In this episode I am excited to share an interview with Linda Tyler, the author of the Plant-Based Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook. As you may know, chronic inflammation and aging are linked and is at the core of many health issues. Linda's book includes a section on how to lower chronic inflammation through diet, discusses in detail what exactly inflammation is, what conditions are aggravated by inflammation, and what foods are beneficial in reducing inflammation. The cookbook has 80 recipes with mouth-watering photos of each recipe — a quality I always look for in a cookbook. In this episode, Linda shared how inflammation affects us as we get older, also known as inflame-aging, her recommendations for foods to eat during menopause, and much more.
Linda Tyler is a plant-based cooking instructor, cookbook author, and writer. She is the author of the Plant-Based Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook, which highlights the foods that are anti-inflammatory superstars in her 80 delicious plant-based recipes. Linda teaches cooking classes for the Portland Community College in Oregon and offers one-on-one plant-based lifestyle coaching.
She has published recipes in numerous vegan magazines and websites and is a frequent guest on vegan podcasts.
AP: Welcome to the podcast, Linda.
LT: Thank you. It's so good to be here, Anna.
AP: Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you here, too.
Behind the Plant-Based Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook
AP: Can you share a little bit about how you got into vegan cooking and what led you to write the Plant-Based Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook?
LT: Yeah, sure. So I became a vegetarian in college, so that was a while ago. And my main motivation was animal welfare.
And so several decades went by that I never ate meat. And then when I was around 50, I started reading articles on egg farms and dairy farms. And I didn't, you know, I hadn't really thought about how cruel those farms were.
And yeah, they didn't -- well anyway, the animals' lives are just miserable. And so I gave up eggs and dairy.
And so I was officially vegan then. And then about five years after that, I went to a conference that I thought was about animal welfare. But there were lots and lots of speakers about plant-based diets and healthy plant-based diets and how much they are protective against chronic diseases and how they really promote health.
So I was just like amazed that I could eat for the animals and the planet, but also for myself and be really healthy. So I really got into that. And I've always been a cook.
It was not my main profession, but I've always loved to cook. And so I just kept cooking and kept transitioning my cooking based on my eating style. And I also, because I'm a researcher at heart, I became a volunteer for Dr. Gregor's site, https://nutritionfacts.org, and kept reading more detail around some of the health topics. And inflammation kept popping up all over. He first wrote, his first big bestseller was How Not to Die, about the 15 leading causes of death in the US. And many of those diseases have a relationship to inflammation.
And then he wrote How Not to Diet. And there was inflammation again front and centre related to obesity and excess weight. And then he started publishing things.
I got sneak peeks into some of his content about How Not to Age. And of course, that's when it got personal. So then again, there was inflammation.
And as I dug in, there's even something called inflammaging, which is the tight connection between aging and inflammation. So I just thought, hey, the way I might be able to offer value to people is that I have this, you know, research bent. So I could really explain what something is, what its connections are, and then highlight the foods that help calm inflammation, especially even though a plant-based diet in general is very good for inflammation.
And then I could, you know, use the recipes that use those anti-inflammatory superstar foods. So it all kind of came together as a topic that I thought would work for a cookbook.
Understanding Inflammation
AP: So what exactly is inflammation?
LT: Yeah, that's a good question. And one that took me a while to figure out because, you know, researchers talk about it and just sort of gloss over, well, what exactly is it as if it's a thing on its own that just kind of spreads. But it's actually, inflammation is the result of your immune system reacting to something.
So inflammation is not something that is like an infection or something. It is just your immune system doing its job, sometimes overdoing its job. So the immune system, of course, reacts to foreign bodies and invaders.
Sometimes it gets misguided and starts to attack tissue, which we call autoimmune. Sometimes it reacts to things that really aren't dangerous, which we call allergies. Sometimes it has to heal things like sunburn.
That's actually inflammation. That redness and soreness is actually inflammation, trying to heal up the cells that were damaged. And so what happens with chronic inflammation is there's something that the immune system just keeps responding to 24-7 and it can't get turned off because it detects an irregularity and it just doesn't turn off because it doesn't resolve it.
