The diet is based on a pyramid giving you options for you to create your own personalized diet.[2]
Other places claim that certain products help specific diseases. Erythritol is a "safe" sweetener which doesn't affect your blood sugar, and it is really low in calories and in fact it is "used" to help fight cancer and diabetes. Coconut milk is "used" by many people to treat neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes and cancer.[3] There are many products that people used to treat diseases but to be certain which ones works are hard to say, because there is no scientific evidence to proof such thing, mostly it can be a placebo, that happens in response to the change in life style.
To conclude many people agree with eating certain foods and avoiding another ones. Most of the websites that talk about anti-inflammatories foods, agree to eat fats and oils such as omega-3-fatty acids, flax seeds, canola oil, etc. Fruits and vegetables and good protein sources. As well as avoiding junk food, high-fat meats, sugar, and processed foods.[4]
[1] http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART02012/anti-inflammatory-diet
[2] http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART02995/Dr-Weil-Anti-Inflammatory-Food-Pyramid.html
[3] http://www.theholistickitchen.com/tag/anti-inflammatory-foods/
[4] http://nutrition.about.com/od/dietsformedicaldisorders/a/antiinflamfood.htm
Interesting post. I have an coworker who eats a diet similar to what you just describe as anti-inflammatory, which she calls the "Paleo-Diet". She eats a diet that consist of foods such as meats, nuts, fruits and vegetables and avoids things like processed grains such as pasta and beer. People that follow a paleo diet believe that we should eat food based more on a hunter-gather type of diet as this type of diet is more reflective of the diet humans evolved on. They also believe such a diet is anti-inflammatory, and that autoimmune diseases might have some component cause related to a pro-inflammatory diet such as processed grains and Celiac's disease.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if the evidence supports such a anti-inflammatory diet yet, but it is intriguing!
I have never heard before about that diet but it sounds pretty interesting, and just by the information you give me, i think it is reasoning because eating natural aliments will be healthier, and it makes sense because people in the past used to live longer, and they didn't eat that much processed food as we do knowadays, which i will say it has something to do, even though i can't refer this as an anti-inflammatory resource, but instead a healthy live style
DeleteI'll just give a few points that shed some light on possible mechanistic explanations of these phenomenon. First, what is the hype with inflammation, free radicals, and antioxidants. Free radicals or oxidants are basically unstable ions/molecules which take electrons from other molecules to stabalize themselves. You can see the vicous cycle that can form of free radicals making other molecules unstable. The result is damage to vital molecules in cellular processes. Damage in turn results in inflammation and so on. These free radicals are a normal part of metabolism and are produced from nutrient oxidation. So the more you eat high energy foods the more nutrient metabolism the more free radicals. So how do you stop these free radicals, by antioxidants which are molecules able to stabalize free radicals by being able to donate or share an electron. Less free radicals mean less inflammation and less inflammatory pathologies. So the point is food has an impact on inflammation and this is probably the basis of alot of these studies.
ReplyDeleteThe next point is on artificial sweetners, they usually have low or no caloric value because they are not absorbed by the body. So your tongue senses the sweet but instead of being absorbed in the intestine they keep on moving out the body and thus not increasing blood glucose levels like sugar. However, they are man-made chemicals and thus can have extra effects, such as risk of cancer in Saccharin.
Coconut milk is a very fat dense food source, with a wide array of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. A lot of neurodegenerative diseases have a destroyed/insufficient myelin sheath (made of fat) so dietary fat intake can in theory help replenish that and thus improve neural signal transmission and improve the condition.
The final points are that diet has vital roles in pathogenecity and the best diet is a varied diet (a bit of everything). That way you get the antioxidants (vit. C and E, betacarotene, etc) and phytochemicals (other things in plant foods that have not been studied or the effects are unknown). The last thing is balance of diet, overindulging can be risky.
interesting, that is the reason every diet recommended high vegetables and fruits aliments, specially the ones with strong color because of the anti-oxidants, and i totally agree that the best dies is the one that have a little bit of everything, because there is people (i know a few) that hear or read something in the internet or tv, and they believe it right away, and they try to avoid things that are actually good for them
DeleteThere are lots of people who have change their lives by being in diet. I believe that there are so much we can do with diet alone. Inflammation is such a problem, but we don't often think about the internal effect certain foods have on our diet or our bodies. The main point is we have complete control over what we put into our body. There are foods that will boost our ability to fight this disease, just as there are foods that will actively fuel the disease. So we have to choose what works best for us.
