Painkillers or food? a look at natural anti-inflammatories in your kitchen

Written By Naomi Lafitte

👀 In this post:

Introduction

  • What is inflammation?

  • Acute inflammation

  • Chronic inflammation

  • Signs of chronic inflammation

  • How to reduce unwanted inflammation

Anti-inflammatory foods

  • Olive oil

  • Turmeric

  • Walnuts

  • Berries

  • Dark chocolate

Conclusion

Introduction

How many of us have reached for painkillers in our lives, specifically those that will help combat inflammation? Whether we’ve got a migraine, a sprained ankle, period pain, the aching that comes along with a heavy cold or ‘flu, or those longer-term aches and pains, ibuprofen or aspirin can provide some much-needed relief at times.

But anti-inflammatory medication is not the only way to get relief. Substances found in natural foods can also reduce inflammation, and with the additional benefit of NOT having the risks and side-effects that the anti-inflammatory medications do.

What is inflammation?

Before we talk about anti-inflammatory foods, however, it’s probably helpful to talk about what inflammation is. After all, if we don’t know what it is, when it’s important, and when it can be problematic, then we probably won’t be motivated to think about including anti-inflammatory foods in our diets.

Acute inflammation

Now we will all be familiar with the signs of inflammation in our body:

  • increased heat at the site of an injury or infection

  • reddening of our skin

  • discomfort or pain

Inflammation is the body’s response to harmful stimuli, and this is a good thing! If we didn’t get inflammation when we get injured or an infection takes hold, we’d die pretty quickly. Inflammation combats harmful invaders such as bacteria, viruses and fungi, and it kickstarts the healing process.

Chronic inflammation

Although acute inflammation saves our lives, chronic inflammation is not so good. It’s like a fire smoldering away in the background causing low-level damage to the body’s organs and tissues. This low level damage then makes it easier for diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer to develop. But that’s not all.

It also means when our body needs to kick into gear with an immune response against bacteria or viruses, it’s much less able to do so. For example, it was recognised fairly early in the Covid-19 outbreak that individuals with chronic systemic low-grade inflammation were far more likely to have poor outcomes (Chiapetta et al., 2020; Schett, Sticherling & Neurath, 2020). Our bodies can’t be on alert all the time without the system becoming worn down.

Signs of chronic inflammation

There are some signs and symptoms that signal we may have chronic inflammation. These include:

  • Tiredness

  • Aching joints

  • Low mood

  • Constipation or diarrhoea

  • Weight gain, particularly around our stomach

  • Skin problems such as acne or eczema

  • Recurrent coughs and colds

Because these signs and symptoms can happen as a result of other problems too, we shouldn’t automatically put them down to chronic inflammation. But if we find ourselves identifying with quite a few of the above, then we should consider the potential that we may have some chronic inflammation at play (Pahwa, Goyal & Jialal, 2021).

How to reduce unwanted inflammation

When we think of improving our health and wellness in any area, by far the most effective way of helping our bodies heal is to get to the root causes of a problem instead of treating a symptom. Sure, we could put some cream on a skin problem or take a laxative for constipation, but that’s simply treating the symptom. Taking a root cause approach requires looking carefully at all areas of our health and wellbeing, but as part of doing that, the following questions can be helpful:

Are there things I need to reduce or eliminate?

AND

Are there things I need to add in?

Now, although we don’t have space in this article to discuss all the factors that we may need to consider removing or adding in addition to food, or even to consider the role of processed foods in causing inflammation, there are some foods that we can add into our diet that will help to reduce inflammation.

In fact, this approach often helps to squeeze out some of the less-helpful foods. After all, if we are busy eating nutritious foods, we will feel less of a need to reach for other options. The foods we’ll discuss below are also foods that taste good and which most of us enjoy eating. And let’s be honest; enjoying what we are eating is probably nearly as important as what we eat!

So let’s talk about some specific foods, but first a caveat. This list is by no means extensive. There’s so many more anti-inflammatory foods such as oily fish, tomatoes, leafy greens, oranges, ginger, carrots…you get the picture! But hopefully this will give you some ideas for starters as to how different foods can really support our ongoing health by reducing inflammation, and from there, you can start to include others.

