Nutritionist on how adding this food to popular meal makes it healthier

A food expert has told how meals can be made more nutritious. The change can improve blood sugar levels, arthritis, gut health and reduce inflammation, it is claimed.

Dr Kanchan Koya appeared on the Zoe health podcast to give an insight into how adding just two teaspoons of one spice making a big difference in some cases. Molecular biologist Dr Koya said: “You can definitely enhance the quality of the diet by also adding spices,” reports WalesOnline.

In one example she said research had been done into what happened with a perceived unhealthy meal of a burger when spice was added. Dr Koya said: “So a study out of Penn State that looked at the addition of a spice blend and they added this to sort of a standard American diet, typical hamburger meal - so something that isn’t great for you.

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“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.”

Dr Koya said it was an interesting result given the meal in question - and reckoned it also tasted nicer too: “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."

According to the guest on Zoe it can also help with arthritis. She said: “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 non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs that many people use for arthritis, but have some side effects especially on gut health.

“They found that turmeric supplements worked as well as the NC I DS without the negative side effects. Now, the issue there is that they did use quite high concentrations of curcumin, which is the bioactive polyphenol in turmeric.

"So I think it’s not clear that you can achieve the same therapeutic effect with turmeric in the diet if you have full-blown arthritis, but if you are looking to lower inflammation and prevent an inflammatory condition, I think that a case can be made for just adding more of these anti-inflammatory spices to your kind of regular rotation.”

Watch the full episode here . Kanchan Koya is a food scientist, founder of the spice-centric food blog Chief Spice Mama and author of the cookbook ‘100 Recipes with Healing Spices for your Family Table’.