In this episode of *Science Versus*, host Wendy Zuckerman explores the science behind inflammation, a health trend dominating 2025. The show begins by noting how inflammation is often blamed for a range of issues, from bloating and headaches to anxiety and depression. Scientists are equally obsessed, with over 60,000 new papers published on the topic in the past year. The episode focuses on chronic inflammation’s impact on mental health, featuring research by Caroline Menard, who found that social stress in mice leads to a leaky blood-brain barrier, allowing inflammatory cytokines to enter the brain and disrupt neurotransmitter production. This phenomenon was also observed in human brain samples from individuals who died by suicide, suggesting a link between inflammation and depression. Beyond the brain, chronic inflammation is tied to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and asthma, with an estimated 35% of US adults affected. The show then debunks common anti-inflammatory myths, such as avoiding nightshade vegetables like tomatoes and eggplants, noting no solid evidence supports this. Instead, reducing processed foods and sugar may help. The most promising dietary intervention is the Mediterranean diet, backed by a 20-year study called the PREDIMED trial, which involved over 7,000 participants and showed significant anti-inflammatory benefits without calorie restriction. The episode concludes that while inflammation is a serious health factor, science supports lifestyle changes like diet and stress management over trendy remedies.
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and Jealousing to Science Faces. This is the show that pits facts against the fire inside your body. Today on the show, inflammation. Everyone is talking about it. If you're not feeling well, you most likely have inflammation. The number one health trend of 2024 is reducing inflammation. Reducing inflammation that we hear so much about these days. If you're feeling crappy in basically anyway, people say that it is inflammation that's to blame. You're typically bloated and maybe you have headaches and you're having problems sleeping at night or you're 15 during the day. Inflammation is really dangerous in a lot of ways because it just triggers bad things in your body. Not only is it triggering bad things in your body, but people say that inflammation can ravage your mind. Yeah, struggling with your mental health? Apparently, it's inflammation. Inflammation in our brains can cause all kinds of problems, including anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue. Inflammation gets in the way of your brain neurons talking to each other. You're feeling a little more anxious, have a bit of depression. This is a huge sign of chronic inflammation. Never fear though. The internet also has solutions. There are all these tips online about what you have to do to rid your body of inflammation. Like, you need to avoid certain kinds of exercise. Over exercising can cause a lot of inflammation, especially in the gut. And the biggie is to change your diet. You can read countless books about anti-inflammatory diets. And it feels like everyone's got advice about what to eat or not to eat to lower your inflammation. Question, what are some good anti-inflammatory foods? Blackberries, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries? Anti-inflammation juice. Celery, ginger. And if you can get turmeric, absolutely add the turmeric. Turmeric is a V1 when it comes to fighting inflammation. Let's talk about nightshades. Tomatoes and nightshades are going to kill you. Did you catch that? If you missed it, catch up. But curiously, it's not just health influences that are obsessed with inflammation these days. Scientists are too. In fact, there has been this explosion of research in this space. In the past year, there were over 60,000 new scientific papers written about inflammation. 60,000. And we've read some of them to find out what is the groundbreaking research on inflammation. What is it doing to our bodies and our brains? And if this is a problem for you, how can you tamp down that inflammation? When it comes to our health, a lot of us have been wondering if we. Most likely have inflammation. But then there's science. Science versus inflammation is coming up just after the break. Welcome back. Today we are looking at inflammation. How big of a problem is this? What can we do to tamp it down? Veryl Haud, C.D. Producer at Science versus. Hi Wendy. Are you worried about your inflammation? I kind of am now. I wasn't before during this episode. I'm like, "Uhhh, it's my fereal." So yeah, it's been a journey. Well, let's start that journey at mental health. Because I'm hearing a lot about how chronic inflammation is affecting our brain and our mental health. So what do we know here? Yeah, it's interesting. Because like one of the first clues that we got that maybe inflammation can actually affect our mental health, it kind of goes back to the like classic role that the immune system can play in our bodies. So like it fights viruses and bacteria. And that's a good thing. Right. But we know that that fight can take its whole on us and