So an interesting one is coronary plaque. So if your cholesterol is building up and you have plaque on your coronary arteries, the immune system tries to get rid of the plaque because we didn't evolve with a lot of plaque over the millions of years. So it's like, what's this? I got to get rid of this. And so it just keeps trying to eat up the plaque and it doesn't succeed. So it swells up the blood vessels nearby.
It brings more blood, more fluid, more pro-inflammatory proteins to the scene. So our arteries are not just have the plaque, but then they're also swollen and red because of the inflammation that comes with the immune system trying to do its job. And so the same thing happens with some compounds from our diets brought about by saturated fats or endotoxins from animal products.
They get into the bloodstream and the immune system wants to attack them. And it does, but then there's more that come in at the next meal. So we get more inflammation because the immune system is trying to do its job.
Same thing, unfortunately, with excess weight, especially the weight around our abdomen and it gets into our, not into, but on top of some of our organs, vital organs, that kind of fat, that visceral fat, that actually releases pro-inflammatory proteins that again gets the immune system all revved up. So the immune system is basically fighting our own fat cells. Which is kind of depressing.
So it's just, unfortunately, you know, our lifestyle and the food we eat and processed foods, they just encourage a lot of immune system action. And when you have immune system action, you have inflammation.
Sources of Inflammation
AP: What are some of the major sources of inflammation?
LT: Yes. So the, some of the sources, diet is a big source of inflammation, as I mentioned, saturated fat. It can lead to leaky gut, which lets things into the bloodstream that the immune system reacts to.
Saturated fat tends to lead to dysbiosis in the microbiome, just meaning not a good balance of good and bad bacteria. So the bad bacteria tend to attract the immune system. Endotoxins are very toxic chemicals in, that can attach themselves to bacteria in, especially in animal products.
So if those get into the bloodstream, the immune system is not happy. Refined grains and refined sugars, processed food, processed ingredients, those tend to make the blood sugar spike. And so when the blood sugar spikes, that tends to cause oxidation in our system, and that kind of damage to cells, again, revs up the immune system.
So diet is a big concern. Of course, smoking is bad for inflammation. The immune system reacts to the damage that smoking causes.
Stress, not getting enough sleep, all those things tend to make us weaker and rev up the immune system. And aging, unfortunately, because our hormones like estrogen and progesterone help calm and regulate the immune system. So when they decrease, our immune system gets a little out of whack and can get overactive in the wrong ways.
Chronic Inflammation and Aging
AP: Is that the inflammaging that you mentioned earlier?
LT: Yes, yes. The decrease in estrogen, progesterone, and on the men's side, testosterone, all those decrease our effectiveness at regulating our immune system. So that's the major cause of inflammation.
The other reason we tend to get inflammation, I think the other main reason is that our body fat, if we gain body fat, tends to come around the middle. And that, again, is that more dangerous visceral fat that is more metabolically active than what they call subcutaneous fat, which is the fat right under our skin in different parts of our body. So it's that stomach, abdominal fat that is metabolically active.
And as we age, for whatever reason, again, not very fair, it goes to our middle. And that's the reason our skirts don't fit the way they used to. And unfortunately, that is another reason for inflammation.
AP: Yeah, the abdominal fat is definitely one of the biggest concerns in menopause.
LT: Yes, I know.
How Inflammation affects Menopause
AP: Yeah, so why is inflammation a particular risk during and after menopause?
LT: Yeah, so inflammation research is really active on inflammation, and it has been for about 20 or 30 years. And what they're finding, these scientists, is that inflammation seems to be implicated in all sorts of chronic diseases. Some call it sort of a common factor in chronic diseases, like cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer.
Some say it could be a cause. Some say it's kind of a common soil in which these diseases grow. Certainly, people with autoimmune are more vulnerable to chronic diseases.
So we know they're suffering from inflammation through no fault of their own. And they're more vulnerable to these chronic diseases. So inflammation is a common factor in chronic diseases.
