Summary
Inflammation has a part in most long term illness, and the spices in your kitchen act on it. Turmeric, ginger, garlic and cinnamon have been tested in people, and the trials show them lowering the markers of inflammation measured in a blood test. This post explains what inflammation is doing in your body, what each spice does to it, and why rotating as many of them as you can is a better plan than picking one.
Key takeaways
- Chronic inflammation is the common thread running through heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, dementia and most cancers.
- Ginger lowered C-reactive protein, the standard blood marker of inflammation, across 16 trials in over 1,000 people.
- Turmeric and curcumin lowered inflammatory markers across 28 trials, with the strongest effect at a gram a day or more.
- Garlic lowered C-reactive protein across 17 trials, and cinnamon did the same at ordinary kitchen amounts of 1.5 to 4 g a day.
- Black pepper is a large part of why your turmeric gets absorbed. A pinch of it raised curcumin absorption twentyfold in one trial.
- Your body needs inflammation to heal a wound and fight an infection. The aim is to regulate it, not to switch it off.
Introduction
Inflammation has a part in almost every long term illness, from allergies and heart disease to rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. It is also an essential part of how you heal, because without it you couldn’t close a cut or clear an infection. The trouble starts when inflammation that should have switched off carries on at a low level for months or years, and that is the kind that drives disease and causes chronic pain. The usual answer to it is a drug that suppresses it, such as ibuprofen and the other NSAIDs, and those drugs come with side effects that build up with long use. If you have been told you’ll need something like that indefinitely, you are probably wondering whether there is another way. There is, and a good deal of it is already in your kitchen.
Plants have been regulating inflammation for as long as people have been eating them. There are potent anti-inflammatory herbal medicines such as willow bark and frankincense, and no anti-inflammatory diet is complete without oily fish for its omega-3 fats. This post is about the spices, because they are the easiest place to start and the evidence behind several of them is now very good.
Inflammation and long term illness
Long term illness causes most deaths worldwide. The World Health Organization counts at least 43 million deaths a year from heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease and diabetes, which is around three quarters of all deaths outside a pandemic. In England and Wales, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are now the leading cause of death, one in eight of all deaths registered in 2024.
Inflammation is the link between those illnesses. Researchers who reviewed the links between inflammation, spices and chronic disease set out the main things that keep it going: infections, excess weight, alcohol, tobacco, radiation, environmental pollutants and diet. Each of them raises inflammation in your body, and inflammation kept going for years leads on to cancer, heart disease and the diseases of the brain and lungs. Some of those you can change and some you can’t. What you eat is the one you decide three times a day, which is why it is the natural place to begin.
Why spices
Spices were medicine long before they were flavouring. Turmeric, ginger, garlic, cinnamon, rosemary, fenugreek and chilli all carry European herbal monographs recording centuries of medicinal use, and I’ll come to what each one was used for as we go. The compounds that give spices their colour and their heat are the same ones that act on inflammation, which is why the same plants keep coming up in the research. The review above lists these among the spices with anti-inflammatory activity:
- black pepper
- cardamom
- cinnamon
- clove
- cumin
- fenugreek
- fennel
- garlic
- ginger
- onion
- rosemary
- turmeric
- saffron
- star anise
- basil
- sage
- mustard
- green tea
The conditions the review suggests they may help to prevent include arthritis, asthma, cancer, heart disease, diabetes and the diseases of the ageing brain.
The spices with the best evidence
Turmeric
Turmeric is the golden spice in most curries, and it has been used for digestion for a very long time. The European monograph records it for fullness after meals, slow digestion and wind, at half a gram to a gram two or three times a day. That is roughly a quarter to a half teaspoon, which is about what goes into a curry for two. So the traditional dose and the kitchen dose are the same thing.
The reason turmeric has had so much research attention is curcumin, the yellow pigment in the root. Curcumin acts on the switches inside your cells that turn inflammatory genes on, and that is what the trials have been measuring. When inflammation is running in the background, your blood carries markers of it, C-reactive protein being the one most often tested. Those markers are what the studies watch, because they tell you whether anything has changed inside.