make us feel pretty crappy. I talked about this with Caroline Menard. She's an associate professor at LaValle University in Quebec City. If you have a flu or a cold, your immune system is fighting against this virus, you feel it. With that kind of blare feeling when you have a cold, like that's inflammation. Yeah, and generally you're not going to feel like going running or doing a lot of like super hard activities. You're just going to be like, "I'm going to stay in bed. I'm going to rest." So yeah, being sick can actually give people symptoms of depression, like feeling sad and unmotivated. And we also have these cases where doctors have used drugs that really ramp up people's inflammation because it can help them fight diseases. And the doctors noticed that this treatment was making a lot of their patients really depressed. Oh wow. So like there's evidence that inflammation itself can like make people's mental health worse. And so how does all of this work? How exactly does inflammation affect our mental health? Well, scientists are finding that out right now. And one of the big discoveries in the field was made by Caroline. Not only I see it, but I knew I'm the first person in the world ever to see it. And so the first time I saw it, I was very happy. I went to get a couple of IPAs. Because I think it was really cool. So what did she say? Okay, so to explain what she saw, let me first explain how her lab researches this. Okay. So they use mice and they have this kind of terrible way of sparking inflammation in the mice. So with people, we know that if you experience social stress, like if you get bullied a lot, you are more likely to have chronic inflammation. And so to mimic this in mice, here's what they do. First they get a little like black mouse. And then they put it in a cage for like five or ten minutes every day with a larger, meaner white mouse. And every day they basically get bullied by this more aggressive mouse. What does a bullying mouse look like? I mean, sometimes it actually kind of beats up the tinier one. Oh, God. It will just stare it down, looming over the mouse. And it will sometimes like rattle his tail on it. But that's not the end of it. What we do after that is we house them in the same cage and they have a plastic transparent divider. So they can see each other and smell their holes. So they don't physically interact, but they see the big bully on the other side. I say it's a bit like in the school yard, you know, when you see the bully on the other side of the school yard, you don't know if it's gonna come for you. Oh no. Oh, that whole little mouse. Yeah. I mean, so finally enough, some of the mice are actually okay with all of this, but other mice seem like it messes them up a little bit. And so Caroline kind of looks at those mice that are really affected by this. And she does see that they have higher inflammation. So this is basically chronic inflammation in the mice. And then the question is, well, what is this all doing to their brains? Exactly. So to find that out, Caroline's team killed the mice, sliced up their brains. And what she saw was that there are a bunch of immune cells right near the brain congregating in this area called the blood brain barrier. Okay. And so this is this barrier that sort of surrounds all the blood vessels near your brain. And it's meant to keep our brains safe from all the dangerous stuff that's just floating around in our blood. Right. It's meant to keep our brains safe. So what did she see here? I mean, was the blood brain barrier doing its job? Well, that's what Caroline wanted to look at. Since we know that these immune cells are pumping out inflammatory chemicals. And she saw that they were lining up near the barrier. She wanted to know whether this was actually affecting the blood brain barrier. So she uses this very fancy microscope that has lasers. And she takes these amazing images of the mice. Okay. So let me show you one of the pictures. Ooh. Okay. Great. Wait. What is this? It looks like two eels kissing on a thermal camera. What am I looking at? I mean, I guess I could see that. So the picture, that picture is of a control mouse. And that's the blood brain barrier lit up in fluorescent green. I guess it kind of looks like you know. But now let me show you the second picture of the mouse that has chronic inflammation. Ooh. And you can see that the eels are kind of ripped to shreds. That is a messed up blood brain barrier there. I mean, the green lines are ripped. You can actually barely see them in some places. You have these tiny holes. So instead of having a long line, there are tiny gaps here and there. So this is where the barrier is broken. Yeah. I mean, it almost looks like it's been ripped apart. Yeah. Exactly. And this is where the inflammation is sneaking. The inflammation is sneaking in. Is that what she's saying? Yeah. That's where the cytokines can get into the brain. And we know that once they're there, they can really do some damage. So they can cause oxidative stress in our neurons. And the cytokines can actually mess up the production of neurotransmitters, like dopamine and serotonin, which we know can play a role in.
