Recap: Reduce inflammation with a sprinkle of spices | Kanchan Koya
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Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're discussing spices.

Are you ever intimidated by spices? Unsure what spice to add to which meal? If so, you might be missing out on some incredible health benefits. Spices are packed full of polyphenols, which means they offer our body something really unique. Oh, and they taste great too. So how can we introduce more spices into our meals? Kanchen Koya is here to share the science of spices and show us how easy it is to make them a staple of our cooking.

So a study that I would love to mention is the one out of Penn State that looked at the addition of a spice blend. It was many spices in the blend. And they added this to sort of a standard American diet, typical hamburger meal. So, you know, something that isn't great for you and they

gave people the meal either with or without the spice blend. And they basically found reductions in inflammatory markers right after the meal when the meal had the spice blend. And I think that's really empowering and exciting because, again, it was culinary amounts of spices. I'm sure the burger tasted better with the blend versus without the blend. And there was this

real reduction in biomarkers of inflammation right after the meal. So, you know, that got people really excited because up until then, we only really had some in vitro and like animal studies on the inflammatory effects of spices. And now we had an actual human trial. And since then, there have been some more studies looking at the impacts of specific spices on inflammatory conditions like arthritis. So there was a study that got quite a bit of buzz looking at

turmeric supplementation versus traditional sort of NSAIDs or non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs that many people use for arthritis but have some side effects, especially on gut health.

And they found that turmeric supplements worked as well as the NSAIDs without the negative side effects. Now, the issue there is that they did use quite high concentrations of curcumin, which is the bioactive polyphenol in turmeric. So I think it's not clear that you can achieve the same therapeutic effect with turmeric in the diet if you have full-blown arthritis. But if you are looking to lower inflammation and reduce

you know, just prevent an inflammatory condition, I think a case can be made for just adding more of these anti-inflammatory spices to your kind of regular rotation. What I really want to do is empower people to use more spices more regularly in their daily cooking. And so I think a mortar and pestle and freshly ground spices are lovely to showcase, but they can be intimidating for

the sort of, you know, home cook who is busy, has kids, is sort of, you know, juggling a bunch of things and is thinking, now I have to buy a mortar and pestle and grind fresh star anise. It's not happening. So I want to take a step back and say, like with any habit change, whether it's adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet, whether it's adding more plant diversity, 30 plants a week, baby steps are really where the magic lies.

So my biggest recommendation is to take the foods that you're already eating, that you already enjoy, that your kids already enjoy and start to challenge yourself to add at least one spice to that dish.

So if we just take some examples, you know, people might typically eat like avocado toast. You mentioned sumac. You could add some chili peppers. If you like heat, you could add a little bit of cumin and coriander to your avocado toast. And when you said you just literally mean sprinkle it on top in all of those cases. Exactly. So start by just going to the store, buying a reputable brand of say ground cumin, ground coriander, keep it away from heat and light and sprinkle it onto your avocado toast.

And the cumin and coriander also have all of these high polyphenols and some of this evidence for helping our health that you've talked about with some of the others. Yeah. So the anti-inflammatory study that I mentioned that look at the addition of the spice blend to the burger actually had cumin and coriander in that blend. And there are lots of in vitro studies looking at the impact of cumin and coriander on antioxidant status, on digestion.

animal models. So yes, absolutely wonderful. There's also some studies looking at coriander and blood sugar control. So pretty much every spice will have some beneficial properties if you dig through the literature. I think cumin and coriander are just easy because you can sprinkle them on, you don't have to grind them fresh. And chili peppers are a similar example. At the kind of doses that you're talking about, us sprinkling on our breakfasts or our lunches, for example,

Will they be enough if we were to have a sprinkle every day to have a health benefit? Well, I think we can extrapolate from the study that looked at markers of inflammation being reduced upon the spice blend. And it was about a teaspoon of the blend. So you can easily achieve a teaspoon of spices through the day if you sprinkle it onto like every meal. So I think it's very achievable to get to that one to two teaspoons a day for some of those anti-inflammatory effects.

