The Inflammation-Free Diet Plan

The biggest reason to own this book is the extensive list of inflammation factors for what looks like thousands of foods. There aren't too many surprises, we all have a good idea which foods are good/bad. But the NUMBERS. One itty bitty red chili pepper can negate the inflammatory effects of two chocolate bars? I have been systematically adding anti-inflammatory supplements and food to the diet. I've been on this diet for six months now and the turn around in my health has been remarkable. If you have any medical condition, you need to get rid of the inflammation because it stops healing. Once you stop the inflammation, the speed of recovery astonishes all my doctors. Observations: Each supplement or food may have very specific effects.There is not articulated very clearly in the book. But this information is found in the literature devoted to that supplement. For example, turmeric is famous as a pain killer. It also helps balance blood glucose. I'll vouch for the stuff. The anti-inflammatory compound isn't always fragile. For example, fresh garlic is powerful but so is powdered garlic. Usually, nutritional benefits take a while ( a few days to a year) before there is noticeable effect. But there are exceptions. Turmeric has been documented to improve blood glucose levels after only one hour. (I agree, this one is fast acting). The list is very long but it's doesn't even come close to covering all the foods with medicinal value. What's the biggest value from reading this book? You know how much to add to your diet so it will have impact. After reading the section on the chili peppers, I started eating 3-4 per meal, more than enough to counteract the negative effect of everything else in my diet for the day. About 2-3 days afterwards I lost my craving for junk food; including chocolate. Was it the chili peppers? I dunno. I'm eating a lot of anti-inflammatory foods now. Information like this would be a fabulous addition to the book. Since I have 5 medical conditions that cause inflammation, I do excessive things like put a whole head of garlic plus lots of red peppers and ginger when I cook. Since that time, I have: Reduced arthritis pain using turmeric supplements. Improved my HDL to LDL ratio using fish oil (yup, fish oil is anti-inflammatory - a powerful one) Lost my cravings for junk food. I don't know what caused this but I've stopped eating compulsively. Chocolate is not longer a compulsion, it's an indulgence. I get hungry - one of my medications was killing my appetite but I became hungry again after I started this diet. I switched from eating junk to healthy. I look much healthier - rosy cheeks. I used to look gaunt and prematurely aged due to recent illness. My skin looks hydrated (I do drink a lot of water) and plumper. I looked around for some deep wrinkles and they are gone. I am not wrinkle-free but I don't look prematurely aged. I cornered a friend and she fessed up. I look younger. It's as if the anti-inflammatories had switched on my own natural collagen production. Update: May 5, 2017 It turns out vitamin C is required for collagen production and I supplemented with 4 gms per day. Then I started taking some collagen supplements (trying to fix thinning discs in my back) and bumped up my vitamin C to 6 gms per day for other reasons. My back started healing at an unseemly rate and the skin on the back of my hands started unwrinkling too. I've tried stuff like this before and never had any results to speak of. What's different? I never did all this at the same time, the anti-inflammatories to promote healing, supplementing with collagen and I've never taken vitamin C at 6 gms properly (you have take one gram at a time, it's all that your body can assimilate). It's true! The anti-inflammatory diet can erase *premature* wrinkles! Two other medical sources confirms this. But other (more crucial I guess) systems tend to show progress before the skin. I'm guessing you won't see it happen until you're ready for hard core Szchewan hot. But this is a good way to test if you are taking enough anti-inflammatories. Erasing wrinkles is "hard", once they start to disappear, you've put enough in your food and don't need to increase the amounts anymore. Just keep going. Or you can get the blood test for C reactive protein. Watching your wrinkles disappear is way more fun! These are the things I notice. I'm wondering if this diet is behind the improvements in my brain: better recall, better concentration, more connected thinking. My sleep has improved but that might be the medications. But all this might be recovery from my illness. Update Sept. 11, 2017 I discovered that inflammation does affect memory the hard way. I had a flare up with one condition and my ADHD went nuts. I've actually pinpointed how this condition triggers inflammation but wasn't prepared for the super high levels. So I dealt with the inflammation by encapsulating my powdered garlic and ginger and just popping 1.5 gms of each daily in addition to what's in my food. My memory hasn't recovered yet but I've noticed my arthritis pain went away in two days flat. I also have clicking noises in my back from thinning disks and they are gone as well. Not sure what's going on there but I will take it. End update. My allergies seem improved - less sneezing, less eczema. My energy level is higher. It's not an amazing change but it's definitely there. I'll take it. Of course, I do other things that probably help. For example, I take special vitamin supplements formulated for people with mental conditions like ADHD (you don't want to take these unless you have one of the target conditions - it's over $100 per month). My doctors have remarked "Your results with anti-inflammatories and supplements is simply remarkable". They don't see astonishing improvements in other patients who have tried similar approaches. I'm not sure what I'm doing right, but all the improvements fell into place when I started the anti inflammatory diet. I've done many things to improve my health but this one is so easy. I just add a lot more of my favorite spices then I add some others which are almost undetectable. My cooking hasn't changed very much.