in depression. And so how much of this evidence is in humans now? We are getting more and more, that's in humans. Caroline has done most of her work in mice, but she also got some human brain samples from people with depression who actually died by suicide. And she could check, like, did they have the same little holes in their blood brain barrier that the mice did? Yeah. So we were able to see the same phenomenon in the human brain as well of individual who died by suicide. Compared to healthy control. So healthy control who died from other reasons, for example, a car accident or something that was not related to depression. Wow. So you think this is happening in people too? Yes. And so now researchers are like trying to figure out if we can use this to help people with depression. Wow. So I mean of all the people who are struggling with their mental health right now, do we have any idea how many might be able to blame inflammation for this? That's still a little unclear. So like for depression, there is one small clinical trial that found roughly a third of the people in that study with depression had high inflammation. And they were the ones that felt better after they got treated with an anti-inflammatory drug. So it's not going to be everyone, but it could be a pretty big chunk. It's funny because as you were explaining the mechanism of how it all works, I have to say it really does feel like that is what is happening in my brain. I don't suffer from depression. But when I am very stressed, I do feel as if my brain gets a bit cottonball. Or a ballie or brain foggy. Yeah, I can almost feel those cytokids flooding in through my crappy blood brain barrier. And this only happened since I got COVID a couple of years ago. I never used to have this effect and I got a pretty nasty case of COVID. Yeah, I asked Caroline about COVID actually since I think a lot of people might have that experience now. And like, yeah, of course we've known for a long time that COVID causes a ton of inflammation. But then Caroline told me about this study that came out recently that was looking at the blood brain barrier of like 75 people who had COVID. Oh gosh, I'm so nervous. It's not going to be good. Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. The barrier of the brain became way more leaky and those individuals who had very strong case of COVID. And then even with the brain fog, the long-term COVID, they see this weakness of the barrier. So maybe the inflammation was so intense that the barrier became a bit more fragile. And so she thinks that part of the reason people are getting brain fog is because this blood brain barrier is leaky. It's allowing more inflammation in which is then causing damage to the brain. Basically, yeah. And they could see this leakyness in people's brains who had brain fog even a year after they had COVID. Oh, maybe this can help explain why people with long COVID have brain fog. And so, yeah, scientists definitely think now that chronic inflammation can play a huge role in cognition and mental health. But it also messes with stuff besides our brains. Do you know, like, I can almost feel brain fog right now from the stress of what you've just told me about? Oh no. Continue with your laundry list of the terrible things caused by chronic inflammation. I'm sorry, Wendy's brain. I know. All right. So yeah, we know that chronic inflammation is also linked to heart disease. One reason is that if your blood vessels are a little bit inflamed a lot of the time, that can make plaque build up. plaque inflammation is also linked to type 2 diabetes, cancer, asthma. And then, of course, there's a ton of autoimmune diseases. So it's a long list. You're almost like the big mouse just bullying me with facts about how terrible inflammation is right now. Just staring at me. I am not the bully mouse. Bullying me with facts. So why is it that some of us? Why does this chronic inflammation come from stress as you've talked about? Yeah. Chronic stress is one. People who are older are more likely to have chronic inflammation. It goes up with age. Also our fat tissue sends out, like, pro-inflammatory signals. So people who are fat or might have more inflammation and air pollution can cause inflammation too. Oh, man. One paper estimated based on this, like, common marker for inflammation called CRP, but about 35% of US adults have chronic inflammation. Wow. And then another study said that 70% of all deaths worldwide are caused by chronic inflammatory diseases. Wow. So it's coming for a lot of us. Oh, gosh. Wow, wow, wow. I mean, I wasn't sure. Just because there's so much talk about chronic inflammation, I really am a bit surprised by this that scientists really do believe that this rumbling of chronic inflammation is truly the cause of quite a lot of our illnesses. Yeah. Or at least it's playing a role, for sure. I was surprised too. Why were you surprised? I think it's just when people say that there is like one thing that can explain so much, I'm always just suspicious. There's no way that there's like one process is like responsible for all these different things. Right. Exactly. But it seems like there's actually a lot of evidence backing it up. That this is this puppet master of health inside of our bodies. Okay. Okay. So then the question becomes how do we fix it? Can we fix it? Yeah. And a lot of people say that the key to lowering your inflammation is through diet. Right. Yes. And when I first started looking into this, one claim that I kept coming across was this idea that if you want to reduce your inflammation, you got to cut out stuff from your diet. Yes. Like one thing that surprised me was night shades, which includes vegetables like eggplants, potatoes, also tomatoes. This surprised you. This has been around for