Facts and fiction about the anti-inflammatory diet

Celebrities, athletes, and stars of all kinds have recently become obsessed with the anti-inflammatory diet. Everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Tom Brady is eliminating toxic lectins and reviving their gut and joint health.

But is this diet a cure-all or just your typical trendy diet that doesn’t actually work for people who aren’t rich and famous?

The fiction of the anti-inflammatory diet

Allegedly, an anti-inflammatory diet is a cure-all for aching joints and troubled intestines. In particular, the commonly celebrity-endorsed meal plan is the autoimmune paleo, or the AIP, diet, and is supposed to reduce gut, joint, and muscular inflammation.

The AIP diet involves eliminating all legumes, grains, dairy, nuts, seeds, and eggs. You’re also supposed to avoid vegetables in the nightshade family with high levels of alkaloids, such as eggplants, potatoes, peppers, and tomatoes. Additionally, you can’t consume olive oil or chocolate, both of which are known to be anti-inflammatory.

So why would celebrities drop such seemingly healthy ingredients from their diets? The answer lies in the proteins known as lectins, which bind to carbohydrates and aren’t broken down by the gut. Fad diets now claim that these proteins are both toxic to humans and cause inflammation, but the problem is that many of the things that include lectins have other tremendously redeeming qualities.

To avoid lectins by cutting out beans, grains, nightshade vegetables, and legumes, you’re missing out on all of their vitamins, minerals, and, of course, fiber, which Western diets are traditionally low in anyway. 

But lectins aren’t the “antinutrient” a lot of other media outlets are reporting. Of course, some people have lectin sensitivities. But cooking completely degrades lectin proteins in foods, so as long as you’re not eating raw potatoes or kidney beans, you’ll be totally fine.

Another complaint about the anti-inflammatory diet, and specifically the AIP diet, is that it’s excessively complicated and so you’ll be less likely to stick to it. But the Mayo Clinic said that if the anti-inflammatory diet is too hard to figure out, then you’re doing it wrong.

The AIP diet might be popular, but it’s not the only anti-inflammatory diet — no one diet can claim to be the only legitimate diet for reducing inflammation. And be suspicious if a program tells you to eliminate healthy vegetables and whole grains, as low-sugar, low-fat food groups are on the frontlines in the fight againstheart disease and diabetes.

The facts of the anti-inflammatory diet

While the AIP diet might be a little too restrictive for most, anti-inflammatory foods do exist, and they do have benefits. It’s just a matter of whether or not they’re beneficial outside of a laboratory. Studies have found that turmeric, blueberries, ginger, dark chocolate, and fish all have anti-inflammatory properties.

Doctors from the University of South Carolina have compiled an index to rank such foods. But there’s so much variation among the studies on these foods that scientists are skeptical about whether there is truly a way to determine which foods are helpful.

Ultimately, experts are careful to note that if you’re eating things like fast food or processed grains, you’re negating the impacts of whatever anti-inflammatory diet you’re on. A controversial study from the University of Bonn showed that mice that were fed a fast-food diet (which researchers called a “Western diet”) suffered from an acute inflammatory response.

The high amounts of sugar and fat and low amounts of fiber caused the mice to suffer a dramatic increase in the types of white blood cells that help your body fight off infections. Whether or not this can be applied to humans is hard to say, but preliminary studies show that even if an anti-inflammatory diet is hard to pin down, an inflammatory diet is pretty straightforward: high fat, high sugar, low fiber.

The one definitive thing about anti-inflammatory diets is that they’re beneficial for heart disease, cholesterol, and diabetes. Take the Mediterranean diet, which controls various health conditions and involves most of the anti-inflammatory food groups needed for a gut-friendly diet. It’s also considered by researchers to be anti-inflammatory.

In other words, you don’t need a ludicrous fad diet to reduce inflammation. Just follow the most popular and healthiest diet in the world, and you’ll be fine.The truth

The moral of this particular story is that just because a celebrity participates in a fad diet doesn’t mean that it’s automatically a great lifestyle choice. Following an anti-inflammatory diet isn’t rocket science, and you don’t have to become an ascetic to follow it. Sometimes, healthy diets are less complicated than they seem, and it’s unnecessary to continually eliminate things left and right in the hopes that you’ll craft a meal plan that magically cures your aches and pains.

Harvard Health’s found that the Mediterranean diet is associated with lower inflammation and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. So why constrain yourself with fearmongering news about lectins when you can just eat a healthy, delicious diet filled with dark chocolate and wine?