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We hope you are staying cool! This week we’ve been battling inflammation from traveling, on a road trip (which has always been difficult to eat healthy, and never wrote about , but have been experiencing swollen sinuses, gas, flair ups of dermatitis and psoriasis that have been completely under control ) and we wanted to talk about foods / ingredients you can eat to decrease inflammation in your gut and will spread to the rest of your body. We also want to breakdown 2 other products that are a great replacement for chips & crackers, and will make steaming or blanching these veggies taste like traditional Japanese cuisine (Kaleidoscope Kale Chips and Cabi) to keep your diet healthy and establishment pushing inflammation-free diet ahead of the competition, as well as a unique tool to discuss (Chargeflow).

Now, let’s get started 🛠️

Kaleidoscope Kale Chips

Kaleidoscope Kale Chips is an artisan producer of bone broth and vegan kale chips. Kaleidoscope are pioneering a new wave of holistic on-the-go nutrition with boldly flavored, deeply nourishing chips. They are a woman-owned, whole systems company that works directly with organic farmers and ranchers whose work restores the land. They pass on this message of rejuvenation in every chip.

Kaleidoscope Kale Chips history dates back to 2013 when Kaleidoscope Foods founders brought together two of their favorite foods: kale chips & bone broth! A few years later Kaleidoscope was accepted into the nationally recognized Nonprofit Incubator Kitchen, La Cocina, in San Francisco. Today, Kaleidoscope Foods is a grateful and proud La Cocina graduate and is a featured mainstay in the nonprofit's popular Gift Boxes.

Made in San Francisco, CA

Founded in 2013 by Emily Lai, Anisha Jagtap, Mercy and Kevin Manning

Cabi  products are simple fermented Japanese condiments. It starts with a piece of mold (see: Cabi name) and Cabi hopes it spreads like a culture; the desire to share easy and traditional Japanese home cooking - soy sauce, dashi, yuzu, mirin, and more.

Cabi heard it a thousand times before: “we really want to cook Japanese food, but what the hell is Mirin? And what does Dashi look like? How many types of miso are there?”. Well, Cabi is here to tell you all about it if you let them.

Always small batch, some of the best in the country. Cabi Foods is a condiment brand that aims to make Japanese home cooking more accessible to people of all cooking levels. The company's founders, Eri Miyagi and Miki Nomura, believe that food is a universal language that should be shared and taught, and that Japanese flavors can be incorporated into any dish. Cabi's products are designed to be easy to use and versatile, and the founders encourage people to enjoy the flavors without feeling like they need to cook. Cabi's initial product line includes three all-natural seasonings made in Japan: sweet yuzu vinegar, umami dashi soy sauce, and zesty sansho peppercorn miso.

Made in New York City, NY

Founded by Eri Miyagi and Miki Nomura in 2022

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these foods fight inflammation

Experts sometimes describe inflammation as important because it’s what fights off cancer and infection, as well as wards of genetic mutations. On one hand, the immune response keeps you alive, the symptoms aren’t always great: redness, swelling, heat, and pain.

In some of us, roughly 1/3 of Americans, that inflammatory immune response doesn’t go away — even when we don’t have infections or cancer or cuts — and that constant inflammation can cause damage to other parts of your body as it circulates in your white blood stream (lymphatics). We wanted to figure out what’s causing that constant inflammation/immune response — and we’re in the food & bev space, so we looked at it form that perspective. Unregulated, due to whatever is causing it — maybe low vitamin D/E, or low Magnesium, or low enzyme / seasonal nutrient diet, lack of sunlight due to long hours indoors, or living in parts of the country with long winters, etc — can cause cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, psoriasis/dermatitis, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic conditions — anything that shows up as inflammed on your skin or in your organs is a condition of inflammation.

Most of the Consumer Grocery-Agriculture and Pharmaceutical (Grocery & Pharmaceutical) industry feed us foods and a lifestyle that pushes fast dinners and fast snacks to get us back to work — but that leads to chronic inflammation (dried foods, dried snacks, fried foods, overcooked, never fresh, never seasonal or from local farms, made typically from corn or rice or wheat, usually over processed which destroys fiber strands and vitamins in the grinder & heating process (denature of proteins). While consuming certain healthy foods — fresh is the key: fruits, vegetables, fiber and certain fats — have been shown to help tamp it down. Think replace 90% with fresh instead of packaged. We did an experiment from April - Oct and then took this cross country road trip and this is what we found. Here are the foods with demonstrated anti-inflammatory benefits.

Vegetables, Especially Leafy Greens

Dr. Sean Spencer, a gastroenterologist and physician-scientist at Stanford University, found that feeding the gut bacteria (yes for every 1 million human cells, there are 1 billion good bacteria) that we coexist with that helps us break down those veggies & meats (think the bacteria that live in the farm field, now live in our gut, and help us non-farm living humans to digest our food) fresh fruit & vegetables then they’re getting all that fiber & carbohydrates they want to eat (fiber is an important part of what these bacteria find on the farm and in nature), and this fiber, when digested by the bacteria, signals the immune system to keep inflammation down. The antioxidants in vegetables can help reduce inflammation too (vitamins and coenzymes and nutrients that get destroyed in a manufacturing snack facility when a snack is heated to 100F during the mixing and baking processes).

