Friday night I finished reading The Inflammation-Free Diet Plan by Monica Reinagel and I figured what better place to share my opinion of the book than right here?
First of all, it’s important to note that the book is not written by a doctor. Also, since the copyright is 2006, I expected the book to talk about chronic inflammatory diseases such as Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome but there wasn’t any mention about them. Reinagel focused on diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and aging. Since I suffer from Fibromyalgia and not diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, heart disease, Alzheimer’s or cancer, I was disappointed. Despite my disappointment in my ailment being left out of the book entirely, I pushed onward.
I found the section on supplements to be helpful and I did make a few adjustments to my daily vitamins based on her recommendations — however, I will say that I didn’t just take her word for it and I did some extra research before I did so. For example, adding ginger and turmeric as spices had already been suggested by my alternative medicine doctors so I added a ginger supplement and a supplement for joint health that contains turmeric to my morning regimen as well as an omega-3 supplement. All three are supposed to be excellent anti-inflammatory supplements for a diet.
In fact, one of the things that Reinagal talks about which I’ve heard before is that the issue with the American diet and inflammation is the high concentration of omega-6 fats. Unfortunately most farmed animals and now farmed fish are being fed diets high in omega-6 fats which means that when you eat those meats you are doubling up on your omega-6 ingestion — you are what you eat and whatever it ate too. Inflammation in the human body is caused by an extreme imbalance of omega-6s and omega-3s in the direction of omega-6s. In other words, omega-3s are good and anti-inflammatory and omega-6s are bad and pro-inflammatory. This is why my alternative med doctors have me off of red meats and poultry — because those cows and chickens have been force fed all of those omega-6s and they’re just like poison to me. It’s also why my aunt is always screaming at me that I should be making sure I’m eating wild salmon and not farmed salmon.
Now, I have to say that this book got very high reviews on Amazon.com, but I think that her IF Rating (Inflammatory Rating) system is far too complex and the food list, while it includes 1500 foods, is too limited. There is no way for the dieter using her system to even begin to guesstimate the value of a food not on the list because the values are calculated using everything from carbohydrates and fat grams to fatty acids and antioxidants. Even Reinagel herself stated in the book that there are many foods in the USDA database that don’t have all the values needed to calculate the IF Rating. She said that in such cases you could compare it to a similar food but even still that won’t be a fair comparison — effectively saying that you really shouldn’t.
Once you get past the limitations of the food list, you are given a goal value to reach every day for the IF Rating, carbs, and fat grams. The IF Rating goal at the beginning is a higher number than when you are on maintenance, which I didn’t understand, since this isn’t a weight loss program. (However, she does give goal values if you want to use her plan for losing weight.) The really strange part is that she encourages the dieters to eat a mixture of foods that have negative and positive IF Ratings. By the way, you can’t help but eat foods that have negative values — a cup of fresh pineapple has a -37 IF Rating, making it an inflammatory food. Dairy too is an inflammatory food and don’t even think about eating farmed salmon instead of wild salmon…
Anyway, the idea is that you write down all your food and total everything up, positives and negatives and the total should come out to your goal value for the day or at least close.
I kind of thought the system itself looked very much like Weight Watcher’s Point’s system.
I don’t think that the diet itself is maintainable in the real world though the journaling would be easy. As I said, the food list is too limiting and there’s no viable way to adjust and expand. I just don’t think it’s practical and this kind of diet where you are trying to find a way of eating for life to help ease pain in an inflammatory illness isn’t a temporary thing. The person doing it needs to be able to live with it. I wouldn’t recommend this book.
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