7 Foods Driving Dangerous Inflammation in Your Body (And What To Eat Instead)

When I talk about low-grade inflammation, just picture the hot, red, angry inflammation you get on your skin around an insect bite or a sting, and then turn the intensity of that inflammation right down to something like 5% of that. And instead of it sitting just in one spot on your skin, imagine it running through every blood vessel and organ inside your body at once. That faint, constant state of everything being slightly red and irritated is roughly what chronic low-grade inflammation is. This is what we talk about. And it is one of the most common threads running through pretty much everything I talk about, like heart disease and diabetes and stroke and dementia, all of these different things. And the food you eat is honestly one of the biggest influencers you have over this. And a huge part of the story here is a process called insulin resistance, where years and years and years of blood sugar spikes leave your cells gradually deaf to this insulin that is meant to clear that sugar and store it away, which drives both inflammation and the disease that follows. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through seven different foods that the best evidence that we have links to high inflammation, insulin resistance, and just general worst metabolic health overall. And rather than leaving you with just a list of things to avoid, I'm going to finish this video with seven other foods to eat instead of those. So you walk away from this video learning something new and learning something that you can implement tomorrow. And just a bit of a heads up here. So the seventh and final food on this list today is seed oils. Now, these have become one of the most argued about topics in all of nutrition. And I will give you my honest, honest opinion on whether they are good or bad for you based on the best research we have, because the truth is a lot more nuanced than either side tends to admit. So welcome to the channel. My name's Dr. Alex. I'm here to help you live longer and stay healthier along the way by teaching you all of the stuff that I've learned over the last few years. And the best way that you can support me is by liking the video, giving the video a hype as well, and also subscribing to the channel if you found it useful. I promise you, this is the only thing I'll ever ask of you. All of those things are completely free and it allows me to keep making these daily videos for you and keeping them free for you as well. So let's carry on with the rest of the video. So the first food on this list is breakfast cereals. And this one will surprise a lot of people because we assume this is healthy. This is what we've been told to eat for years. I'm talking specifically about things like crunching up Corn Flakes or Frosties or Cocoa Pops or Special K or Cookie Crisp, all of these different things and lots of the granolas as well. The problem is that many of these are closer to a dessert than a breakfast. And I say that because they're built largely from refined grains and sugars, even a lot of granolas as well, which means they hit your bloodstream really fast and you get a big, big glucose surge, a big spike first thing in the morning. Each of those spikes forces your pancreas to pump out a huge surge of insulin to deal with that sugar. And when you repeat that morning after morning, your cells very slowly become less responsive to insulin, which is the very definition of insulin resistance. Now, because the cereal is light and it's sweet and it's easy to pour, most people eat far more than the very modest portion printed on the box, which for most cereals is 30 grams. If you've ever poured 30 grams and actually weighed it into a bowl, it's basically nothing. The spoon often weighs more than 30 grams. And the granolas here are often the worst offenders precisely because the health halo around them gives you this sort of permission to pile up the bowl really high, thinking, well, I'm getting a load of fruit in here, lots of oats and stuff, so it must be healthy. Well, that is going to spike your blood sugar pretty high. A simple rule that will serve you well is that if it tastes sweet, you probably shouldn't be having it for breakfast. The second one is probably the single strongest item on this entire list. And that is, as you probably know, sugary drinks, things like Coke and Pepsi and Sprite, Fanta, or these energy drinks or sweetened coffees with lots of cream and sort of syrups in as well. The things that so many people sip through all day, every day while they're at work. A can of full sugar Coke delivers such a huge sugar dose in liquid form with nothing to slow it down. There's no fiber, there's no protein, there's no chewing. So it floods your system with glucose and fructose almost instantly within a few minutes. Now that glucose forces those same sharp insulin surges that wear down your sensitivity over time, while the fructose is handled mainly by your liver. And a steady stream of this fructose gets turned into liver fat, which is one of the most direct routes there is to insulin resistance and also fatty liver disease. And I would also put fruit smoothies in this same bracket. And people hate me for saying this, but just bear with me. Thing is, once you've blitzed all of this fruit, then the fiber, yes, isn't technically gone, but you've destroyed that fiber and it can no longer do its job of slowing that sugar down. So you end up drinking an enormous amount of sugar that is absorbed pretty much instantly, just like Coke. Just imagine for a second, just picture yourself