The BEST Nutrition Plan To Decrease INFLAMMATION (The Mediterranean Diet)

Hi, I'm Dr. A. I've been involved in treating patients with complex chronic illness for decades, and I've also been involved in the teaching and research end of natural integrative medicine for the last 30 years. So I use this YouTube channel to answer people's questions, get more deeply into things that we brought up maybe in video shorts or other stuff. And today I wanted to get into the Mediterranean diet And some thoughts around the Mediterranean diet. So let's break that down. The first thing is that as a diet format, and diet is just a way of formatting your macro and micronutrients from your food, the so-called Mediterranean diet is the diet that has the most published research on it. There's 2 things to say about that. The first is sometimes something has lots of research published and that's all it is. It's just people like to research that, or there's a lot of people people interested in researching it, and it's just a numbers game. So maybe that was why there was more. But the other side of it is that if you have something that is well-researched, but the research continually shows that it has good outcomes, that also leads to more research because people want to reinforce research that comes out well because they think it might help human health. The other thing to say is that you might have a diet that doesn't have as much research, and that doesn't mean anything good or bad about that diet. It just means it doesn't have as many papers, published as, for example, The Med. So the first thing would be, okay, I've heard of the word Mediterranean. Maybe you've been there, maybe you live there. What is the Mediterranean diet? So the first thing is, is what would we focus on in the Mediterranean diet? Generally speaking, most vegetables, most nuts and seeds, herbs are fairly unrestricted, spices are unrestricted, fish and other seafood, extra virgin olive oil is always in the list. And then when it comes to what would we limit, you'd have limited amounts fruit and legumes, peas and other things of that nature. We'll get into why that is, but they would be more limited. And in some ways of doing the Mediterranean diet, so there's sort of the full Mediterranean diet and there's modified Mediterranean diet, and I'll talk about why in a minute. But in the modified ones, you generally take out what is normally allowed, which would be potatoes, whole grains, and breads. So if you look at a broad med diet, potatoes, whole grains, and breads, and again, that's whole grains, not processed grains. If you're eating a modified modified Mediterranean diet to decrease, you know, insulin secretion or something, you might take those out. That's why it's modified. Rarely— so they have, you know, eat all the time, eat limited, and then rarely. Rarely would be red meat, which is kind of commonly a minor thing. Then there's the do not eat list, and that includes anything that is sugar sweetened, any added sugars, processed meats, refined grains, refined oils, any other highly processed foods. That kind of makes some sense. But you might look at this and say, well, why would this be good for inflammatory conditions? Why would this be good for people with just chronic health problems, et cetera? Well, as I said earlier, there's a ton of diets. Every diet probably has some really good things about it and it works really well for particular types of problems, but we're focusing on the Mediterranean or modified med diet today. And one of the reasons that this probably is helpful is it provides a number of medical portions from plant Polyphenols and flavonoids and other good chemistry in plants. That includes the herbs and the spices, but also the whole vegetables and all of those things. You have extra virgin olive oil, which is an anti-inflammatory substance for most people unless they're allergic or something. But the other thing is that you have enough macronutrition coming in with proteins, fats, and carbohydrates to fuel your body, which is very helpful. But if you look at it, and this is both true of the modified and the regular Mediterranean diet, You have a lower amount of inflammatory chemical signaling. Inflammatory chemical signaling is often triggered by the signaling for more insulin, and this diet done correctly with most people will often lower their insulin levels, which lowers the inflammatory activity during the day. Now, I had somebody say, well, you know, I've read in a book that it's like quote unquote the most researched type of diet for an intervention. How researched is it? Well, I just checked PubMed this morning, and in PubMed there's almost 12,000 hits, which are publications, peer-reviewed publications on the Mediterranean diet. And I didn't get creative at all. I just looked in and did a search for Mediterranean diet. You can do Mediterranean diet and then add on other cancer or, you know, arthritis or whatever, and you'll find others that get in there too. So close to 12,000 hits of peer-reviewed research. That's a fairly large amount. Now, what's it been shown effective for? Well, there's different ways to look at research with effect of either a modified Mediterranean Mediterranean