Turmeric does bring those markers down, and it has been shown to do it in the people who most need it to. In the largest pooled analysis, 28 trials in people with prediabetes and diabetes, C-reactive protein fell, and so did the two other markers most often measured. It fell in people with knee osteoarthritis too. The dose in those trials was around a gram a day, and plain curcumin did at least as well as the formulated versions, so there is nothing clever needed. Where the inflammation is in the gut lining itself, as it is in ulcerative colitis, the effect goes beyond the blood markers. Adding curcumin to usual medication doubled the rate of remission across eight trials. That is the kind of result that tells you the plant is doing something real inside the body, and not just moving a number.
There is one thing to hold onto, though, which is that curcumin is not turmeric. Every one of those trials used a concentrated supplement, and the largest review of them, 104 trials in metabolic conditions, says so plainly. Turmeric in your cooking is a different thing. You get the whole root, with all of its compounds and not just one of them, in an amount your body is well used to, and that is how I’d rather you had it. If you want to understand why the whole root matters more to me than the extract, I’ve written about it in my post on turmeric for hay fever.
Black pepper
Black pepper belongs with turmeric, and not only for the flavour. Curcumin is poorly absorbed and your liver clears it quickly, so on its own very little of it reaches your blood. Piperine, the compound that gives pepper its bite, slows that clearance down, and the difference it makes is not small. In a trial in healthy volunteers, two grams of curcumin taken alone produced blood levels that were barely detectable. Add just 20 mg of piperine, which is a good pinch of pepper, and absorption rose by 2,000 per cent. That is a twentyfold difference from something you were probably adding anyway, and it is why the two belong in the same pan. Piperine has anti-inflammatory activity of its own, and a grind of pepper over almost any savoury dish is the easiest habit in this whole post.
Ginger
Ginger is one of my favourite herbs, and I use it often in my practice. It is warming, it moves things, and it has a range that few single plants can match. Its European monograph records its use for minor joint pain, for bloating and spasm in the gut, for loss of appetite and for colds, and its well established use for travel sickness. Those look like unrelated jobs until you see that inflammation runs through most of them.
The trials bear that out. Across 16 trials in 1,010 people, ginger brought down C-reactive protein and TNF-alpha, two of the main blood markers of inflammation. A second analysis of 25 studies found the same, and it also found less oxidative damage and a higher antioxidant capacity in the blood. So ginger does two things at once, calming the inflammatory signal and protecting your cells from the wear that goes with it. Fresh root grated into a stir fry, sliced into hot water, or dried and ground into a spice mix all count.
Garlic
Garlic has been used for the heart for as long as records go back. The European monograph lists it as a traditional adjuvant for the prevention of atherosclerosis, which is the furring of the arteries, and for colds. Both of those are inflammatory at root, and that is where garlic’s sulphur compounds do their work. Across 17 trials, garlic brought C-reactive protein down. Across a much larger set, 108 trials in over 7,000 adults, it lowered triglycerides, total and LDL cholesterol, fasting glucose and insulin, and raised HDL cholesterol. That is every measure a heart check looks at, moving the right way, from one bulb.
And, that is the point of this whole post. The aim is never to switch inflammation off, because you need it. The aim is to regulate it, keeping it in proportion so it does its job and then stands down, and that is exactly what herbs and spices in an everyday diet do. A clove or two crushed into most savoury cooking is a habit rather than a dose, and it adds up.
Cinnamon
Cinnamon is the spice with the best evidence at the amounts you’d eat anyway. Its European monograph records its traditional use for bloating, wind and mild diarrhoea. The modern trials used it at 1.5 to 4 g a day, which is half a teaspoon to a heaped one. At that dose, across 12 trials, C-reactive protein came down, oxidative damage came down, and antioxidant capacity went up. The effect was clearest in people whose inflammation was raised to begin with, and in trials that ran for more than 12 weeks. So cinnamon is a daily habit rather than a quick fix. On your porridge, in your coffee, stirred into stewed apples or a lentil dish, it is one of the easiest of all of these to keep up.