eating two oranges and an apple and a banana and a kiwi and 300 mil of orange juice, all in one sitting, all of that in one go. You couldn't do it. But if you put all of that into a blender and blended it all up and whisked it all up, most people could drink all of that within 20 minutes. It's really easy to drink liquid sugar and it lets you pour in so many more calories and grams of sugar, far more than you could ever eat in one go. And out of everything on this list, cutting these drinks out, drinking anything sweet, if you try and cut that out, this is one of the best changes you could ever make to your diet. The third group on this list is sweets and confectionery, things like Haribo or Skittles or Jelly Babies and wine gums as well, which are about as close to a pure sugar delivery system as food gets. Although it takes a bit more digesting because it's solid, which is why it comes behind liquid sugar. There is almost nothing else in these foods other than maybe a bit of gelatin, but it's mostly just sugar. There's no fiber, there's no fat, there's no protein, obviously. So again, they produce a really massive glucose response and do next to nothing to fill you up, which means it's very easy to eat bag after bag and take on a serious amount of sugar without ever feeling satisfied. Remember, it is protein and fiber and fat that fills you up and stops you feeling hungry. If it's just pure sugar, then you're going to continue to feel hungry and keep eating more and more. Every single one of those sugar hits demands another flood of insulin. And it's this constant spiking and surging day in, day out, that gradually pushes your cells towards insulin resistance and keeps your body in this low-level inflammatory state. Because each spike sets off a small wave of oxidative stress and inflammatory signaling inside every one of your blood vessels. Now, if you eat them every now and then, then obviously it's not going to do you much harm. But as a daily habit, they keep your blood sugar on this roller coaster that your inflammatory system never really gets a chance to step down from. The fourth food group today is things like donuts and pastries and cakes, crispy creams as well, the muffins, the Danish pastries, the things that appear in every office and every coffee shop and things that people eat on the go or as a bit of a mid-morning snack. These are a particularly unfortunate combination from an inflammatory point of view because they bring together refined flour, a heavy dose of sugar and industrial fats all in one bite. So you get the rapid blood sugar spike from the refined carbohydrates and with it, another demand on your insulin alongside all of the other stuff that's in these foods. And that pairing of sugar and fat is especially effective at switching on the inflammatory pathways that your body uses to deal with stress and injury. Only here, those pathways stay switched on for hours after every snack rather than being briefly fired and then turned off. The fact that these foods are designed to be really soft and sweet and really easily swallowed and more-ish means one is rarely where it ends. So the inflammatory signal builds across the day rather than fading because people tend to eat multiple of these sorts of food throughout the day. The fifth group is another group of ultra-processed foods. We're talking about other snacks this time like Pringles and Doritos and Wotsits and other cheesy puffs, you know, refined crisps or chips if you're in America. The thing is engineered to be almost impossible to stop eating. These are what we call hyper-palatable which means that they have this exact combination of fat and salt and refined carbohydrates to override the signals that would normally tell you that you've had enough and to stop eating. And all of those easily digested refined carbohydrates very often spike your blood sugar and your insulin much more than something sweet because they are so easy to overeat and these carbohydrates are so refined and easily absorbed. And what happens is that these extra calories that you're eating very often get absorbed and then plonked onto your visceral fat deep inside your abdomen. Now that deep abdominal fat is itself one of the most inflammatory tissues in your body. It behaves almost like a gland that pumps out inflammatory chemicals around the clock. And large studies of diets high in this kind of ultra-processed food have consistently shown higher inflammatory markers in the blood and worse metabolic health across the board. And what tends to happen is that when you eat these refined carbohydrates, these chips and crisps, you're missing opportunities to eat whole natural foods that would actually be calming your inflammation down. Okay, number six on the list is processed meat. And here we're talking about things like bacon or sausages or pepperoni, salami, hot dogs, the meats that have been smoked or cured or treated with preservatives specifically here. This one actually carries the most serious official warning of anything on this list because the World Health Organization actually classifies processed meats as a group one carcinogen. The same category used for other substances that we know cause cancer in humans based largely on the link with bowel cancer. Now the route from these meats to disease runs straight through inflammation because the nitrites that are used to cure them and preserve them along with the heme iron that's actually in the meat itself, they generate compounds in the gut that irritate the bowel lining and they trigger ongoing low-level inflammation in the cells down there which is exactly the kind