Even more encouraging is that it only takes a few changes—not a drastic overnight overhaul—to move toward more anti-inflammatory eating. To reduce inflammation and heal the body, research points to these three steps:
INCREASE ANTI-INFLAMMATORY FOODS: Add and increase your intake of foods that ease inflammation as well as nourish and protect the body from further damage. All the Meals That Heal recipes are based on this most important guideline and these foods.
REDUCE INFLAMMATORY FOODS: Slowly reduce and eliminate those irritants that you regularly consume.
RESTORE AND NOURISH GUT HEALTH: As you increase foods that heal and protect, incorporate those that also nourish gut health to rebuild and maintain your microbiome of good bacteria.
Increasing anti-inflammatory foods appears to be the most important aspect by far. The reasoning? Many of the key anti-inflammatory foods—vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, nuts, herbs, and spices—actually provide a double boost to your body since most contain phytochemicals and antioxidants. So, in addition to soothing inflammation, these foods’ antioxidants and bioactive compounds also prevent or slow oxidative damage to protect your cells.
Since skipping those veggies and plant foods may have a double-whammy effect on health, first focus on increasing those rather than eliminating less healthy ones. What you’re likely to find is that adding more anti-inflammatory foods makes the other two areas—eliminating inflammatory foods and restoring gut health—fall more in line without much effort.
We’ve known that populations near the Mediterranean Sea are some of the healthiest, but the extent is pretty overwhelming (see Mediterranean Stats on page 23). Is it the olive oil or the red wine? Actually, it appears to largely be due to the overall anti-inflammatory effect of the foods emphasized in the Mediterranean diet.
Meals That Heal eating recommendations are patterned after the Mediterranean diet but also incorporate recent research findings from the DASH diet, the ketogenic diet, and the MIND diet, as well as plant-based diet effects and how glycemic impact affects various conditions. In fact, you won’t find this exact “prescription” anywhere else. The next few pages share the general eating guidelines, and then Chapter 10 focuses on the most important aspects of the diet for various health conditions and provides menu plans.