Last reviewed: July 2026 · SecondFyre Alkemy Kitchen
Inflammation is your immune system doing its job. Acute inflammation — the swelling after you sprain an ankle, the redness around a cut — is a necessary and effective healing response. Chronic low-grade inflammation is something else entirely: a persistent, low-level activation of your immune system that produces no visible symptoms but quietly damages tissues over years.
Chronic inflammation is a driver of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, certain cancers, and — relevant here — menopause symptoms. Joint pain, brain fog, mood dysregulation, and skin changes in perimenopause all have inflammatory components. And the menopause transition itself is associated with an increase in systemic inflammatory markers.
What you eat is one of the primary modulators of chronic inflammation. Not the only one — sleep, stress, physical activity, smoking, and alcohol all have powerful effects — but the most consistent lever you pull three times a day.
What Drives Inflammation
Ultra-processed foods are the clearest dietary driver of inflammation. Emulsifiers, refined seed oils high in omega-6 fatty acids, refined sugars, and additives all have demonstrated pro-inflammatory effects in research. This is not about “clean eating” as an ideology — it is about specific food categories with documented mechanistic effects on inflammatory pathways.
Refined sugar and refined carbohydrates spike blood glucose, which triggers inflammatory cytokine release. This is dose-dependent and cumulative. Frequent blood sugar spikes over years produce a measurable increase in inflammatory markers.
Excess omega-6 fatty acids from refined vegetable oils (sunflower, corn, soybean oil) compete with omega-3s for anti-inflammatory enzymatic pathways. The omega-6 to omega-3 ratio in Western diets is approximately 15:1 to 20:1. The optimal ratio for low inflammation is thought to be closer to 4:1. The imbalance matters.
The Anti-Inflammatory Plate
The Mediterranean diet has the most consistent evidence of any dietary pattern for reducing inflammatory markers. It is not a rigid set of rules — it is a pattern: abundant vegetables and fruit, olive oil as the primary fat, legumes and whole grains as staples, fish regularly, dairy and meat in moderation, wine occasionally (though this is the most contested element given alcohol’s own inflammatory effects).
The anti-inflammatory elements of this pattern are:
Olive oil — specifically extra virgin. The polyphenols in extra virgin olive oil (particularly oleocanthal) have ibuprofen-like anti-inflammatory effects. Not metaphorically — oleocanthal inhibits the same COX enzymes as ibuprofen. Use it liberally. Don’t cook it at very high heat (it degrades; use avocado oil for high-heat cooking).
Fatty fish twice a week minimum. Salmon, sardines, mackerel, anchovies. EPA and DHA directly reduce inflammatory cytokine production.
Colourful vegetables — variety and abundance. Different plant pigments represent different polyphenol classes with different anti-inflammatory mechanisms. Eating a range of colours is not nutrition aesthetics — it’s accessing different compounds. Dark leafy greens, red and orange vegetables, purple-red berries, yellow and white onions — these are not interchangeable.
Herbs and spices. Turmeric with black pepper, ginger, rosemary, oregano — culinary herbs are extraordinarily dense in antioxidant and anti-inflammatory polyphenols. Used daily, they meaningfully increase dietary antioxidant capacity.
Legumes daily. Legumes provide fibre (which feeds anti-inflammatory gut bacteria), protein, and polyphenols. Regular legume consumers consistently show lower inflammatory markers in population studies.
The Alcohol Question
Red wine is always cited as an anti-inflammatory Mediterranean food — resveratrol in grapes is the polyphenol usually credited. The problem is that the quantity of resveratrol in a glass of wine is far too low to produce the effects seen in resveratrol research. And alcohol itself is pro-inflammatory. The net effect of moderate regular alcohol consumption on inflammation is now thought to be negative, not positive. In midlife women particularly, the costs of alcohol to sleep, hormone metabolism, and gut health outweigh the polyphenol benefit.
Last reviewed: July 2026 · SecondFyre Editorial
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