of chronic irritation that over the years pushes your cells towards becoming cancerous. It's also got its own connection to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes because in large studies, regular processed meat eaters have a clearly higher risk of developing diabetes and it's thought to be down to a mix of the preservatives, the heme iron, but also the refined carbohydrates that are usually sort of coming along with these foods like the sausage in a white roll or the bacon in a white bab or a scotch egg where you've got the bread crumbs and all of these sorts of things or pork pies as well. None of this means that an occasional bacon sandwich is going to hurt you but as a daily staple of your normal diet, the inflammatory signal it sends through your gut according to these huge trials, it's really hard to ignore. And then finally the seventh one on this list, the one that I promised you at the start, is all about seed oils. Now here is my honest opinion based on the best evidence that we currently have. So the popular claim that seed oils like sunflower oil and rapeseed oil are powerfully inflammatory doesn't really hold up because when you look at the randomized trials, the main fat in them which is linoleic acid doesn't reliably raise inflammatory markers in your blood and if anything people with higher levels of it in their blood tend to have lower rates of heart disease and better insulin sensitivity as well rather than worse. So the oils themselves use sensibly are not the inflammatory villain that the internet has made them out to be. But where there is a real problem is repeated heating and deep frying at really high temperatures, the kind of thing that happens to the oil in a fast food fryer that has been used over and over again without changing the oil because that process specifically generates very harmful oxidized compounds and reactive aldehydes that really do appear to drive genuine inflammation when eaten regularly. The bigger issue here is that the fried food almost always comes wrapped in refined carbohydrates and an enormous calorie load like the batter on your fried fish or KFC or whatever or the bun and the chips and that whole combination there is exactly what pushes insulin resistance and systemic inflammation sort of along together for the ride. Obviously using a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil to cook a healthy meal at home is not something to be worrying about and extra virgin olive oil obviously is a better choice as well especially at lower heats where the oil remains a bit more stable and where the polyphenols actively lower inflammation rather than adding to it and again the occasional bit of fried food the occasional KFC is not going to really harm you. The thing to actually worry about is a diet built around food that has been deep fried or comes you know wrapped in refined carbohydrates like KFC or McDonald's if you eat this every single day. Again it's the things that you do consistently that we need to be worrying about so if you have the very occasional KFC like once every couple of weeks or a couple of months then I wouldn't really be losing sleep over this. It's the stuff that you do every day that we've got to be talking about and that leads me on to the most important part of this video because the most powerful thing that you can do is to crowd those foods out with foods that push in the opposite direction. So the first one which I've already mentioned is extra virgin olive oil and this is the backbone of the mediterranean way of eating. It's rich in polyphenols that have been shown in study after study to lower inflammatory markers. The second one is oily fish like salmon or mackerel or sardines whose long chain omega-3 fats are some of the most reliably anti-inflammatory things that you can actually eat. The third one is berries which are packed with polyphenols that calm oxidative stress in your body and the fourth one closely related are nuts which combine really healthy fats and fiber and protein and are tied to better heart health in trial after trial. The fifth one which we eat every single day are beans and lentils which are a really really good source of slow release energy that nudges up your blood sugar very gently instead of spiking it along with the fiber that your gut bacteria turns into anti-inflammatory compounds. The sixth one are cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower and kale which carry plant compounds linked to lower inflammation and lower cancer risk as well. And then finally the seventh one is fermented foods things like live yogurt or kefir or sauerkraut or kimchi or kombucha which feed a healthier gut microbiome and a healthier gut is one of the strongest influences that you have over inflammation in your entire body. So every single week try and get as many of these onto your plate as you can and if you do that if you eat mostly anti-inflammatory whole foods then there's not going to be any room left for the ultra-processed stuff that we know causes disease. This is why I tell people that if you're trying to overturn your diet don't worry about counting calories just eat the really good stuff until you feel full and then you won't be tempted to eat the ultra-processed stuff because you're going to be too full. Remember you don't need to be perfect here, it's about making small changes and then building on those over time. I really hope you found this video useful and if you did there are plenty more videos like this across the channel just waiting for you to click on one of them. Take care, have a great day and I'll see you in the next one.