Chronic Inflammation and Nutrition: What Two Trials Found
Last week of September. You are up, breakfast done, the kids are out the door. By half ten you are flat.
Not sick. Nothing you would ring the doctor about. Just run down. Your knees were stiff climbing out of the car this morning. Your get up and go got up and went somewhere around eleven.
For years I filed all that under getting older. Then I started reading about chronic inflammation and nutrition, and a good chunk of that heavy feeling turned out to be something I could actually do something about.
What that run down feeling actually is
The word for it is inflammation.
Inflammation gets a bad name, but it earns its keep. It is your body’s repair signal. You cut your finger, the skin goes red and warm, the body sends in help, it heals. Short term, it does a real job and you would be lost without it.
The bother starts when that signal never fully switches off. It hums away in the background at a low level, month after month, year after year. That is what people mean by chronic, systemic inflammation. It quietly drains your energy, keeps your joints feeling older than they are, and muddies the signals your body normally sends you.
You cannot feel it the way you feel a cut. You just feel a bit off. Heavier. Slower out of the blocks. And because it creeps in over years, most of us hand the whole lot to our age and leave it at that.
Two studies that made me look twice
This is where it gets interesting for anyone who eats the way most of us really eat.
A 2010 study in Molecular Nutrition and Food Research looked at a dried fruit and vegetable concentrate, the kind you take as a capsule. It measured systemic inflammatory markers across two groups of people. In the group taking the concentrate, that inflammatory load was significantly suppressed. Real people, real markers, a real journal. You can read the study on PubMed yourself.
Then a 2013 randomised controlled trial, published in the British Journal of Nutrition, took it further. This one tested the same kind of concentrate in a real world group, overweight women, alongside some regular exercise. It found measurable reductions in both inflammation and oxidation, and better microcirculation on top of that.
Two studies. Two completely different groups of people. The same direction of travel.
What gives these weight is simple. These were markers measured in a lab, before and after, then written up in journals where other scientists could go at them and try to knock them down. Actual numbers, on actual people, out in the open for anyone to check. That is a good deal more than most of what you read about your health in a given week.
A fair question comes next. Does the goodness in a capsule like that actually get into you, or does it go straight through? That has been studied too, and the answer is more reassuring than most people expect. I went through it in whether fruit and vegetable supplements really work if you want the detail.
The gap most of us are quietly living with
The real reason any of this matters is simple. Most of us are nowhere near the fruit and veg we are supposed to eat. I wrote about that gap in getting enough fruit and vegetables, and the honest truth is that the good intentions on a Sunday rarely survive a wet Wednesday.
That gap, repeated over years, is exactly the kind of thing that keeps the background signal humming. It is the same reason a good autumn tends to hold up better than a bad one, fewer of the sniffles doing the rounds, a bit more left in the tank. I covered that side of it in the autumn sick days piece.
None of this is about one magic fix. A walk you actually take, a night’s sleep you properly protect, they quieten the background noise more than any capsule ever will. A fruit and veg concentrate is one more lever, and an easy one, because you take it in the morning and you are done thinking about it. That is why it has stuck with me when plenty of other good intentions quietly fell away.
What I actually do about it
I have taken a fruit and veg concentrate every single morning for fourteen years.
All this habit does is put more real fruit and veg nutrition into a normal day, in a form the body can actually use. I have never once called it medicine, because it is not. It is just me refusing to leave that gap wide open, when I know hand on heart that a normal week never gets me the rainbow I am meant to eat.
The research is there for anyone who wants to look. One simple habit, done daily, will not cure a thing, and it was never meant to. What it does is give your body more of what fruit and veg were always meant to give it, heading into the season when you feel the lack of it most.
If your autumn has been landing a bit heavy this year, that is worth knowing.
You can read the full body of published Juice Plus research at juiceplus.com/research. Or you could just do the simple thing, and put a fruit and veg concentrate beside the kettle before the clocks go back.
