Anti-Inflammatory Vegetables Other Than Greens

Have any vegetables besides those in the broccoli-family been shown to lower human inflammation? Potatoes are America’s most popular veggie. Eating a steamed white or yellow potato every day for 6 weeks didn’t affect CRP or IL-6 levels, but eating purple-fleshed potatoes did bring both inflammatory markers down compared to white. Purple potatoes contain the same type of anthocyanin pigments found in berries, but so do purple carrots and neither they nor regular carrots seem to make any inflammatory difference.

Tomatoes are America’s second favorite vegetable and have been shown to have anti-inflammatory effects in both petri dishes and people. Randomize overweight individuals to a little less than a can of tomato juice a day, and see a drop in inflammation within three weeks.

Give people about a quarter cup a day of tomato paste, and get improvements in artery function within fifteen days, an effect attributed to both its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. Tomatoes can also have anti-inflammatory effects after a single meal. Men and women were randomized to a pro-inflammatory meal (containing saturated fat in the form of coconut milk) with or without about a third of a cup of tomato paste. The tomato paste significantly blunted the rise of IL-6 that occurred within hours of consumption.

The effects have been attributed to lycopene, the red pigment in tomatoes, watermelon, and other such hued fruits and vegetables, but we now know that tomatoes contain a large number of diverse anti-inflammatory compounds. That may be why giving people “Lyc-O-Mato” lycopene supplements alone, appears to have no effect.

Five to ten dried shitake mushrooms a day for a month led to significant decline in certain inflammatory markers but there was no control group to verify the effect. Note that two study subjects had to drop out due to flagellate dermatitis, a bizarre whip-like rash that affects about 1 in 50 people who eat raw or undercooked shitake mushrooms. Interestingly, the rash can strike as many as 10 days after you eat the mushrooms, which is why people may not make the connection. Bottom line? Cook your shitakes.