eight years. Like when it's paltrow was crapping on about how much she hated that shades. But I guess I shouldn't say crapping on about it. Is there any science here? Why do people hate night shades? I mean, there's always been this like lore around night shades. Maybe one reason they're even called night shades is that they're kind of dark like they they might have some kind of toxin in them that makes them bad for us. Yeah. Right. And well, I mean, there are these chemicals in them that people think might be bad. Okay. One of the big ones is called solinine. These researchers have tried like giving this to mice and have found that it did make their gut kind of messed up. And there's even a case study from the 70s of almost 80 school boys in England who had a bad batch of potatoes and then a lot of them got really sick. And some researchers blamed that on the solinine. That's such a thing that would happen to school boys in England. Yeah. Poor lads. So potatoes. This was like a jolt's dick and story. So like, yeah, there was those studies, but I felt like that. None of that was that convincing. Right. Yeah. I mean, the bad batch of potatoes, I could have been anything that caused those illnesses that they'd you've got some studies advice, right? Yeah. No one one report from the University of California, San Francisco said that in people, quote, no research has shown that solinine has a direct effect on inflammation, unquote. So yeah, there really does not seem to be any convincing evidence that cutting out nitrates can lower inflammation. You're not cutting eggplants out of your diet anytime soon. No. And actually it's kind of the opposite because we know that eggplants and other vegetables have stuff that can actually lower inflammation, like nutrients called polyphenols. Yes. We have fiber in them. We covered this a few weeks ago, fiber can lower your inflammation by keeping your microbes happy. So if you want to try cutting something out to lower inflammation, you probably don't want to cut out vegetables, but you could look at cutting out junk food. So like process food, process meat, that stuff does seem to be linked to higher inflammation. And then maybe also stuff like sugar and saturated fat, though the science there is a little more mixed. Okay. So nitrates back on the menu, junk foods is still bad for us. What's up next? After the break, an anti-inflammatory diet that scientists are actually excited about. Wow, that's big. That's big. Plus, could exercise because of chronic inflammation. Coming up. Welcome back. Today we're talking about inflammation. Merrill has scared the **** out of us. Out of me at least about our leaky brain barrier. How do you. How do you fix it? How do you lower your chronic inflammation? Avoiding processed foods might help. What else you got for us? Well, there are lots of foods that people say can help with inflammation. But the one that seems to be like really having a moment right now is turmeric. Yes. And that's been used for thousands of years in South Asia as part of Ayurvedic Medicine. And it's thought to help with inflammation. Yeah, yeah. Seeing a lot on turmeric shots, turmeric in this turmeric in that. Yeah, it's a huge market now. Yes. And researchers have been doing clinical trials like giving people a pill that has the stuff that's in turmeric and they'll check to see does it lower inflammatory markers in the blood. Great. And a lot of these studies find that yeah, it can actually do this. But a lot of these are pretty small studies and it's inconsistent. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and we're not really sure why. So what do you and make of that? I mean, are you adding more turmeric to things now? I haven't been. No, I just feel like the science isn't solid enough yet. Okay. But then like away from turmeric, as I've been talking to scientists, this one study just kept coming up again and again and again as like the study to look at when it comes to lowering inflammation. Great. It's just clinical trial. So I talked to one of the researchers who's been running it. My name is Rosa Casas. I'm an associate professor at the University of Barcelona. And so her study has been going on for like 20 years. It's actually one of the biggest randomized controlled trials on diet ever. Wow. It's called the Freddie Med study. And it's on the Mediterranean diet. So for years now, the meditrated diet has been in and out of headlines as this sort of magic diet in a way. Let's dive into it. What is it actually involved? All right. So here's like a classic meal that you might eat if you're on this diet. pasta with some nice sauce. It's a sauce that is made with tomato, garlic and onion. And you slowly simmer it with olive oil. That sounds tasty. It's very good and very healthy. So frito. Sounds delicious. Exactly. It does actually get me kind of excited because I was like, oh, I would eat that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So besides pasta and veggies, people were also encouraged to have stuff like fruit, beans, nuts, fish and seafood. And one thing that's pretty great here is that people could eat as much of this stuff as they wanted. Like they didn't have to count calories. So that is the Mediterranean diet. Then tell me about this amazing study. Okay. So they got over 7,000 people who were at least 55 years old and they had a high risk for heart disease. And if you were in the Mediterranean diet group, then you'd meet with a dietitian who would give you advice about how to incorporate all these foods into your diet. But then just to make sure people really change their diets, the researchers also shipped food to them. So some people got nuts or olive oil. And the people who got olive oil were getting a leader of it a week. Wow. One later a