So it's something that we want to decrease as much as possible because it makes us more vulnerable to those. Inflammation also causes tissue damage, and that can make us frailer. And if it causes cell damage, tissue damage as the immune system just keeps working and working and trying to fix things, then parts of the cell that are supposed to maintain good health and good DNA replication, all those component parts sort of get distracted trying to repair the cell, and so they don't cause that nice, clean replication of our cells.
And once that happens, our body just gets a little weaker. And so all those are reasons to want less inflammation, especially because we don't want those chronic diseases. There's a lot of correlation between risk of heart disease and inflammation markers in the blood.
Inflammation is related to increased insulin resistance, and inflammation and type 2 diabetes seem to have a vicious cycle, reinforcing each other in a negative way. So all that is good reason to try to do our best to calm as much inflammation in our system as possible.
Decreasing Inflammation
AP: Okay, so what kind of foods would help to decrease the inflammation?
LT: Yeah, so lots of plant foods in your diet is key because animal foods just tend to increase inflammation because a lot of them have saturated fat in them, they may have endotoxins in them, and you get that package of fat, and we really don't need as much protein also as a lot of meat-eaters get. So having mainly a plant-based diet, as much plant-centered diet as possible, is great for inflammation there. I cited a study that showed about 40 studies done that showed plant-based eating is better for inflammation markers than a typical diet, so that's key in decreasing processed foods as well. But the good news is that there's a lot of anti-inflammatory superstars. One of my favorite categories is the dark purple, dark red, black family.
So lots of berries, cherries, eggplant. You don't want to peel it because that dark skin on the eggplant has these anthocyanin micronutrients that are really helpful for calming inflammation. Even black rice, black quinoa, black beans, kidney beans with that dark red, small red beans with dark red colors.
So everything that's dark red, dark purple, dark blue, those are great. So I always try to have at least a half cup of berries a day. And when I don't have access to fresh berries, I whip up some frozen blueberries.
I can always have frozen berries in my freezer. So always trying to get something in that family. Then there's a certain type of flavones like celery, red pepper, lots of different herbs have that flavone.
High fiber really helps on inflammation. So trying to get 30 to 35 grams of fiber. Beans are a super source of fiber, any kind of dried black beans, pinto, black beans, kidney beans, or whole grains are great for fiber.
And then cruciferous vegetables and dark leafy greens have particular substances. And then on the aromatic sides, we have garlic and ginger and turmeric, you know, favorite ways of flavoring dishes. So lots of different foods that are anti-inflammatory superstars, probably like 50 plus if you count all the foods that are high in fiber, all just available from the grocery store, you know, not expensive supplements from health food stores.
So we can do a lot, you know, if you feel you're eating all day with foods like this, you know, you can do a lot for your foods from the diet completely. I do as much as possible. You know, I know it's very hard to switch one's diet 180 degrees immediately.
But you know, so much takeout food and restaurant food is really packed with refined grains, refined sugars, butter, dairy, cheese, meat, and so it's really hard to eat in an anti-inflammatory way. If you're eating a lot of takeout, of course, fast food as well can be very inflammatory. And so it's, you know, as much as you can decrease processed foods and packaged foods and takeout and even, you know, some of the grocery store deli items, they have a lot of oil and cheese and things in them.
So, you know, unfortunately, this means a little more cooking, but you can listen to podcasts while you cook, you know, you can, cooking can be a joyful thing to do. And there are lots of ways to make things easy or cooking batches and freeze things. And, you know, I think it's not super hard to do, but it does take, especially if you're not eating this way, it takes some planning at least once a week, I think.
Some people do it once a month, but I think that's once you get expert at it. And just, you know, thinking about what are my favorite, you know, plant foods? Let me buy apples.
Let me buy these. Let me buy, you know, really look at the produce section and, you know, buy your favorite foods and eat those and, you know, up those plants and see if you can see if the plants can just push out the others as opposed to feeling deprived. But yeah, the more you, the more you eat of these superstars and plant plant based diet in general, the more gain you'll get.
AP: What are some things vegans commonly eat that would be inflammatory foods that they should remove from their diets?