Let’s start with probably one of the most famous anti-inflammatory foods: olive oil.

Anti-inflammatory foods

Olive oil

The story behind how olive oil was discovered to be anti-inflammatory all started with a scientist who went to an olive-oil tasting event while he was on holiday in Sicily. As the scientist gulped back the olive oil, he noticed that after the initial taste, the oil created a burning sensation in the back of his throat that reminded him of something. At first, he couldn’t figure out what this was, until he realised that when he took liquid ibuprofen for his pain, he got exactly the same burning sensation in the back of his throat. He got curious, and, as they say, the rest is history (Beuchamp, 2019).

It turns out that one of the major compounds in olive oil is oleocanthal, the compound responsible for creating the burning sensation in the back of the throat when the scientist knocked back his shot of olive oil. Oleocanthal blocks the synthesis of prostaglandin, one of the key inflammatory mediators in the body (Basuny & Arafat, 2022). But it’s not the only bit of olive oil that is anti-inflammatory.

Olive oil contains many other compounds such as polphyenols that have significant antioxidant properties that can help protect against cancer, heart disease and even aging (Owen et al., 2004).

As a note here, whenever you see the word ‘polyphenols’ in this article, we are talking about teeny micronutrients in plants that are powerful antioxidants and, because of that, great at combatting inflammation in our bodies.

It’s worth mentioning that most of the studies on olive oil’s benefits specifically mentioned that the oil was extra-virgin olive oil, as production can affect the various compounds that help to reduce inflammation. How we consume it is also important. Heating olive oil, particularly for prolonged periods, reduces many of its useful compounds, particularly the polyphenols with their antioxidant properties. Oleocanthal appears to be less affected, but even so, it is better to avoid heating it if possible (Lanza & Ninfali, 2020).

Tumeric

I used to know that people took turmeric supplements, but I’d never really given it much thought until the day I became aware that some cultures have held turmeric’s health benefits in high regard for a very long time. That day came when I was working in a GP surgery, and a patient came in to see me with an ankle sprain. When I examined him, I initially thought he had really bad bruising, but when I made a comment about it, he said, “Oh no, that’s yellow because I rubbed turmeric into it!”

While rubbing powdered turmeric into a sprained ankle, might not make a huge difference, when half-marathon runners took a turmeric supplement for a month leading up their race and immediately afterwards, they had an increased amount of a particular anti-inflammatory molecule in their bodies (Faria et al., 2020). So it turns out that turmeric’s age-old reputation is for good reason.

Turmeric contains a polyphenol called curcumin, and this has been shown to have anti-aging, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer and antimicrobial effects. That’s quite a list! Both the curcumin itself and essential turmeric oils can reduce inflammation of the intestine, but the turmeric oil appears more effective (Toden et al., 2017). This means that rather than simply taking a curcumin supplement, we are probably better off adding turmeric to our food for maximum effect.

One problem with turmeric, however, is that it’s quite difficult for our body to get much benefit from the curcumin. But there is a little trick we can use when cooking with turmeric to help our body max out the good bits. By adding a little fat and black pepper, we increase the bioavailability of the curcumin. An easy way to do this is when you next cook rice, add a teaspoon or two of turmeric, a little bit of coconut oil, and black pepper, and you’ll not only get tasty colourful rice, but you’ll also get an anti-inflammatory boost.

Walnuts

Technically, the name here is a bit misleading, as walnuts are actually stone fruits of the walnut tree. But technicalities aside, these little nuts have a lot of benefits for our health. If you look at a walnut, you might have noticed it looks a little like a brain. Nature has a funny way of giving us clues sometimes; it just so happens that walnuts have a powerful anti-inflammatory effect on our brains, both improving memory and helping our brains to function more effectively overall.

They contain lots of alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) which do a lot of heavy-lifting in our bodies when it comes to reducing inflammation. And ALA is a compound our bodies can’t produce on their own (Fan, Fusco & Rosenberg, 2023). It’s one of the three Omega-3 fatty acids that we need to get from our food.

