Enjoy Nature, Lower Inflammation

An April 2024 study by Cornell University said,

• “By focusing on … inflammation markers, the study provides a biological explanation for why nature might improve health … particularly showing how it might prevent or manage diseases linked to chronic inflammation, like heart disease and diabetes.”

• “It’s a pretty robust finding … And it’s this sort of nexus of exposure and experience: It’s only when you have both, when you are engaging and taking the enjoyment out of it, that you see these benefits.”

• “It’s good to remind ourselves that it’s not just the quantity of nature … it’s also the quality.”

Stress, inflammation and Metabolic Syndrome

A January 2024 study by Ohio State University said,

• “We were specifically examining people in midlife – a time that is critical to determine those who will experience accelerated aging. Stress is an important contributor to several negative health outcomes as we age,”

• “There are many variables that influence metabolic syndrome, some we can’t modify, but others that we can. Everybody experiences stress,”

• “And stress management is one modifiable factor that’s cost-effective as well as something people can do in their daily lives without having to get medical professionals involved.”

• “There’s not much research that has looked at all three variables at one time,” said Jurgens, a psychology graduate student in Hayes’ lab. “There’s a lot of work that suggests stress is associated with inflammation, inflammation is associated with metabolic syndrome, and stress is associated with metabolic syndrome. But putting all those pieces together is rare.”

• Inflammation composite scores were calculated using biomarkers that included the better-known IL-6 and C-reactive protein as well as E-selectin and ICAM-1, which help recruit white blood cells during inflammation, and fibrinogen, a protein essential to blood clot formation.

• The statistical modeling showed that stress does indeed have a relationship with metabolic syndrome, and inflammation explained over half of that connection – 61.5%, to be exact.

• “There is a small effect of perceived stress on metabolic syndrome, but inflammation explained a large proportion of that,”

• “People think of stress as mental health, that it’s all psychological. It is not. There are real physical effects to having chronic stress,”

• “It could be inflammation, it could be metabolic syndrome, or a number of things. This is another reminder of that.”

Sleep, immunity, inflammation

A September 2022 study by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai said,

• “This study begins to identify the biological mechanisms that link sleep and immunological health over the long-term. It shows that in humans and mice, disrupted sleep has a profound influence on the programming of immune cells and rate of their production, causing them to lose their protective effects and actually make infections worse—and these changes are long-lasting.  This is important because it is yet another key observation that sleep reduces inflammation and, conversely, that sleep interruption increases inflammation,” 

• “This work emphasizes the importance of adults consistently sleeping seven to eight hours a day to help prevent inflammation and disease, especially for those with underlying medical conditions."

• “Our findings suggest that sleep recovery is not able to fully reverse the effects of poor-quality sleep. We can detect a molecular imprint of insufficient sleep in immune stem cells, even after weeks of recovery sleep. This molecular imprint can cause the cells to respond in inappropriate ways leading to inflammation and disease,” 

• “It was surprising to find that not all clusters of stem cells responded to insufficient sleep in the same way. There were some stem cell clusters that proliferated and grew in number, while other clusters became smaller. This reduction in overall diversity and aging of the immune stem cell population is an important contributor to inflammatory diseases and cardiovascular disease.”

pro-inflammatory diets and frailty

A December 2021 study by, amongst others, Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research, and Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, said that, 

• “The study indicated that regularly eating foods that contain nutrients such as dietary fiber and dietary antioxidants (such as vitamin C, vitamin E, and flavonoids) may prevent older adults from becoming frail,” 

• “While more studies are necessary, guidelines based on an anti-inflammatory diet may help reduce the percentage of older adults who may develop frailty and related conditions such as falls and fractures, which can improve their quality of life.”

Skin and joint inflammation

A June 2021 study by UC Davis Health said,

• "Earlier studies have shown that Western diet, characterized by its high sugar and fat content, can lead to significant skin inflammation and psoriasis flares," 

• "Despite having powerful anti-inflammatory drugs for the skin condition, our study indicates that simple changes in diet may also have significant effects on psoriasis."

• "There is a clear link between skin inflammation and changes in the gut microbiome due to food intake," 

• "The bacterial balance in the gut disrupted shortly after starting a Western diet, and worsened psoriatic skin and joint inflammation."

• "It was quite surprising that a simple diet modification of less sugar and fat may have significant effects on psoriasis,”

• "These findings reveal that patients with psoriatic skin and joint disease should consider changing to a healthier dietary pattern."

The Liver, high blood sugar and muscle loss

A March 2021 study by Monash University said, 

"The ageing-related diseases of skeletal muscle loss and type 2 diabetes are very prevalent and are a huge societal and economic burden. We have known for some time that the ageing-related diseases of skeletal muscle loss and type 2 diabetes were linked but we didn't know how.”

"Our studies demonstrate that the liver is a critical control point for muscle protein metabolism; a discovery that is quite surprising. We believe that our new findings highlight the need to examine the role of skeletal muscle atrophy in type 2 diabetes more closely in human clinical populations."

Curcumin and Inflammation

A March 2020 study by the University of South Australia, McMaster University and Texas A&M University said,

• "Curcumin is a compound that suppresses oxidative stress and inflammation, both key pathological factors for Alzheimer's, and it also helps remove amyloid plaques, small fragments of protein that clump together in the brains of Alzheimer disease patients,"

• "To treat genital herpes (HSV-2) you need a form of curcumin that is better absorbed, which is why it needs to be encapsulated in a nano formulation."

• "Curcumin can stop the genital herpes virus, it helps in reducing the inflammation and makes it less susceptible to HIV and other STIs."