Considering the inflammatory nature of the average American diet, the dietary recommendations in this book are a huge step in the right direction. Many of the health problems that are prevalent in our society are at least partially caused by inflammation (e.g. heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, arthritis). The author explains that many factors determine whether a particular food works in your body to fight or promote inflammation. Some of these factors include glycemic load, fat composition, antioxidant and vitamin content. She has created a formula that she uses to rate individual foods as to how inflammatory or anti-inflammatory they are. About one third of the book is devoted to charts that rate individual foods. Another third is devoted to recipes and meal planning. The other third explains the factors that cause inflammation and how the diet plan works. Your goal in the diet is to make sure that all the foods you consume during a single day have an overall anti-inflammatory effect (by adding up the individual ratings of each food), and that you don't consume more than 65 grams of fat (55 grams for weight loss). It is a simple concept, but the calculations could be quite time-consuming. The information is useful even if you choose not to do the calculations. There are some areas where I feel the author has fallen short. She doesn't mention the inflammatory xeno-estrogens in pesticides that also accumulate in animal fat. When she lists beef as an anti-inflammatory meat she doesn't mention whether she has taken into account all the hormones that are fed to cattle and end up being stored in beef fat. Surprisingly, blueberries are rated as slightly inflammatory. This seems odd since a cup of blueberries has a glycemic load of 5, which is extremely low, and blueberries contain more antioxidants than almost any other fruit or vegetable. Several other fruits and vegetables with low glycemic loads and lots of antioxidants (such as black beans) were also rated as slightly inflammatory. Overall, there is a lot of useful information here that can be used to improve your diet and your health. Whether you have inflammation-related disease or not, this book can help you make healthy choices.

Monica Reinagel has a comfortable writing style, an excellent bibliographical reference and index, so everything is simple to find. The book is sectioned into 4 chapters and has a List of Tables and Figures at the front before the foreword. The chapter that was most interesting for me was chapter two because she very clearly shows how the IF ratings were calculated. Reinagel never says exactly what IF stands for but I assume its Inflammation Free. The rating takes into consideration over twenty nutritional factors that affect inflammation. The calculations come from the U.S. Department of Agriculture which is the basis of the National Nutritional Database for Standard Reference and the most recent update of the database was published in 2004. The formula also incorporates the glycemic index which was sourced from the Glycemic Index Research Institute at Sydney University in Australia. The IF Rating chart also includes for each food the grams of fat and carbohydrate. Reinagel has used the latest information available so we are very up to date. In chapter three she outlines a flexible and easy-to-follow eating plan. You are able to easily modify an eating plan for yourself, so that you can achieve weight loss, reduce pain and allergies, prevent disease and slow the ageing process; all great reasons to watch what you eat. There are a few quizzes so to speak that also help you find the level/plan you need to start with, and some target values to help you stay on track. There is lots of information on meal planning. Then there are some great recipes and even a recipe worksheet (page 60) so that you can work out the IF Rating for your own recipes. She even has tips for calculation of recipes. Using a recipe worksheet Monica shows how you can modify a recipe to realize a higher IF Rating. Over all I found the book very easy to read and understand.

I ordered this resource for a client struggling with a host of inflammatory symptoms. Using the book as a guide - as well as anti-inflammatory herbs and some other lifestyle modifications - my client has enjoyed significant improvement of her symptoms, including decreasing the use of her albuterol inhaler from 4x a day to not having used it in over a month. "The Inflammation-Free Diet Plan" is a great multifocal resource. It: - explains the role of diet in inflammation - provides inflammatory ratings for many common foods and ingredients - provides sample daily diets to reach the goal inflammation factor for people looking for general or therapeutic diet intervention - provides tasty recipes ("Very Veggie Lasagna" was a hit with three generations at the supper table last night) The only thing I can think of as a "negative" is that some of the daily food plans have rather peculiar food pairings: broccoli (in different presentations) for both lunch and supper one day, one meal consisting of two salads, snacks that are heavy one day, very light the next. Still, this is an excellent book (particularly with the related website [...]) to begin understanding the role of nutrition in inflammation, and making guided dietary adjustments.

Inflammation is a very important topic that writers are eager to exploit. This one has some good information, but leaves out much that is vital to understanding inflammation. Rating foods for inflammation gives a false sense of good and bad foods, becaus inflammation is only one of several factors to judge the value of a food. For better treatment of the subject try THE INFLAMMATION SYNDROME and HONEST NUTRITION.

