Chronic inflammation is nothing to mess around with. This prolonged immune response can damage healthy cells and is linkedOpens in a new tab to a higher risk of most modern diseases. Lower inflammation has long been linked with longevityOpens in a new tab. This isn't theoretical anymore. In a recent scientific statementOpens in a new tab, the American College of Cardiology (ACC) declared the inflammation-disease link "compelling and clinically actionable." The ACC now recommends that doctors screen for inflammation right alongside cholesterol.
Living an anti-inflammatory life isn’t just a matter of skipping the office donuts or eating more vegetables. Those things may help, but there are many more diet and lifestyle tools in your toolkit to leverage.
If you remember one thing from today, remember this: Reducing chronic inflammation is a holistic endeavor. Along these lines, I’ll cover seven tips science suggests can help folks manage chronic inflammation:
- Mind your sugar intake
- Limit ultra-processed foods
- Avoid trigger foods
- Eat anti-inflammatory foods
- Get enough sleep
- Exercise
- Manage stress
Before we delve into these tactics, let’s explore two types of inflammation: chronic and acute. While the focus of this article is reducing chronic inflammation, it’s helpful to understand the difference between the two and learn how certain types of inflammation can be helpful.
Acute Inflammation 101
Acute inflammationOpens in a new tab is the type of inflammation that can be helpful. It’s an immune response to destroy a pathogen or heal a wound. It also kicks in to help your body unlock the benefits of exercise — more on that later.
Here’s how acute inflammation works. When your immune system detects a problem, it releases inflammatory cytokines — scouts that signal the rest of your immune army to come help. The heavy artillery comes in response to this signal: platelets, white blood cells, and other immune particles that prevent infection and stimulate wound healing.
For an example of this in action, we can take a look at what happens when you get a cut or scrape. The area turns red and may swell (from blood vessels dilating, which allows more immune cells to access the wound), platelets clot to create a scab and protect the area, and the body slowly rebuilds the damaged tissue. Voilà, the wound is healed — thanks, acute inflammation. Similarly, when you encounter a virus, the immune system identifies this invader and mobilizes white blood cells to destroy it.
It’s worth noting here that any immune response, including acute responses, can damage healthy tissues. This damage is usually a reasonable price for neutralizing a threat that would otherwise create much greater harm, but sometimes the consequences can linger. For instance, the same immune response that helps folks clear a severe respiratory virus like the flu can contributeOpens in a new tab to scarring of the lungs and can cause continued breathing issues. Typically, though, the damage from fighting off a virus is temporary and will heal too.
Chronic Inflammation 101
Both acute and chronic inflammation involve the same immune response. But with chronic inflammation, the immune system remains constantly activated even when there are no germs to kill or wounds to heal — rather, it’s chronic immune confusion as the soldiers chase an imaginary threat.
Remember how immune responses damage healthy tissues? This is what makes chronic inflammation undesirable; the long-term damage from this unnecessary and lengthened immune response has consequences.
Chronic inflammation is linked to higher risks ofOpens in a new tab Alzheimer’s, cancer, liver disease, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and other modern diseases.
In heart disease, for example, chronic inflammation contributes toOpens in a new tab plaque formation in the arteries. When plaques break off, they can cause heart attacks and strokes.
Autoimmune diseases like irritable bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, celiac disease, and others are also marked by needless immune system activity that damages healthy tissues. Folks with these conditions often need lifelong treatment with immunosuppressive drugs to get the immune system army to stop needlessly damaging healthy cells.
What causes chronic inflammation? Aging is a big one, hence the term “inflammagingOpens in a new tab.” Smoking, binge drinking, and environmental toxins like air pollution also increase inflammation — so do your best to avoid them. Then there’s the role of diet, sleep, exercise, and stress in chronic inflammation. These factors can increase inflammation when handled poorly but can also be powerful anti-inflammation tools when leveraged the right way. Let’s get into that now.
7 Tips to Reduce Chronic Inflammation
As you’ll recall, inflammation reduction is holistic. Consider these factors in your quest to keep chronic inflammation low.
