for a wide variety of naturally colorful fruits and vegetables in your diet can help you eat a range of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and phytochemicals with potent anti-inflammatory impacts. Some of the most well-known plant-based sources of anti-inflammatory nutrients include leafy greens, berries, apples, dark chocolate, citrus fruits, cruciferous vegetables, nuts, seeds, and olive oil. Legumes, such as lentils, chickpeas, and black beans, have also been shown to reduce markers of inflammation and provide plant-based protein, fiber, and phytonutrients.
These plant foods are beneficial for reducing inflammation due to some key bioactive compounds they contain. Plant foods are rich in vital bioactive compounds for inflammation reduction, including antioxidants like polyphenols such as flavonoids and carotenoids, which modulate inflammatory and immunological processes.
Antioxidants in plant foods protect cells from free radical damage that can trigger inflammation. These include vitamins A, C, and E, selenium and manganese minerals, and phytochemicals like flavonoids and carotenoids. Antioxidants work best in combination with other nutrients found naturally in the plant, so eating foods rich in these compounds is generally more beneficial than taking isolated supplements alone.
Some antioxidant-rich foods to consider incorporating into a plant-based diet include strawberries, which are rich in vitamin C and anthocyanins (a type of polyphenol); broccoli, which provides vitamin C and beta-carotene; leafy greens like spinach, which are a good source of vitamin C, vitamin E, and beta-carotene, Brazil nuts and brown rice for selenium, and apples and onions for quercetin.
Implementing a Plant-Based Diet for Inflammation Management
Adopting a plant-based diet for inflammation allows you to enjoy these delicious and vibrant plant sources of nutrition. You can adjust and customize your plant-based diet to meet your individual needs and preferences, but an anti-inflammatory plant-based diet often focuses on foods like vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, herbs, and spices.
Depending on your needs, preferences, and lifestyle, transitioning to a plant-based diet can be gradual. For example, you might prefer to start by incorporating more plant-based meals into your weekly routine, like adding a few meatless meals each week and gradually reducing the consumption of animal-based products. You can also make plant-based foods that focus on your snacks, such as crudité with hummus, salsa, or guacamole.
Aim for various colorful fruits and vegetables and other plant-based foods to ensure diversity and a wide range of inflammation-reducing nutrients in your meals. You can experiment with different cooking methods, herbs, and spices to add variety and keep plant-based eating exciting and delicious. For example, baking, roasting, or sauteing your produce can bring different flavors and textures to your vegetables.
Adding different seasonings can also shift the mood of the meal. Consider options like garlic, extra-virgin olive oil, lime juice, or chopped herbs like cilantro, mint, parsley, and thyme. Be mindful of choosing a balanced amount of good anti-inflammatory fats like olive oil, olives, nuts, nut butter, seeds, and avocados to keep inflammation balanced and help you absorb fat-soluble nutrients like vitamins A, D, E, and K.
Considerations and Potential Limitations
Plant-based diets offer these many benefits for reducing chronic inflammation and preventing chronic disease but there are some considerations in plant-based diets of which to be aware.
Each person has unique health needs, genetics, allergies, sensitivities, preferences, and goals, which must be considered when developing an optimal approach to individualized nutrition. While plant-based diets are generally safe and effective for people at all life cycle stages, it can be helpful to work with a knowledgeable practitioner to help tailor your diet to your individual needs, preferences, and goals.
Some nutrients may require special attention to ensure adequate intake when following a plant-based diet depending on dietary choices, age, lifestyle, and other factors. Overall, it is essential to ensure that your diet contains adequate energy and a variety of plant protein sources that match your unique needs.
Those following long-term plant-based diets should also pay attention to levels of iron, zinc, iodine, vitamin B12, calcium, and vitamin D. For example, plant-based diets are often lower in calcium and/or contain phytic and oxalic acids in plant foods that can inhibit calcium absorption. Some strategies can help to balance these effects, like boiling green leafy vegetables to reduce oxalate content.
Although heme iron from animal foods is generally better absorbed (15–30%) than non-heme iron (typically 5–10%), vegetarians who consume a well-balanced diet are not at a greater risk of iron-deficiency anemia, to ensure balanced iron, aim to consume a varied diet rich in whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, dried fruits, and green leafy vegetables and combine vitamin C sources with plant-based iron sources.
While whole plant foods such as fermented soy foods, leafy vegetables, seaweeds, mushrooms, and algae (like chlorella and spirulina) contain some vitamin B12, they are usually inadequate for daily needs. Therefore, vegans may need to add supplements or vitamin B12-fortified foods, such as plant-based beverages.
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Plant Based Diet and Inflammation: Final Thoughts
There is a growing interest in plant-based diets, and for good reason. Whole plant foods provide a wide range of antioxidants and other anti-inflammatory phytonutrients that help to prevent and manage chronic inflammation. A plant-based diet focused on colorful fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, herbs, and spices can be a powerful component of a comprehensive approach to inflammation management. This can improve quality of life and prevent the development of chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes.
Enjoy the rich flavors of plants and reap the health benefits of the nutrients they provide. Embracing plant-based diets for health offers a tasty and effective way to feel your best and prevent future diseases.
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