This is not another fad diet book, but one of the first layman books on the destruction inflammation causes to the human body. As science progresses about fats and oils, cholesterol, nutrients and the human lifespan, the inflammation theory holds up. Reduce inflammation and then you reduce all sorts of diseases from cancer to coronary. While some can quibble over the inflammation factor rating system, I found it helpful in guiding the direction of my diet. I doubt anyone will actually count inflammatory raitngs, like calories, but it is important to realize the total effect foods have on the body. Well worth reading to anyone concerned over a science-based approach to diets for longer living. Validation is being read about almost daily in the health press; the less inflammation in the body, the longer you live.

Very nice book if you can read it !! I was very disappoited that I could NOT read the tables. The font is SO small. I tried everything. It is ridiculus to sell a book where you cannot read a part of it

The book explains how balancing the IF rating in foods can keep you healthy. A negative rating is inflammatory whereas a positive rating is anti-inflammatory. The IF rating system takes into account 20 different aspects of a particular food. That seems fairly impressive. The aim is to consume foods on a daily basis so that the net number is positive. Most processed foods such as soft drinks sweets and the like have a high negative rating, hence a clear message; junk foods and processed foods will cause disease through inflammation. If all you get from this book is the message to avoid these highly inflammatory foods, you will do well. Processed foods contain high levels of salt,sugar and fat and they are not combined in any particular proportion. Natural foods such as an orange have a natural and healthy combination of ingredients which is in balance. There are some big surprises; both a banana and an apple come up with a negative IF rating. Fruit don't show up as super healthy foods on the IF rating system. Most foods which contain a reasonable amount of sugar, even if it's natural as in fruit, don't do well. The IF foods rating system was displayed on the self nutrition data site until recently. I wrote to the site about a month ago, early in 2014. This site also gives a star rating out of five for a foods optimum health benefits. Macadamia nuts have a positive rating of around 530 for 4 ounces which is close to 110 grams. The site only gave macadamia nuts an optimum health rating of 2. I posed this apparent contradiction to the self nutrition data site, namely how is it that a food with a high IF rating has only 2 stars for optimum health. I received no answer. Many similar contradictions exist. The example quoted is not isolated. The IF rating system was removed shortly after I sent them my question. Perhaps the system needs some adjustment. THE BOTTOM LINE;I strongly recommend this book as it will keep you away from the foods that cause disease.

This book overturns all we thought we knew about eating healthily! It was recommended to me and I am re-thinking my diet as a result. It is a well written, science-based book with several recipes. Foods are rated according to their inflammatory values and some of these are surprising. I would definitely recommend this book as a guide to good health.

This was recommended to me by my naturopath. It's very easy to understand, the charts and tables are great and the recipes look delicious. I've only had it a week so it's a bit early to tell how well it works for combating general body inflammation, but I've lost weight and feel healthier.

This is the book I have been waiting for. Now I understand why every time I tried to improve my diet I ended up with different problems. Food choices have a great impact on our health. This book will help me stay organic (no pills) longer.

This book has enabled me to considerably reduce the pain in my joints. I found the index of foods disappointing because while it had over 4 pages of pork variations, it lacked many key ingredients of my near vegan diet, for example tofu. I have been using the book daily to assess how inflammatory my choices of foods are and am amazed at the difference a few small changes can make - for example just adding some ginger or chilli to my diet is greatly reducing the overall inflammatory score. I was surprised to find out how inflammatory some ingredients could be: the book has an example of a day's menu which appeared very healthy, but in fact was highly inflammatory. The author then showed how a few adjustments in food choices could turn the overall inflammatory impact around. I think what Miss Reinagel has done is amazing - regular doctors give none of the advice contained in this book, palming you off with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs which eat through your stomach lining. Here at last is real help for allergy, arthritis, and other inflammatory disease sufferers. After over 10 years of searching for help from the medical profession and other books, I think that this one really has provided the answer.

Very good advice but geared for American market. Designed to have an overall anti-inflammatory diet however it balances complete rubbish with anti-inflammatory food so while balance is in the plus zone it's still a pretty vile diet if you choose to eat all the puddings, gm meat, refined carbs and sugary junk! I suppose it encourages some good eating which is perhaps the best some people can do. I found the information part very interesting and some things were completely new to me. I use the principles to have a good diet rather than log every item and work out if it's overall in the plus. I don't eat sugar and haven't for years - nor refined carbs so I have a pretty good diet already. Using fat which is more omega 3 rather than the many veg oils which are too high in omega 6 - useful to know and guard against. So much convenience food is full of omega rich oils so you are on a hiding to hell to try and balance that!