week. Yeah. Yeah. That was for the whole family. For the Von Trapp family. What? Yeah. I mean, I guess they wanted people to just go wild with this stuff, right? Like drizzle a little on everything. Okay. All right. It's expensive. But okay. And then if you were not in this group, what was the control? They were actually told to go on a low fat diet, but you weren't given any olive oil or pushed to eat these other Mediterranean diet specific friendly foods by the dietitian. And so what did she find? Okay. So after all this mailing of olive oil, you know, meal planning with the dietitian, here's what happened with their information. So in this part, the study Rosa looked at 164 people. After one year, we observed reductions in inflammation because of the Mediterranean diet. So yeah, they saw less inflammation. That marker that a lot of researchers look at CRP was down by more than 40%. Wow. Do you remember the moment you saw that this diet basically worked? Yes, I remember the moment and it was wow, this very incredible note. And this work has been replicated by by other studies. So according to one meta analysis, going on the Mediterranean diet really does work to reduce inflammation. That's awesome. So what's it doing? What why? Why is it helping? Well, it seems like it is about the fact that it's a bunch of different foods kind of working together. Rosa says forget this idea that there's like this one super food that's the entire inflammatory one that everyone just needs to eat. It's the fact that there's all these different foods that are kind of dialing down inflammation in ourselves in all these different ways. So for example, if you're eating a lot of fish, stuff like salmon, you'd be eating omega-3 fatty acids. And they might be reducing inflammation in a few different ways. So for example, you have like a layer of fat surrounding all of your cells. And when you eat more omega-3s, they can literally get inserted into this fatty layer that's surrounding all your cells. And that will make it harder for your cells, for your immune cells to like become inflammatory. Oh, that's cool. And then of course, there's other things going on like a lot of the foods in this diet have fiber, which we talked about. Yes. And then you're eating less junk food. And just by the way, I noticed that you know how you see all these lists of top five anti-inflammatory foods. Of course, of course. Well, the stuff on the lists is like berries, chia seeds, fish. And it's basically all just either stuff that's on the Mediterranean diet or stuff that has a lot of fiber in it. Or both. Right. It's not the food on these these lists. They don't have some magical anti-inflammatory power. Yeah, basically. I mean, if anything fiber is the magic. But then Rosa and her team wanted to find out like, okay, we know that the Mediterranean diet lowers inflammation. But like does this all actually lower your risk of getting diseases? Like if you're on this diet for years. Oh, of course. Of course, inflammation is one thing, but you really want to just not be sick. One of the things they looked at was to see whether this can help for heart disease, which is the number one killer of people in the US. Right. And like we've said, that is linked to inflammation. Yeah. And they found that it helped to follow a Mediterranean diet, reviews the cardiovascular disease by 30% in comparison with the low fat diet. Wow. She said 30% lower. Yeah. And other studies find this kind of thing too. Nice. And then one more disease. I want to tell you about. They looked at breast cancer. And in this case, the women in the Mediterranean diet group were a lot less likely to get breast cancer than the people in the control group. What's that? That is that an inflammation story as well. Is it because it's lowering inflammation? Yeah. I mean, we do think that inflammation can help tumors grow. So yeah, it just it seemed like this diet was really helping people with a lot of stuff. Well, this is very exciting. So there are there is a thing you can do to lower your inflammation. And it's to go on this diet that allows you to eat pasta and fry it with beautiful tomatoes. No, no, no, the frying part. It was like, you know, you simmer it slowly with olive oil. I'm not a cook. I don't know. You shove it on a pan. I'm not the stotherest. So this is amazing. And I guess, I guess what is slightly annoying is for anyone who's really looking for a quick fix as in I'll just cut out egg plants from my diet. Or I'll just add this one thing and all of a sudden, boom, no more inflammation. That's really not how we should be thinking about it. It's it's really your whole diet, which is good. Yeah. Yeah. So then speaking of other things that are annoying exercise. So what's the story here? Because online. Man, people have so many opinions about exercise and inflammation. Do it. Lowest your inflammation. Don't do it. Actually ramps up your inflammation. The thing that I kind of came across a lot was this idea that if you do a really high intensity workout, it's going to increase your inflammation. So you really have to kind of be careful not to go too hard. Yes. What's the science? Yeah. So you often do see this short term rise in inflammatory markers in the blood after people work out. I talked about this with Grace Rose. She's a lecture at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. When you exercising in general, you will always have because exercise is a stress. You have this shop increase in inflammation. And we know that if you work out a ton like if you work out excessively, it can kind of keep you in that high inflammatory state for longer. Yeah. If you do a triathlon inflammation in your blood will still be really high even 24 hours later. It seems like this is because really intense exercise.