Tami Best, a dietitian in Rochester, New York, has found that eating any seasonal leafy greens — think farmers market, in season, at its peak in spring, summer, fall, and even early winter: spinach, kale, collard greens, broccoli, Swiss chard and arugula, and you can get funky and diversify with random stuff at the farmers market - Tatsoi, Cabbages, the leaves of Radishes and Beets in your salad, I mean you can literally chop it so fine you won’t even taste it, but the bacteria will appreciate — which are high in antioxidants.

And veggies high in apigenin — a plant based compound with anti-inflammatory properties — are also helpful. Don’t worry about memorizing, the point is that there are health benefits that you don’t get in a baked bar or a loaf of bread, or a snack. Just because it says there is kale in it or it’s plant based doesn’t mean that the ingredient wasn’t completely destroyed in the manufacturing process. Your best bet is to throw these leafy greens in boiling water for 10 seconds and then pull out and mix with your favorite sauce, and smaller batch sauces without tons of processed corn syrup and other inflammatory compounds are better — think making a lemon squeezed sauce by mixing the lemon juice with olive oil and a little of your favorite jam w/ salt. You can do this all day, add garlic or ginger and peanut butter with olive oil, and mix. It’s that easy, and you’ll love it.

Barbara Olendzki, at UMass Chan Medical School who developed an anti-inflammatory diet, said that Americans don’t consume enough fresh vegetables (cooked or raw), and recommended we all find ways to include them in more of our meals. We recommend 80%, and then toss that mushroom or salmon or chicken or steak on top. Eliminate as much dried product as possible like bread and pasta, and replace with some local rice or different grains, depending on your gluten sensitivity.

She says blanching or quick 10 second boiling of onions, leafy greens and tomatoes is a great way to add veggies to your eggs in the morning, or blanching / quick boiling some carrots or root veggies, are a great way to add veggies to your tomato sauce for Italian sausage & peppers night. Load it up, don’t use sparingly, and you’ll realize it absorbs all the flavor of the sauce anyway! Plus you get that extra Vitamin D you might be lacking from sitting in the office all day instead of being out in the sun.

Fruits, and Berries

Fruits are another fiber- and antioxidant-rich anti-inflammatory food group, Ms. Best said. We’ve been enjoying tart cherries and all kinds of berries, especially blueberries, but apples are great, bananas are calming, peaches and plums and plouts are all over the farmers markets this year, even yellow tomatoes and cucumbers or squash blossom fruit have been making their way into our kitchen.

Any kind of fruit — even citrus is great because it gives you Vitamin C antioxidants that are good for the skin.

Legumes

Dr. Nate Wood, a physician at Yale School of Medicine, said that beans, lentils, edamame are great for Anti-Inflammation because they are very high in fiber — we like getting them in string bean form, so we can quickly blanch or dry them, but whatever you can get.

They’re rich in vitamins and minerals like folate and magnesium, which some suggest are associated with Vitamin D and lowering inflammation.

Turmeric and Other Spices

Spices can be another inflammation fighter, but try to stay away from spicy food spices — we love our tacos, but we’ll limit them to 1x a week or 1x every 2 weeks. Most people don’t consume spices or veggies used for spicing at all, and definitely not enough.

Curcumin, a macromolecule in turmeric, has been connected to reduced inflammation in animals that eat it. Also veggies like ginger, cardamom and garlic can also help with inflammation so go to the farmers market and pick up some local garlic, ginger, or turmeric if you can find it fresh - just a quick 5 seconds fry in your olive oil or in your raw smoothie, and you’re great for the day.

Fermented Foods

Ancestors had to preserve food for thousands of years before the invent of ice or refrigerators. So we have evolved to survive on these foods. Yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut and kombucha are some variations of different cultures trying to preserve their food, but people preserve meat and fish too, think charcuterie, dried fish, lox and smoked salmon — these fermented and cured products reduce inflammation as well.

There was a study done, published in 2021, two groups: one that was instructed to eat a diet rich in fermented foods, while the other had a diet high in fiber. By the end of the study, the group that ate more fermented foods saw consistent decreased levels of inflammation, while the other group saw a mix of results depending on the state of their gut microbiome at the beginning of the study. We take a shot of Kombucha or eat a spoon of fermented kimchi or Yogurt with our breakfast to kick off the day — depending if we want sweet or savory. Remember that over processed fermented foods like heated kombucha or over processed yogurt (heating through mechanical machinery) will destroy the protein and nutrients in the milk / yogurt / kombucha process. So you have to find these products wisely — we recommend the farmers market or local tiny grocer that might carry Farm2Me makers in small batch that are not over processed and don’t add over processed ingredients (like overprocessed sugars). You just need a spoon a day, so find a good source, it lasts a while!

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free recipe — stir fry

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