LT: I think, you know, there's a lot of vegan processed foods, a lot of vegan, as we know, we call some people junk food vegans. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of vegan desserts, you know, like a vegan ice cream not only has sugar, which is a refined, you know, a refined product, but also a lot of it has saturated fats. So, you know, probably a serving of gourmet vegan ice cream has, you know, as much or more saturated fat as you should have total during the day at the most, you know, zero is the recommended amount of saturated fat a day.
That's kind of impossible, but there's no quote safe amount of saturated fat, and it's certainly not something our bodies need. So, you know, I think desserts, vegan desserts with a lot of sugar and flour would be the first. And then I tend to think that, you know, vegan cheeses and some of the vegan burgers and sausages, those are pretty high in fat, including saturated fats.
So you just want to be on the lookout for those. Certainly things like vegan pizza on a regular basis, that's a lot of refined flour, and a lot of vegan cheese, which has a lot of coconut oil in it, usually, which has a lot of saturated fat. So there are lots of vegan processed foods that have saturated fat and refined sugars and refined grains.
The Best Sweeteners to Use
AP: What are your thoughts on sweeteners? Like can you, if you're not having refined sugar, would you say maple syrup is okay or?
LT: Yeah, so when I make desserts or I'm working on recipes, I try as much as I can to use dates or date syrup. Whole dates are even better than strained date syrup, but even date syrup's a little better than maple syrup, but I use maple syrup as well. But for baking, if I can, I like to use date sugar, which is dried dates, really dried dates, which they grind up into very small sugar.
It's a little more yellow than regular sugar, but it's ground up as much as sugar, but it behaves very differently from white sugar in recipes. So if you're looking to use date sugar, I would look for recipes with date sugar because you really have to adjust a lot of the other ingredients for the date sugar to work. So I try to stick with dates and date syrup, date paste, whole dates blended in.
I do use maple syrup for some things that can't take the heaviness of dates or the darker color of dates. So I use maple syrup judiciously. It's a little better on the glycemic index.
It does have some vitamins and minerals, which white sugar doesn't have. So those are the two families I use of sugars. And I used to use a little bit of stevia, but I've just been seeing more research that maybe don't rely on stevia.
And usually it's not sold in its pure form. It's with the other, it's with another chemical one.
AP: What about sweeteners for a hot drink, like coffee or tea, or do you not recommend coffee or tea?
LT: No, I'm fine with coffee and tea for sure. Over the years, I've weaned myself of sugar and milk.
Coffee was not easy. And still even with, you know, dark roast French beans, it's tough. In that case, so I've weaned myself.
That's like, if you can wean yourself kneading it, it does take a little, it takes a little while just keep decreasing, keep decreasing. I find though that maple syrup is okay in drinks. So I would say if, if, you know, you do need the sweetener, I would say maple syrup works for me.
Yeah, dates don't work in coffee and tea. Yeah, they're actual foods. So they do not dissolve.
Foods to Help with Menopause
AP: Are there any foods you would recommend specifically for menopause?
LT: You know, I'm sure you have delved a lot into soy foods, right?
AP: Yeah.
LT: And the consensus seems to be that soy foods can be helpful for some people for decreasing the symptoms of menopause if they're, if they're actively having symptoms.
So I think soy, you know, tofu, edamame, even, you know, dry soybeans, cooking them, it's easy to cook them in the Instant Pot. I really like them, actually. I know they're not very fashionable yet again.
But so I would say soy. I also have a few recipes in the cookbook with soy curls, which I love. They're made from 100% soybeans. So even, you know, you get all the fiber of soybeans.
And like tofu, where they strain out some of the fiber and the protein. So I love to use soy curls in lots of recipes. But I also love tofu, I cook with tofu, I make, I drink soy milk.
And so that would be one thing. And of course, soy is high in fiber, as well as the phytoestrogen. So that would be one.
And, you know, otherwise, I think fiber is critical in terms of menopause, you know, because menopause can be a time when the estrogen levels go up and down and up, they swing up and down. And fiber actually, estrogen, as I understand it, estrogen gets connected to fiber, and then it's eliminated with the fiber. So it's a good way to flush out excess estrogen.
