Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're discussing spices. Are you ever intimidated by spices?

Unsure what spice to add to which meal? If so, you might be missing out on some incredible health benefits.

Spices are packed full of polyphenols, which means they offer our body something really unique.

Oh, and they taste great too. So how can we introduce more spices into our meals?

Kanchen Koya is here to share the science of spices and show us how easy it is to make them a staple of our cooking.

So a study that I would love to mention is the one out of Penn State that looked at the

addition of a spice blend. It was many spices in the blend. And they added this to sort of a

standard American diet typical hamburger meal.

So, you know, something that isn't great for you.

And they gave people the meal either with or without the spice blend.

And they basically found reductions in inflammatory markers right after the meal

when the meal had the spice blend.

And I think that's really empowering and exciting because again, it was culinary

amounts of spices. I'm sure the burger tasted better with the blend versus without the blend.

And there was this real reduction in biomarkers of inflammation right after the meal. So, you know,

that got people really excited because up until then, we only really had some in vitro and like animal studies on the inflammatory effects of spices, and now we had an actual

human trial. And since then, there have been some more studies looking at the impacts of

specific spices on inflammatory conditions like arthritis. So there was a study that got quite a bit

of buzz looking at turmeric supplementation versus

traditional sort of NSAIDs or non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs that many people use for

arthritis but have some side effects, especially on gut health. And they found that turmeric supplements

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