can damage or just put a lot of stress on your muscles. - This is excellent, Maral, because I never wanna do a marathon. And so any extra reason as to why I don't do that, this episode is just getting better and better for me personally. - So I found this one study where they got 10 marathon runners to agree to getting their calf muscles biopsyed like right after running a marathon. - Wow, thank you. - Yeah, and they saw that their tissue was damaged. So yeah, the idea is that that can spark this immune reaction. You know, you get muscle damage, your immune system is gonna like spring in's action, like it does whenever you have tissue damage. - So when you do exercise, you do get this sort of sharp increase in inflammation. But then to zacko down, or does that actually lead to chronic inflammation? - Well, we can find this out. Researchers have done a ton of experiments. Well, they'll have people do two different workouts. Some will do a more intense version of the thing and other people will do an easier version of the workout. And then they'll look at their operation and their blood after they've kind of rested. And Grace has collected over 20 of these for a meta-analysis where she could then see whether doing high-intensity workouts is actually bad for you. - Well, what we've shown is that it does not matter if you're doing any intervention that's lower or higher intensity exercise overall did not make a difference. - And so for the people online who are saying you should an exercise, especially, no, don't do like hit workouts if you're worried about your chronic inflammation. Is that right? - No, that's not right. - So engaging in higher intensity exercise, like hit workouts is really unlikely to increase your risk of chronic inflammation. And in fact, it's more likely to reduce your risk of chronic inflammation than anything. - Reduce your risk of chronic inflammation. - Yeah, we do actually have evidence that doing exercise either doesn't do anything to your chronic inflammation or it might actually lower it. Even for the marathon runners. - That makes so much more sense. I mean, we know exercise is so good for us. - Yeah. - It was so many different things. - Okay, so Merrill. - Wendy, what I have learned from this episode is that chronic inflammation is a problem that a lot of us have to think about. Unfortunately, one more thing added to the pile. And don't listen to people try to sell you quick fixes, whether it's a turmeric shot or someone telling you not to eat that tomato. Instead, you know what, take that tomato, put it in a pan with olive oil, simmer it, whatever that is. (laughing) No, simmer it, and enjoy. - Merrill, what are you gonna do differently as a result of this episode? You gonna cook up a sofrito? - Yeah, no, I actually do just want to eat more vegetables. Like, while I was working on this episode, we're also working on the fiber episode. And so I feel like it's just like the universe telling me to eat more vegetables. Researchers also told me some other tips that I like, try to get enough sleep, 'cause sleep is linked to lower inflammation and also stress. Like those poor mice getting bullied, like you know, stress can cause inflammation. So, lowering stress has also found to decrease inflammation in some cases. - I think it's really, everybody can find their own recipe find something to do that you like, like taking a long bath, going for a walk with your dog. Something that's for you is very relaxing. Personally, I love to go see every metal concert. I find it very relaxing. (laughing) And a good way to really thank her and I play video games because I get out of my head and I really focus on one task. - Oh, this is great. A prescription for Mario Kart from a scientist. Absolutely. - Right. - Thanks, Merrill. - Thanks, Wendy. - That's science vases. - So Merrill, how many citations did this week's episode? - We have all 190 citations. - A hundred and 19. And if people want to find these citations, let more about anything that we talked about, I'll just show where should they go. - Well, you can go to our show notes and then just follow the links to the transcripts. - Excellent. And on Instagram, this week, which is science_vs, what do we have for people? - We will have, you know, those photos of the blood brain barrier that Caroline took photos of and the mice, the eels kissing. - I mean, I would love it if you guys, as you look at these photos, tell me what you say in this. Do you see the eels? - Yeah. - Are they eels? - What are they? - It kind of looks like stars. - You know, where you kind of find the pot and the whatever else is up in the stars. - Anyway, tell us what you think. - Yeah. - Thanks so much, Merrill. - Thanks, Wendy. (upbeat