So you started with breakfast and you're saying like, I think you talked about cumin, coriander, sumac is like really easy to sprinkle on. What about snacks? I was going to go exactly the same place. Exactly. What about... Snacks account for 25% of our energy intake in the UK and the US. So I think that would be a great way if we could get some spices into our snacks. It would be fabulous.

Yeah. Any ideas? Yeah. So I would suggest a yogurt-based snack because we know yogurt is a fermented food. It's great for microbiome diversity, inflammation. So two options with yogurt. You could go in a sweet direction where you take some Greek yogurt, you throw in a bunch of different berries for those wonderful polyphenols. You throw in some nuts like walnuts, pistachios, almonds.

And you sprinkle on some cinnamon, a little bit of grated nutmeg and cardamom. And you almost have a pudding of sorts because it has all these luxurious flavor profiles from the spices. You get the benefit of potential blood sugar balance with the cinnamon and these additional polyphenols.

Really easy way to spice up sort of a sweeter yogurt snack. And then you could go in a more savory direction and prepare a yogurt dip for a plate of cut vegetables. So you can have your carrots, cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes, and your Greek yogurt with a little drizzle of olive oil, some crushed garlic for that allicin, which is another great bioactive found in garlic. And to that, I would again add

salt, a little bit of sumac, chili, cumin, coriander, mix it up. And it's almost like a Middle Eastern type of dip for your cut veggies. Great. And any ideas for snacks on the go?

Yeah, I actually love home-popped popcorn. So just, you know, get some corn kernels. Do this with your kids. It's super fun. A little bit of avocado or olive oil in a pot. Throw the kernels in. Let them pop. It's really fun to hear them popping. The kids can get involved. And then just toss it with a spice blend that you love. It can be garam masala, which is an Indian spice blend. It can be the baharat blend or a curry blend, you know.

with a little bit of olive oil and salt. And now you have a spiced up polyphenol rich popcorn snack. Great idea. That I have never tried. So it's like curried popcorn. Exactly. I'm going to be trying that one. Like not just as a snack for me and the kids, but in the evening, if I'm a bit peckish when I'm having my polyphenol packed glass of red wine, I'm going to like boost it up. Yeah, that's after my time restricted eating window that I'm now told I have to stop eating. You see, this is all pulling me in the wrong direction, Sarah. So yeah.

I've got to resist the after-dinner eating. And what about – because I feel like – what about when you go to dinner, which is, I think, where I get intimidated because it starts to feel like you need to really understand what you're doing cooking with spices. So imagine that you're looking for that same sort of gateway access into using spices for meals at dinner. What would you –

What would be your entry points that you might suggest? Again, it's take the thing you're already making. So if you are making a bolognese, a traditional meat bolognese or a lentil bolognese, which would be packed with more fiber, you can add sweet or smoked paprika. You can actually add cinnamon to a bolognese for a lovely complexity of flavor. Cinnamon.

We tend to think of cinnamon as a sweet dessert spice. - That's definitely how I think about it with sort of very much so. - Right, but traditional cultures, whether it's India and garam masala or the Middle East and Baharat blend or this shawarma blend,

Or even in Vietnam, cinnamon is often used in savory dishes. Chinese five spice, which is used in savory cooking, has cinnamon and star anise. So you can definitely add cinnamon to a savory dish. If you are grilling some salmon, you know, you can do some rosemary and garlic and smoked paprika on the salmon. If you're just oven roasting some cauliflower, you could throw in a curry spice blend and

There has been an interesting study observational looking at curry spice blend in ingestion and cognitive readouts. So people seem to have better cognitive health in response to regular ingestion of the curry spice blend. So I think, you know, there's so many ways to take existing dishes that you already make, you already know how to do and just add spices to that instead of sort of starting from scratch, which can be way more intimidating for people.

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