Professor shares 8 foods to lower inflammation and help you age slower | Professor Robert Thomas

Dr Rupy Aujla (0:00)

I'm Dr. Rupy, and on this show, I help you feel more in control of your health through food and lifestyle medicine. One of the most important ways we can impact our health, feel stronger and more energetic every day, and even slow aging is by lowering inflammation. And the good news is that what you choose to put on your plate is a powerful lever to reduce it, alongside improving sleep, moving more and stressing less. So today, I'm joined by Professor Robert Thomas, NHS Consultant Oncologist at Addenbrooke's and Bedford Hospitals, and Head of Integrative Oncology at the Royal London Hospital for Integrative Medicine, where he advises lifestyle, complementary and nutritional strategies to improve patient outcomes. We're going to discuss the eight key foods he believes we should be eating every day to optimize inflammation, to help us live longer, healthier lives and protect us from diseases of ageing, including cancer and heart disease.

Professor Rob Thomas, if I reduce inflammation through food, can it help me age slower and live longer?

Professor Robert Thomas (1:17)

Well, the simple answer is yes. There's lots of data to show that people who are living with chronic inflammation have a shorter biological age.

There's various markers of longevity or ageing, and there's a direct correlation between higher inflammation and more likely to get ageing related diseases, such as arthritis, dementia, heart disease, diabetes, race, cholesterol. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. But they're more likely to get other biomarkers of longevity, so reduced grip strength, lower testosterone or hormone imbalance, and higher markers of inflammation. So we can go on about how you measure inflammation. But yes, that's a long way of saying inflammation increases ageing.

Dr Rupy Aujla (2:10)

Okay. So some of those markers of longevity I want to double click on, one of them being grip strength. We've got this cool looking gadget here, but mobility, arthritis, independence, all these things. Are these the sort of macro features of longevity that you're interested in? Because there's a lot of attention being given to other sort of novel biomarkers, like, you know, aging clocks and so forth.

Professor Robert Thomas (2:37)

Yeah. I mean, we're going to come on to the study, which we recently published. And, you know, what we want to look at is what are the practical measures of longevity. So, you know, we can look in the mirror. And if we see, you know, gray hair and lots of wrinkles, things like that. But it's very hard to quantify that. Grip strength is actually one of the most reliable biomarkers of aging. We know that if you have poor grip strength related to your age, you're more likely to die earlier and get a chronic degenerative disease, such as arthritis and all the ones I've just mentioned. And it's great because it's an easy tool. I mean, a grip strength monitor costs, you know, less than 50 pound. Patients actually quite enjoy doing it. And it takes a few seconds. And there's hundreds of trials which have validated the results against other diseases. So it's a great one for a trial.

We can do the usual markers of, you know, aging, such as C-reactive protein, lymphocyte to neutrophil ratios, which is just a blood test as well. You can measure things like hemoglobin A1C, which is a marker of diabetes or things like cholesterol as well.

But I like grip strength because it reflects your overall exercise ability. I like simple tests like a neutrophil to lymphocyte count, which is a simple marker of inflammation and a measure in men of testosterone. Now men's testosterone normally declines. It's not like women where it just sort of falls off a cliff in the menopause, so there's no such thing really as a manopause.

But it does decline with age. When you have lower testosterone than it should be for your age, you're more likely to get lower grip strength, worse gut health, and more likely to get a degenerative disease.

Dr Rupy Aujla (4:43)

So it has an impact on gut health as well, testosterone?

Professor Robert Thomas (4:46)

Well, the other way around really. If you have poor gut health, you're more likely to have lower testosterone.

So, yeah, I think there are more complex measures, such as you can measure telomere lengths and all sorts of genetic markers. But they're more expensive and harder to do. And I don't really think they're that relevant when we've got simple tests, which we can introduce into clinic or measure yourself every day.

Dr Rupy Aujla (5:15)

OK, so you convinced me I need to reduce inflammation. It's going to have a knock on effect on all these things, particularly practical markers of aging like grip strength, because I imagine if I've got better grip strength, I'm more mobile, more likely to catch myself and hold myself, you know, do my daily activities. When it comes to inflammation itself, how do you actually explain that to your patients in clinic?