Month: March 2021

Berries and watermelon in the summer, kale and beets in the winter. The recipe for anti-inflammatory foods to enjoy can change with the seasons.

Your heart, your brain, and even your joints can benefit from a steady diet of these nutritious foods, and scientists think that their effects on inflammation may be one reason why.

Inflammation: How it helps and harms the body

Inflammation is part of your body’s healing mechanism — the reason why your knee swelled and turned red when you injured it. But this inflammatory repair process can sometimes go awry, lasting too long and harming instead of helping. When inflammation is caused by an ongoing problem, it can contribute to health problems. Over time, inflammation stemming from chronic stress, obesity, or an autoimmune disorder may potentially trigger conditions such as arthritis, heart disease, or cancer. It may also harm the brain. Researchers have found a link between higher levels of inflammation inside the brain and an elevated risk for cognitive decline and impairment. Regularly adding anti-inflammatory foods to your diet may help to switch off this process.

Three diets that emphasize anti-inflammatory patterns

Research hasn’t looked specifically at the anti-inflammatory benefits of eating foods that are in season. “But it’s generally accepted that eating what’s in season is likely to be fresher and obviously there are other benefits, including those for the environment,” says Natalie McCormick, a research fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Eating foods that are in season may also help your grocery bill.

When it comes to anti-inflammatory foods, the goal should be to incorporate as many as you can into your overall diet. “Our emphasis now is on eating patterns, because it seems that interactions between foods and their combinations have a greater effect than individual foods,” says McCormick.

Three diets in particular, she says, contain the right mix of elements: The Mediterranean diet, the DASH diet, and the Alternative Healthy Eating Index. These diets are similar in that they put the emphasis on foods that are also known to be anti-inflammatory, such as colorful fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and healthy fats such as olive oil and nut butters. But just as importantly, these diets also eliminate foods — such as highly processed snacks, red meat, and sugary drinks — that can increase levels of inflammatory markers inside the body, including a substance called C-reactive protein.

Mixing and matching different foods from these diets can help you tailor an anti-inflammatory approach that fits your personal tastes, as can choosing the freshest in-season offerings. Whole grains, legumes, and heart-healthy oils can be year-round staples, but mix and match your fruits and vegetables for more variety. Below are some great options by season.

Winter anti-inflammatory superstars

In the cold winter months, think green. Many green leafy vegetables star during this season, including kale, collard greens, and swiss chard. Root vegetables like beets are another great and hardy winter option. Reach for sweet potatoes and turnips. Other options to try are kiwi fruit, brussels sprouts, lemons, oranges, and pineapple.

Spring anti-inflammatory superstars

When the spring months arrive, look for asparagus, apricots, avocados, rhubarb, carrots, mushrooms, and celery, as well as fresh herbs.

Summer anti-inflammatory superstars

Summer is prime time for many types of produce, and you’ll have lots of choices. Berries are a great anti-inflammatory option. Try different varieties of blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries. Go local with marionberries, huckleberries, gooseberries, and cloud berries, which grow in different parts of the US. Also reach for cherries, eggplant, zucchini, watermelon, green beans, honeydew melon, okra, peaches, and plums.

Fall anti-inflammatory superstars

Nothing says fall like a crisp, crunchy apple. But there are a host of other anti-inflammatory foods to try as well, such as cabbage, cauliflower, garlic, winter squash, parsnips, peas, ginger, and all types of lettuce.

Whenever possible, when you choose an anti-inflammatory food try to substitute it for a less healthy option. For example, trade a muffin for a fresh-berry fruit salad, or a plate of French fries for a baked sweet potato. Making small trades in your diet can add up to big health benefits over time.

If you frequently find yourself stepping on a building block, tripping over a doll, or stumbling over a race car, then you know the challenges of getting younger children to put away their toys. Below are a few strategies to encourage children to clean up after themselves and keep the house tidy.

Make specific and focused requests

Asking your child to put many different things away all at the same time can leave room for children unintentionally to forget at least one of your requests — or intentionally skip a few. Make one specific request at a time, such as "Please put your blocks back in the bin on the shelf." After your child has finished one task, then you can request that your child puts a different toy away.

Make requests in the form of a command, not framed as a question like "Will you please clean up your blocks?" Asking a question leaves room for the child to reply, "No." Also, unless you want this to be a group activity, frame the request for just your child: "Please put your blocks back in the bin on the shelf" instead of "Let’s clean up the blocks."

Give your child time to comply, and repeat yourself only once

Children, especially young children, take more time than adults to process information. Count to five in your head after you make an initial request, to give a child time to process what you said and to comply.

If you don’t see the required action after five seconds, repeat your request in a neutral tone followed by a potential logical consequence. For example, "If you do not put your blocks away in the bin on the shelf, then you will not get to play with the blocks for the rest of the day. You can play with them tomorrow."