#1: Mind your sugar intake
High sugar consumption can increase chronic inflammation in a number of ways, so it makes sense to watch your sugar intake.
Here are six ways sugar may drive inflammationOpens in a new tab:
- High-sugar diets can lead to high blood sugar, an inflammatoryOpens in a new tab state.
- Sugar can feed inflammatory gut bacteriaOpens in a new tab (the gut houses about 70% of your immune cellsOpens in a new tab and is a hub for inflammation).
- Sugar can also feed pathogenic oral bacteria like S. mutansOpens in a new tab that can enter the bloodstream and drive chronic inflammation.
- High sugar intakes (of fructose, in particular) increase fat productionOpens in a new tab in the liver, which can boost inflammation.
- High-sugar diets decrease the production of anti-inflammatory ketonesOpens in a new tab.
- High-sugar diets drive weight gain and obesityOpens in a new tab. Excess body fat then drives inflammation, and inflammation promotes further fat storage. This cycle may explain why higher sugar intakes are linked to higher chronic disease risk in studyOpens in a new tab after studyOpens in a new tab.
All in all, cutting back on sugary drinks, treats, and snacks can be a key tool in your inflammation reduction toolbox.
#2: Limit ultra-processed foods
Ultra-processed foods — industrial formulations made with ingredients like hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, emulsifiers, and flavor additives — now make up the majority of calories in the typical American diet. And they're consistently linked to worse health outcomesOpens in a new tab, including inflammationOpens in a new tab.
The strongest evidence: Ultra-processed foods drive overeating and weight gain.
For example, in a 2019 randomized controlled trialOpens in a new tab, researchers admitted 20 adults to a metabolic ward for a month. Participants ate either an ultra-processed or minimally processed diet for two weeks, then switched. Both diets were matched for calories, sugar, fat, fiber, and macronutrients. The results were striking: Calorie intake was greater during the ultra-processed diet. Those on the ultra-processed diet gained weight, while those on the unpressed diet lost weight.
Excess weight, especially obesity, leads to systemic inflammationOpens in a new tab through mechanisms like adipokine secretion and immune cell activation in adipose tissue. And a recent review of studiesOpens in a new tab found a strong association between ultra-processed foods and elevated markers of inflammation.
#3: Avoid trigger foods
Symptoms like gas, bloating, diarrhea, headaches, or fatigue after eating certain foods may be signs that these foods are increasing inflammation. Identifying these food sensitivities can help you avoid trigger foods and may reduce damaging immune activity.
Remember that most immune cells are housed in the gut. If you have a food sensitivity, here’s an example of how trigger foods can cause inflammation, starting in the gut.
- You eat a trigger food like gluten.
- Your immune system considers gluten a foreign invaderOpens in a new tab and launches an inflammatory response.
- The inflammation damages the gut and causes symptoms.
- A damaged gut is more likely to be sensitive to more foods, which can cycle back into more inflammation.
Identifying and removing trigger foods can help break this cycle. Common problem foods include gluten, dairy, soy, eggs, nuts, seeds, legumes, and shellfish, but any food can be a trigger food, depending on the individual. You can use a journal or app to correlate specific foods with symptoms, and identify what to limit or avoid.
#4: Eat anti-inflammatory foods
A wide range of plants, herbs, and spices contain anti-inflammatory compounds called polyphenols. Science also suggests marine omega-3s are useful for curbing chronic inflammation.
Let’s explore polyphenols first. One way they may reduce inflammation is by neutralizingOpens in a new tab damaging molecules called reactive oxygen species (ROS) in your body. You produce ROS as a byproduct of living and breathing, but too many ROS can be harmful. As we age, we produceOpens in a new tab more and more ROS, driving inflammation and disease risk. Polyphenols may help offset the ROS-induced damage.