Rosemary
Rosemary is an aromatic herb with a long medicinal record, and it deserves a place beyond the roast. Its European monograph lists it as a tea for indigestion and gut spasm, and as a bath for minor muscular and joint pain and for poor circulation in the hands and feet. That bath is a lovely thing on a cold evening. Rosemary’s compounds have been studied for inflammation as well. Alpha-pinene, which gives rosemary its scent, reduced pancreatic inflammation in mice and lowered three of the main inflammatory signals in that study. The trials in people are still to come, and the herb has centuries of use behind it in the meantime.
Fenugreek
Fenugreek seed is the bitter, slightly maple scented spice in many curry blends. It has a European monograph for loss of appetite as a tea, and as a warm poultice for minor inflammation of the skin. Where it has been studied most is blood sugar, and that matters here because high blood sugar is one of the things that keeps inflammation going. Across 26 trials, fenugreek lowered fasting glucose by around 0.9 mmol/L and brought HbA1c, the three month average, down by around 0.6 of a point. Those are the measures a diabetes review is built on, and fenugreek moved them with a seed. The seeds are bitter, so they are best toasted and ground into a spice mix, or sprouted for salads.
Chilli peppers
Capsaicin is what makes a chilli hot, and it has been studied more than almost anything else on this list. Chilli even has a European monograph for well established use on the skin for muscle pain such as low back pain. A network analysis of 28 trials found capsaicin cream relieved osteoarthritis pain as well as the anti-inflammatory gels did.
The bigger story is in the people who simply eat it. Researchers followed 564,748 adults across four countries for nearly ten years. Those who ate spicy chilli food regularly had a 12 per cent lower risk of dying from any cause, and an 18 per cent lower risk of dying from heart disease. That is an association rather than a trial, but it is a large one, and a second analysis found the same pattern. If you enjoy chilli, keep it in your cooking. If it upsets your stomach, it isn’t the spice for you, and there are plenty of others here.
Onions
Onions are an everyday source of quercetin, a flavonoid also found in apples, and quercetin is one of the plant compounds with the most trial work behind it. As a supplement at 500 mg a day and above, it lowered C-reactive protein across seven trials, and in 16 trials in people with metabolic syndrome it lowered cholesterol as well. An onion won’t give you a supplement dose, and I wouldn’t want it to. It gives you quercetin every day, in a form your gut is used to, alongside everything else in the vegetable. That is how food works on inflammation, by being there at every meal.
Mustard
Mustard, broccoli and cabbage are all cruciferous plants, and they share a family of sulphur compounds called glucosinolates. When the plant is chopped or chewed, those compounds break down into isothiocyanates, and the best studied of these is sulforaphane from broccoli. A review of the research to February 2026 counted 17 clinical trials of it. In one, a year of sulforaphane in former smokers reduced a marker of cell proliferation in the airways by 20 per cent, while it rose by 65 per cent on placebo. Mustard gives you its own isothiocyanates, so a spoon of wholegrain mustard in a dressing is doing more than adding flavour.
Learn more about natural anti-inflammatories
Which are the best natural anti-inflammatory herbs and spices?
Each spice on this list carries its own compounds, and each compound has been studied for different things. Turmeric and ginger have the most trial evidence for inflammation. Cinnamon has the clearest evidence at kitchen doses. Garlic and fenugreek reach inflammation through the heart and blood sugar. So there isn’t one best spice, and there doesn’t need to be. The better plan is to include as many of them as you can and to rotate them through the week, because variety gives you the full spread of compounds instead of a lot of one.
That is the difference between food and a supplement. A supplement gives you one compound at one dose, which is what a trial tests. Your cooking gives you the whole plant, every day, in amounts your body has been handling for thousands of years. You have to eat regardless, so the only question is which spices go in the pan. And, if you’ve been wondering whether there is something you can do for yourself, this is it. The same holds well beyond the spice rack, and I’ve written about why the line between food and medicine is thinner than you think.
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