article · Frontiers in Nutrition
Plant-derived foods and dietary patterns can influence neuroinflammation through biological mechanisms such as microglial inflammatory signalling and the gut microbial production of short-chain fatty acids from fermentable fibre. While laboratory and animal studies provide substantial mechanistic evidence, human clinical findings remain mixed. Controlled human trials examining whole diets, individual foods, or formulated compounds such as curcumin and resveratrol demonstrate inconsistent cognitive, vascular, and inflammatory results, with unresolved issues regarding dosing, metabolism, and formulation. Furthermore, human evidence demonstrating that plant foods prevent infection-related neurological complications remains insufficient. Sustainable dietary translation requires evaluating real-world factors including local availability, processing, cultural acceptability, safety, and environmental impact. Plant foods serve as elements within context-specific dietary patterns rather than direct replacements for clinical treatments.
Diet-driven strategies to reduce brain inflammation attract significant public and clinical interest, but laboratory findings do not automatically translate to clear human benefits. Understanding the limitations of current evidence helps researchers, healthcare planners, and the public design realistic interventions. It also highlights the necessity of considering food affordability, local supply chains, and safety rather than relying on oversimplified dietary claims.
The research indicates an early translational stage for formulated plant compounds and dietary interventions aimed at neuroinflammation. While nutraceutical developers and food manufacturers can target pathways like microglial signalling and short-chain fatty acid production, product success requires solving critical hurdles in formulation, dosing, and human target engagement. Commercial viability also depends on practical delivery factors such as local sourcing, consumer affordability, processing requirements, and proven clinical efficacy rather than simple claims of health benefit.
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This narrative review evaluates how convincingly plant-food components and plant-rich dietary patterns influence neuroinflammation and whether those mechanisms translate into neurological benefit. Infection is treated as one possible initiating exposure, neuroinflammation as a context-dependent mechanism, and neurological complications as clinical outcomes. Targeted literature searches and reference verification prioritized original human trials, mechanistic studies and balanced evidence syntheses. The most coherent pathways are modulation of microglial inflammatory signaling, including NLRP3-related processes, by selected phytochemicals, and microbial production of short-chain fatty acids from fermentable fiber, with effects on intestinal barrier function, systemic immune tone and microglial homeostasis. Cell and animal evidence is substantial, but human findings are heterogeneous. Randomized studies of whole dietary patterns and selected foods report both favorable and null cognitive, vascular, inflammatory, and microbiome outcomes. Trials of formulated curcumin and resveratrol show selective signals rather than consistent disease-modifying efficacy, underscoring problems of dose, metabolism, formulation and target engagement. Direct human evidence that plant foods prevent or modify infection-specific neurological outcomes remains insufficient. Translation also depends on food-system conditions: affordability, cultural acceptability, local availability, processing, safety, environmental burden and the foods displaced by a plant-forward intervention. Plant foods should therefore be framed as components of nutritionally adequate and context-specific sustainable diets, not as universally low-impact products or substitutes for clinical care. Future studies should integrate defined food exposures, pharmacokinetics, microbial function, inflammatory and vascular measures, neurological outcomes, safety, cost and environmental indicators.
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DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2026.1907913
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