music) - This episode was produced by Merrill Horn with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, along with Michelle Dange, Rose Rimler, and Aketi Foster Keys. We're edited by Blad Turell, Mix and Sound Design by Sam Bear, fact-checking by Diane Kelly, music written by Bobby Lorde, Emma Munga, so wily, Boomi Hidaka and Peter Leonard. Next to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Susan Segerstrom, Professor André Nell, Dr. Hannah Mayer, Professor Jalping Lee, Dr. Jennifer Felga, Professor André Smickelson, Professor Charles Serhan, Professor Heather Zwicky, Dr. Jan Tan, and Professor Philip Colter. ScienceBassers is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are listening on Spotify, then follow us and tap the bell icon, so you get notifications when new episodes come out. And if you like the show, you like what you've heard, whatever app you are listening on, give us a five-star review. Bakes us feel happy. Bakes. I'm Wendy Zwickyman, fact-checking next time.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Inflammation is a major health trend in 2024, often blamed for various physical and mental health issues.
Chronic inflammation can damage the blood-brain barrier, allowing inflammatory chemicals to enter the brain and affect mental health, including depression and brain fog.
Scientific research shows a strong link between chronic inflammation and diseases like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and autoimmune conditions.
Common anti-inflammatory advice, such as avoiding nightshade vegetables, lacks solid scientific evidence; instead, reducing processed foods may help.
The Mediterranean diet, supported by a large long-term study, is highlighted as an effective approach to lowering inflammation without calorie counting.
Summary:
In this episode of *Science Versus*, host Wendy Zuckerman explores the science behind inflammation, a health trend dominating 2025. The show begins by noting how inflammation is often blamed for a range of issues, from bloating and headaches to anxiety and depression. Scientists are equally obsessed, with over 60,000 new papers published on the topic in the past year.
The episode focuses on chronic inflammation’s impact on mental health, featuring research by Caroline Menard, who found that social stress in mice leads to a leaky blood-brain barrier, allowing inflammatory cytokines to enter the brain and disrupt neurotransmitter production. This phenomenon was also observed in human brain samples from individuals who died by suicide, suggesting a link between inflammation and depression. Beyond the brain, chronic inflammation is tied to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and asthma, with an estimated 35% of US adults affected.
The show then debunks common anti-inflammatory myths, such as avoiding nightshade vegetables like tomatoes and eggplants, noting no solid evidence supports this. Instead, reducing processed foods and sugar may help. The most promising dietary intervention is the Mediterranean diet, backed by a 20-year study called the PREDIMED trial, which involved over 7,000 participants and showed significant anti-inflammatory benefits without calorie restriction.
The episode concludes that while inflammation is a serious health factor, science supports lifestyle changes like diet and stress management over trendy remedies.
FAQs
Chronic inflammation is a persistent immune response linked to numerous diseases like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and mental health issues. Studies suggest about 35% of US adults have chronic inflammation, and it's associated with 70% of global deaths.
Inflammation can disrupt the blood-brain barrier, allowing inflammatory chemicals to enter the brain and damage neurons. This can impair neurotransmitter production, leading to symptoms like depression, anxiety, and brain fog.
Yes, studies show COVID-19 can cause a leaky blood-brain barrier, even a year after infection. This allows inflammation to enter the brain, contributing to brain fog and cognitive issues.
Yes, research has found similar blood-brain barrier damage in humans who died by suicide with depression. A clinical trial also showed that about a third of depressed individuals with high inflammation improved with anti-inflammatory drugs.
No, there's no convincing evidence that nightshades cause inflammation in humans. In fact, they contain beneficial nutrients like polyphenols and fiber that may help lower inflammation.
Some small studies suggest turmeric can lower inflammatory markers, but results are inconsistent and not solid enough to recommend it as a reliable treatment.
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