ReplyDeleteagree! a lot of people misunderstood diets and used staff that doesn't help them at all, but sometimes hurt them like "light sodas" it may not have calories but still is a soda and contain others chemicals that harm your body, and plenty more products that people use daily "in a healthy" way
DeleteThere are so many articles in the media for the general public to read relating a healthy diet to anti-inflammatory results! I think it's misleading because people who don't understand much about physiology may believe these food cause inflammation directly. To my knowledge, cytokines are often released from over sized adipocytes. The adipocytes grow in size due to weight gain, which is most commonly caused by a lack of exercise and eating foods that are not on that list. We've learned in our physio classes that these adipokines can cause chronic, systemic inflammation and cause more problems throughout the whole body. I'm not sure if there are other mechanisms, but that appears to be a main one involved in the metabolic syndrome. Eating healthy and exercising are important if you like living, not just because they may somehow cause inflammation. It might be nice to see a little more information of the reasoning as to WHY those foods may be correlated with decreased inflammation in these lay articles. I think it would become more clear to the general public and they would also see this process as a more long term change.
ReplyDeletei agree they actually scared people instead of helping them, and the worst part is that a huge amount of the population relies on this kind of articles, on the other hand obesity is a huge problem and it affects you in so many different ways, and people don't look for a way to decrease obesity, they just look for a way to live with it, which in my opinion that is really wrong
DeleteFrom the paper i presented last monday, i get this info
"Conversely, obesity is associated with increased cytokine levels and decreased vagus nerve activity. A combination of weight loss and increased exercise enhance vagus nerve activity and decrease cytokine levels potentially via modulation of the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway."
It would be wise to not be too receptive of Dr. Andrew Weil and his Integrative Medicine. Though it has been well-received with awards and accolades, it has also received a lot of criticism as well. Physicians in both the osteopathic and allopathic fields have been divided on Dr. Weil's work, mainly because Weil employs more eminence-based (short definition: my opinion/endorsement says so) over evidence-based (short definition: the facts say so). With his fame (and business interests in natural foods), he also presents a explicit, if not implicit, bias.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, I do respect his work in providing complementary therapies and providing nutritional alternatives to healthy living and improvements in the quality of life. However, I do need to be careful when he provides anecdotal evidence and one-sided testimonials that leave room for doubt
I totally agree, is great that he recommends nutritional alternatives in a healthier way, but i dont think he should reflect that alternatives as "cures" for diseases, specially if he doesn't have solid information to proof such thing
DeleteI'd like to propose an alternative explanation to the ones listed above (I like Janna's idea of adipocytes but I don't have a good knowledge base on that topic.
ReplyDeleteIn our class JJ Cohen describes what terms "Chronic Frustrated Immune Reponses". I'll take the liberty to loosely summarize it to be when the body responds to but cannot rid itself of by removal or sequestration the offending substances. The examples he gives (see PDF on 11/20/12 on our class website:(http://immuno4ever.org/week11.htm) are Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis which are chronic diseases of the GI tract.
I'll give a anecdotal example.....I have a friend who has chronic but relapsing/remitting arthritis. Her doctor suggested she try an Elimination Diet wherein the person dials back the variety of foods s/he eats in order to narrow down a food that is troublesome. The idea is that you proceed with such a plan for several days, and ideally a few weeks so as to clear the existing antigens, allow repair to occur, and inflammation to settle down. Through this process she discovered that eating eggs causes her arthritis. Avoidance brings relief.
So why arthritis? Another thing we've learned is that in "Type III Immmunopathology" (which I propose also comes into play in my friend's case), wherever there is a net outflow of fluids---skin through evaporation, mucosa through secretions, joints through synovial fluid, and the quintessential location, the glomeruli--immune complexes can aggregate and chemotactically cause inflammation.
I believe in "clean eating" which in my interpretation is eating a few processed foods and artificial ingredients as possible and emphasizing whole grains along with fruits and vegetables. In Dr. Oz's book, "You: On a Diet", (yes, really, I read it years ago) he proposes that low-level inflammation feeds on itself--pun intended--and that the discomfort often causes us to eat more and digest less effectively.
Through strange circumstances (which I blogged about last week) , I found myself on an extended Elimination Diet for 6 months eating only turkey, rice, potatoes, apples, pears and squash. It changed the way I think about food because I know now how good my body can feel without processed foods and sugars and I've never looked back.
Is it placebo? Well, for one, I dropped tens of pounds and I stopped waking during the night with heartburn. The proof is in the pudding, I guess you'd say, and I don't think a person has anything to lose by trying out a diet as "clean" as possible---whether you prefer the Paleo diet referenced above or the Clean Eating diet that I prefer.
(Blog post for reference: http://inflammablog6.blogspot.com/2012/12/non-ige-mediated-food-allergies-or-why.html)
Thanks for your blog post!