Count to five in your head again. If your child still does not do what you asked, say the following in a neutral tone: "Okay, you did not put the blocks away in the bin on the shelf, so you do not get to play with them for the rest of the day. You can play with them tomorrow." You can then put the blocks away and out of reach from the child so that the toys are not in use for the remainder of the day.

Stay calm and choose logical consequences

Two key elements of this approach are to remain as calm as possible and create a logical consequence.

• Staying calm helps. Understandably, you may be very frustrated. However, it’s best to give as little attention to noncompliance as possible. Attention, even in the form of a negative tone, can make the behavior happen more often.
• Logical consequences matter. Creating consequences that are for extensive periods of time and do not make sense to the child may spark more frustration and refusals. For example, it would not be logical for the child to lose TV time for a week if the child did not put their blocks away. Instead, limiting access to the toy is a logical consequence.

Praise behaviors you want to see

Shine attention on behaviors you’d like to see more often. Any time your child does put toys away, praise them specifically. "Good job" can confuse: the child will not know exactly what was good — sitting quietly, putting toys away, or something else. Instead, say, "Great job putting the blocks in the bin on the shelf!"

Praise with enthusiasm, and use touch, such as a pat on the back, to strengthen a behavior. If you have a child who has sensory processing difficulties, especially with tactile stimuli like a pat on the back, you can reinforce the behavior with a nonverbal gesture, such as a thumbs up.

Your days of repeating commands until you’re blue in the face and cleaning up after your children do not have to continue. The steps above can give you a breather and help your children learn to pick up after themselves.

Prostatitis gets little press, but it’s a common inflammatory condition that accounts for more than two million visits to doctors’ offices in the United States every year. Some cases are caused by bacteria that can be readily detected and treated with antibiotics. But more than 90% of the time, prostatitis symptoms (which can include painful urination and ejaculation, pelvic pain, and sexual dysfunction) have no obvious cause. This is called chronic nonbacterial prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome, or CP/CPPS. The treatments are varied. Doctors sometimes start with antibiotics if the condition was preceded by a urinary tract infection. They may also recommend anti-inflammatory painkillers, stress-reduction techniques, pelvic floor exercises, and sometimes drugs such as alpha blockers, which relax tight muscles in the prostate and bladder.

Another treatment that can work for some men is acupuncture. A 2018 review article of three published studies found that acupuncture has the potential to reduce CP/CPPS symptoms without the side effects associated with drug treatments.

Now, results from a newly published clinical trial show symptom reductions from acupuncture are long-lasting. Published in the prestigious journal Annals of Internal Medicine, the findings provide encouraging news for CP/CPPS sufferers.

Acupuncture involves inserting single-use needles into “acupoints” at various locations in the body, and then manipulating them manually or with heat or electrical stimulation. During the study, researchers at ten institutions in China assigned 440 men with prostatitis to receive 20 sessions (across eight weeks) of either real acupuncture, or a control sham procedure wherein the needles are inserted away from traditional acupoints.

The researchers were medical doctors, but the treatments were administered by certified acupuncturists with five years of undergraduate education and at least two years of clinical experience. Treatment benefits were assessed using the National Institutes of Health Chronic Prostatitis Symptom Index (NIH-CPSI), which assigns scores for pain, urinary function, and quality of life. The men were tracked for 24 weeks after the eight weeks of treatment sessions.

By week eight, just over 60% of men in the acupuncture group were reporting significant symptom improvements (with the exception of sexual dysfunction), compared to 37% of the sham-treated men. Importantly, these differences were little changed by week 32, indicating that the benefits of acupuncture were holding steady months after the treatments were initiated.

Precisely how acupuncture relieves prostatitis symptoms is unclear. The authors of the study point to several possibilities, including that stimulation at acupoints promotes the release of naturally occurring opioid-like chemicals (enkephalins, endorphins, and dynorphins) with pain-killing properties. Acupuncture may also have anti-inflammatory effects, and the experience of being treated can also have psychological benefits that result in symptom improvements, the authors speculated.

“The research on prostatitis CPPS has been very sparse and scarce, and often with disappointing results, so this article from practitioners who are also experts in acupuncture is very welcome,” said Dr. Marc Garnick, the Gorman Brothers Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, editor of the Harvard Health Publishing Annual Report on Prostate Diseases, and editor in chief of HarvardProstateKnowledge.org. “The possible causes of prostatitis are many and not fully understood. Furthermore, we do not fully understand how and why interventions that may occasionally aid in relieving troublesome symptoms work. If one is to avail themselves of acupuncture, my advice is to make certain that the acupuncturist that you select is well trained and qualified to perform this potentially important intervention.”