or full Mediterranean diet. But generally speaking, it has been shown to be helpful in weight loss. It's been shown to be helpful in some groups of people for, as I said, insulin blood sugar control. It's been shown to be helpful in other inflammatory conditions, whether they're autoimmune or transient inflammatory conditions, shown to be helpful because of its anti-inflammatory capacity and healing. And there is some research in maintenance of, you know, remission or stable disease in cancer. So it's kind of all over the Yeah. So the first thing that we have to think of to like get put, you know, boots on the ground with regard to the med diet or modified med diet is you want to, you know, you might already eat this way, so then no problem, you're already there. But let's say you don't. Let's say you have more of the, you know, standard North American highly processed food, all that stuff. The first thing that you want to do really is to take away processed foods, take the junk out. Of your life, if it comes in a package, it probably shouldn't be part of this diet. Now there's some things that might come in a package that are a whole food, and that's just how they did it at the store. Okay, that's fine. But if it's packaged and if it has a number of chemical stabilizers, etc., those things that stabilize packaged food add to your chemical toxicity and add as pro-inflammatory mediators, add to your inflammatory balance. So get the junk out first. Processed foods. Added sugars, other added chemicals, dyes, et cetera, et cetera. So get the junk out first. That's the number one goal. And the more processed and packaged foods you eat, the harder that's gonna be. But literally, if you can do that and then you go and you look at the eat a lot of these, limit these things, you know, don't eat these things, et cetera, you can build a diet around what you like. Now, maybe you, you know, are fine with vegetables, you love nuts and seeds, you have certain spices and herbs. Great. Well, that, you know, kind of takes care of that cornerstone. You're going to use an added oil. You might use an extra virgin olive oil and take away the other oils you might use. Again, I'm talking just about the med diet here. You might look and, you know, your balance of vegetables versus, and seeds and nuts versus, you know, legumes and fruits, which have a little more insulin stimulating. It might be, you know, favoring, you know, more fruits. So you'd back off on that a little bit. You still, there are some fruits in the med diet. It's just not as much as the other stuff. Now, if you're modifying it, you would take potatoes and the grains and breads out. If you're doing a full med diet, you could have some potatoes and whole grains and stuff, but most of the grains that we get, at least in North America, are highly processed. So you need— those aren't part of what you're going to be eating. You're going to have, in addition to seafood, fishes or whatever. And again, with seafood, you always have to look at how toxic the seafood is. So you want to get the lowest toxicity seafoods you can find just to put that in there. But seafood, and then you might look If you're not intolerant, you might have eggs, you might have cheese, you have yogurt, might have some, some poultry, things that fly. You're gonna have minimal amounts of other types of meat. And then like I say, the big thing is you're gonna take away added sugars, you're gonna take away added chemicals, stabilizers, all that junk. And then you're gonna be on your way to implementing this. Now, the next level is usually once I've removed the junk and the stabilizers added, you know, chemicals and sugar, et cetera. And then I've got my, you know, my macros, I got my proteins dialed in and And the vegetables and the spices and all that. Then the next thing might be, I still, you know, sometimes when I eat certain meals, I still feel, you know, inflamed later that day or the next day. My joints will flare up or whatever your symptoms are. Well, then you can do an elimination challenge. Just, just look up online what elimination challenge is and you might be eating, you know, eggs every day and maybe your body doesn't like eggs. Okay. It's not allergic. It just doesn't like them. Or maybe you're eating, you know, some other source that, you know, cheese or some other thing. If you're not having those problems though, and you can cut of build the Mediterranean or modified med diet around getting the junk out, get the, all of the, you know, all of the chemistry out, all added sugars out, have a good base of vegetables and herbs, spices, good oil, et cetera. And then you build on top of that to get your protein and your other fats. You're gonna be really fine and you're gonna be good to go. Well, I hope that answers the questions about Mediterranean diet and Got a little bit in the modified Mediterranean diet. We may do a whole thing just on modified med diets. We tend to use those more extreme situations like cancer patients and other types of things. Hope it answered your questions. If you like this video, we're going to put some links up here to other content that we've made. And thank you for joining me. I will see you guys on the next video.