Eliminating Oils
AP: What about oils? Do you cut out oils completely?
LT: I do cut out oils, I don't cook with oils and my recipes don't have oil. Certain oils have saturated fat in them, especially coconut oil and palm oil. And both of those are used in a lot of processed foods.
But oils like olive oil and avocado oil, they don't have saturated fats per se, but all oils are processed foods. And, you know, it takes like 22 olives to make a tablespoon of olive oil. So all that fiber and other nutrients in the olives have been discarded just to get the fat out of it.
So oil is 100% fat, you know, I think it's 12 grams of fat per tablespoon, it's 120 calories per tablespoon for olive oil. And our bodies are very bad at detecting that we just took in 120 calories. So maybe we don't want to eat anymore.
You know, our bodies evolved with our, you know, with the whole foods that we used to eat while we evolved. And that's how the body became sensitive to whether we've eaten enough or not. And so oil, and the same thing with refined sugar, it sort of passes under the radar, so our system doesn't know we've had enough.
That's one of the problems of excess weight currently, because people are eating what's available. And by golly, our bodies really aren't able to deal with it very well or detect what's in it. So I try to avoid oil.
About the Plant-Based Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook
AP: Can you share a few of your favorite recipes from the book?
LT: Sure, yeah. So I mentioned that, you know, that I use blueberries in a smoothie every day if I don't have fresh berries, and I have a recipe for daily habit blueberry smoothie. So it's very fast, very easy.
You can use it as a smoothie bowl like this with some toppings or just smoothie. The recipe is for four servings. So I make this recipe and then the next three days I have, you know, a smoothie in the freezer that I can just warm up until it's nice and smoothie-licious.
And then I have a couple of wonderful dessert recipes. This is cherry nice cream with raw brownie bits. So that's, you know, ripe frozen bananas with frozen cherries.
And then if you want to go all the way, you make a little batch of the raw brownies and then those are super good. Also an orange ginger polenta cake, which uses actually two whole oranges, including all the peel. You boil the two oranges for about 45 minutes and then put them in the blender with the other wet ingredients and then mix them with polenta or cornmeal and some other dry ingredients.
AP: That must be so flavorful.
LT: It is very flavorful. And then one of my favorite entrees is the baked penne with red peppers and ricotta.
So I have a plant-based ricotta cheese and then used with marinara and then you bake the penne up and water saute the red peppers and mushrooms and then bake that up like a baked pasta. So that's one of my favorites as well. I have some soy curl fajitas and some sweet potato cakes, which are made without frying them.
So lots of different, another popular one is eggplant parmesan stacks, where you roast the eggplant slices and then you stack them up with some vegan parmesan cheese, homemade vegan parmesan cheese, and then put marinara in there as well. And so those, that has proven quite popular with folks. I can show you all 80 recipes but I know we don't have time for that.
AP: Well I'm sure everyone is getting really hungry now! So how can people find your book?
LT: Yes. Yeah. So, you know, if they want more information before they buy, including a list of all the recipes, they can go to my site https://graciousvegan.com and go to the cookbook tab. And there's all sorts of links and information about the book there. If they want to just go straight to Amazon, they can. And the book was in Costco stores.
I think Costco rotates their inventory very quickly. So I think I've been rotated out of Costco, but you can go to barnesandnoble.com. You can go to all the online booksellers.
And it is in bookstores. It's just, I don't know which bookstores, like Barnes and Noble stores. They all order their books separately.
Those are not ordered on a national level. So, but I know it's in some Barnes and Nobles. And so I think it's in lots of bookstores.
AP: And of course, the usual people will be wanting to check out your book. Thank you for sharing all the information and helpful. Yeah, it's been great.
LT: Thank you for having me.
AP: Thank you so much for being here.
LT: Thank you so much. I had a great time.
Find Linda on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gracious_vegan/
Further help for Menopause
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In my free guide, Five Action Steps to Elevate Your Vegan Menopause Experience, I share five simple steps you can implement immediately, to feel more calm, more positive, and less affected by menopausal symptoms.
DISCLAIMER: This website's information is general in nature and for informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice and is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
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