Rhonda Patrick is making a case here that chronic inflammation is not a destiny — it's a choice. Seven levers, all evidence-based, all within reach. Cut refined sugar. Add omega-3s. Exercise. Use the sauna. Eat cruciferous vegetables. Restrict your eating window. Add cold exposure. Each one moves the same dial: lower C-reactive protein, lower IL-6, lower the chronic background hum of inflammation that quietly accelerates aging.
What I appreciate about Rhonda's framing is that she doesn't lead with elimination. She leads with addition. When you start giving your body the right things — omega-3s, sulforaphane, deliberate heat and cold — you naturally crowd out the things that harm you. That's a more sustainable psychology than willpower-based restriction.
The sugar data is the most viscerally striking thing in this piece. Healthy, normal-weight individuals — not diabetics, not the obese — spiked their CRP by 60 to 100 percent from a single 20-ounce sugar-sweetened beverage. That's not a chronic dietary pattern producing that result. That's one drink. The research on refined carbohydrates and inflammatory signaling is consistent and robust across multiple labs. This isn't a fringe finding.
The sauna data Rhonda references echoes the Finnish cohort studies I've read extensively — the same dose-response relationship appears again and again. More frequent sauna use, lower CRP. The cardiovascular mortality reductions in those studies are staggering, and the inflammatory biomarker data helps explain the mechanism. Heat exposure is doing real biological work, not just making you feel relaxed.
There's near-universal agreement on the sugar elimination and omega-3 evidence. The cruciferous vegetable data on sulforaphane and IL-6 is solid, though the magnitude of effect (25% lower IL-6 in top consumers) is sometimes questioned as potentially confounded by overall dietary quality — people who eat a lot of broccoli tend to do many other things right. Time-restricted eating for inflammation is a younger field, and the 12-month biomarker data is promising but not yet definitive at scale.
Cold exposure is where it gets interesting. The norepinephrine mechanism Rhonda describes is real and well-documented. But the magnitude and duration of the anti-inflammatory effect from brief cold exposure is still being quantified. It's probably the weakest lever on this list in isolation — and the strongest when combined with sauna in a contrast protocol.
Start with subtraction, not addition. Eliminating refined sugar — soft drinks, processed snacks, added sugars — is the single highest-leverage intervention on this list. A 60 to 100 percent reduction in a core inflammation marker from one dietary change is extraordinary. Get that right before you optimize anything else. Then layer in omega-3s (two to four grams daily from fish oil), add cruciferous vegetables to several meals per week, and stop eating three hours before sleep. Those four steps alone will move every relevant biomarker.
Sauna and cold exposure amplify what the dietary changes begin. Think of them as signal amplifiers, not standalone interventions. The contrast between heat and cold — the oscillation that Contrast Collective is built around — may produce greater inflammatory resolution than either modality alone.
Norepinephrine as an anti-inflammatory agent is underappreciated. We know norepinephrine as the alertness molecule, the fight-or-flight molecule. Cold water hits your skin and floods your system with it. But norepinephrine also inhibits TNF-alpha production — one of the primary cytokines driving chronic inflammation. The same neurochemical that sharpens your focus turns out to be one of your body's most potent anti-inflammatory signals. That's not an accident. Your stress response system and your immune system are deeply entangled. When you train one, you train the other.