Anti-inflammatory diets: Do certain foods reduce inflammation and help you live longer?

It is one of the scourges of life in the modern world: chronic inflammation. This unhelpful response by the body’s immune system is linked to accelerated ageing and conditions such as stroke and heart disease.

What if we could dampen it down by consuming certain foods, such as spinach, walnuts and salmon? That is the promise of anti-inflammatory diets, often advocated in vague terms by the media and nutrition industry. That might prompt eye-rolling from the scientifically minded. But recent research reveals that this approach isn’t as faddish as it sounds and paints a nuanced picture of the links between food, inflammation and our long-term health.

Inflammation is a crucial part of our response to injury and disease. But when the body continues to deploy it even when there is no trauma, this results in chronic inflammation. Exactly why this occurs is unclear, but genetics, environment and lifestyle play roles. It can be detected by measuring certain chemical markers in the blood, and has been increasingly linked with poor health.

“Chronic inflammation is a driver of many common diseases, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis and dementia,” says John Mathers at Newcastle University in the UK. It has also been implicated in some mental health conditions.

But how…