Now, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen can have some rather nasty effects on our digestive tract. In fact, the small bowel can become so injured by taking NSAIDs that it can bleed to the point of causing anaemia in people. That means that they lose so many of their red blood cells that their body can’t carry enough oxygen to meet the body’s demands. This type of injury happens more often than people realise; between 53-80% of people who use NSAIDs short-term will experience this, and let’s just clarify that those studied were healthy individuals (Srinivasan & De Cruz, 2017)! But walnuts appear to help the digestive tract heal from this damage (An et al., 2020).

Berries

Fruit in general is full of compounds that are beneficial for us. From lots of fibre and high water content to excellent levels of Vitamin C and various minerals such as potassium and magnesium, along with plenty of antioxidants, they are ideal for boosting our nutrition. They also taste good. (Let’s be honest, I’d pick a strawberry over a walnut anytime!)

Berries happen to be particularly high in the antioxidants that reduce inflammation. In one research study by Cassidy et al. (2015), eating strawberries reduced overall inflammation scores, and this is partly due to their containing high levels of an antioxidant called pelargonidin. Pelargonidin is probably responsible for the association that eating strawberries has with lower rates of the brain changes that occur in Alzheimer’s Disease (Agarwal et al., 2022).

Research in people with Type II Diabetes, a disease associated with lots of inflammation, showed that eating raspberries every day for four weeks had an overall anti-inflammatory effect (Schell et al., 2019) This might be surprising given that fruits are often associated as a food group that people with diabetes shouldn’t eat, but berries contain a lot less sugar than other fruits such as bananas. So if you are trying to keep blood glucose levels stable, some protein-rich yoghurt with a helping of berries is probably going to help you with this…and give you lots of anti-inflammatory benefits at the same time.

Dark chocolate

This one might make quite a few people happy! Dark chocolate has a high quantity of flavenols, a particular type of polyphenol. It turns out that the flavenols found in dark chocolate ramp up one of the anti-inflammatory signalling proteins in our bodies while at the same time reducing the effect of the inflammatory stress response (Kuebler et al., 2016).

Dark chocolate’s polyphenols also cause the growth of microbes that have an anti-inflammatory effect (Magrone, Russo & Jirillo, 2017). These polyphenols also influence other bacteria that could help to improve negative moods (Shin et al., 2022). And we all know that when we feel better in ourselves, we are more likely to engage in behaviours that help decrease inflammation like moving our bodies more and eating healthier foods.

Along with ramping up anti-inflammatory signalling proteins and influencing beneficial bacterial growth, dark chocolate also helps reduce inflammation by increasing levels of nitrous oxide. This tiny little molecule is absolutely key to the health of our heart and our blood vessels. One of the ways it keeps our cardiovascular system healthy is by reducing inflammation that means the blood vessels are able to remain flexible and free of damage (Lares & Pérez, 2017).

One word of caution; this doesn’t mean we should be eating loads of dark chocolate a day. It is rather calorie dense, and it would be very easy to pack on a few extra pounds if we suddenly started doing that!

Conclusion

In short, while there’s absolutely a time and a place for painkillers, there’s also a place for foods that can help to reduce inflammation. So why not make a habit of adding some to your weekly shopping list? This might sound like a small change, but small changes can all add up to create a significant positive impact for our bodies.

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References:

An, J.M., Kim, E.H., Lee, H., Lee, H.J. and Hahm, K.B. (2020) ‘Dietary walnut as food factor to rescue from NSAID-induced gastrointestinal mucosal damages’, Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics, 689, p.108466.

Agarwal, P., Holland, T.M., James, B.D., Cherian, L.J., Aggarwal, N.T., Leurgans, S.E., Bennett, D.A. and Schneider, J.A. (2022) ‘Pelargonidin and berry intake association with Alzheimer’s disease neuropathology: A community-based study’, Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 88(2), pp.653-661.

Basuny, A.M. and Arafat, S.M. (2022) ‘Oleocanthal: One of the most bioactive compounds in extra virgin olive oil’, Eurasian Journal of Medical and Health Sciences, 1(1), pp.39-43.

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Naomi Lafitte