It’s a cliché to say “eat the rainbow,” but that strategy really can work. Examples of high-polyphenol plants include olives (and olive oil), broccoli, kale, spinach, carrots, asparagus, purple potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, beets, blueberries, cacao, turmeric, garlic, ginger, cinnamon, rosemary, oregano, and many othersOpens in a new tab.
Omega-3s EPA and DHA, common in seafood, may reduce inflammation through multiple mechanisms. For example, science suggests EPA and DHA inhibitOpens in a new tab inflammatory cytokines that contribute to chronic inflammation. To get your omega-3s, you can consume several servings of fatty fish (salmon, sardines, mackerel, etc.) weekly and/or consider taking a high-quality fish or algalOpens in a new tab oil supplement.
#5: Get enough sleep
The research indicates that getting enough sleep can support lower inflammation. Remember cytokines, the scouts that signal your immune system to join the battle? Sleep deprivation skyrockets production of these inflammatory particles.
In a 2009 studyOpens in a new tab, researchers restricted young healthy men to five nights of short sleep (four hours), then gave them two nights of recovery sleep (eight hours). During the sleep deprivation phase, the men showed elevated levels of the inflammatory cytokines CRP, IL-6, and IL-17. Notably, cytokine levels stayed elevated even after the two nights of recovery sleep. In other words, the inflammatory consequences of sleep deprivation may persist for days after you get back on track.
Inflammation may explain why sleeping fewer than seven hoursOpens in a new tab a night is linked to higher risks of many diseases, decreased pain tolerance, and worse cognitive function.
#6: Exercise
Exercise is a form of beneficial stress that activates anti-inflammatory mechanisms in the body. This might be why regular exercise (especially aerobic exercise) is linkedOpens in a new tab to lower risks of many diseases.
To understand why exercise can be anti-inflammatory, we need to talk about hormesis. Hormesis is a beneficial response to a reasonable dose of a stressor that would otherwise be harmful in a high dose.
Specifically, exercise stresses your immune systemOpens in a new tab by increasing ROS production. Too much ROS is a bad thing, like I noted above — and as many of us have found out the hard way, overdoing exercise is hard for the body to recover from, in part due to the excessive ROS. But, a reasonable dose of exercise stimulates a reasonable ROS response that, in turn, can drive an anti-inflammatory response system. AKA, hormesis. In particular, the body makes more glutathione peroxidase and glutathione — molecules that act as a cleanup crew to curb chronic inflammation. The ACC recommends at least 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise.
#7: Manage stress
Researchers believeOpens in a new tab that psychological stress activates inflammation, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Back in paleolithic times, our ancestors were always on the alert for danger — most of it real danger. Being stressed about real danger helped prime the immune system to deal with wounds, maladies, and other such problems.
Yet most “dangers” of modern society don’t benefit from an immune response. Your immune system doesn’t protect you from a bottomless email inbox or a pickup truck riding your tail in rush hour traffic. These are stressful situations, but they aren’t the same kind of stress like breaking your leg.
In today’s world, it pays to be intentional about stress reduction. Yoga, meditationOpens in a new tab, funny shows, books, journaling, song, dance, workload management, vacations, and time with friends and family can all relieve stress.
A Holistic Endeavor
I’ll repeat today’s theme: Reducing chronic inflammation is a holistic endeavor.
The research indicates that avoiding sugar, ultra-processed foods, and trigger foods, plus increasing veggie consumption, can all help. As can dialing in sleep, exercise, and stress management routines.
We didn’t discuss anti-inflammatory supplements and medications today, but these compounds can also be valuable tools for inflammation reduction. Consider pairing with a trusted health practitioner for guidance.
A clinician can also monitor your bloodwork, tracking markers of inflammation like hsCRP and IL-6 to see if they're going in the right direction. For hsCRP specifically, the ACC uses these thresholdsOpens in a new tab:
- Below 1 mg/L signals lower cardiovascular risk
- 1–3 mg/L is moderate
- Above 3 mg/L indicates higher risk.
You don’t need to be perfect in all these areas. Focus on one or two to start with. Over time, small changes can lead to big results.
Originally published November 2024; updated January 2026