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A few years ago there was a nutritional fad called The Zone Diet, as popularized by MD/author Barry Sears. According to the Zone Diet, every food you ate, and even the combinations of foods eaten, either resulted in beneficial hormonal responses or negative ones. In order to attain optimum health, avoid premature aging, etc., the Zone Diet required that you do everything right, eat nothing counter to the formula, and even offered in-depth meal plans, basically telling you exactly what to eat. Lots of foods were out, some of them rather surprisingly, and never mind the lack of scientific proof to support any of it.
In the case of inflammation-free food, I think we have another example of an author starting with an interesting premise, and then selectively finding or inventing the evidence to support it. The baseline arguments may even appear sound, and there IS a growing body of scientific evidence to supports the theory that inflammation is a root cause of many diseases, and even that diet has a significant role to play. But I think we need to be wary of the sensational tactics some of these "doctors" turned best-selling authors are using in order to get the attention they do. For starters, the "fruit is sorta bad" argument should jump right out at you. That just doesn't sit right, and anyone who tries to make it some nutritional law is being disingenuous.
Quantifying foods as either good or bad, positive or negative, assigning numbers, calculating every bite, is not a healthy way of thinking about food. Better to take a broad view of the issue of inflammation, learn the latest scientific thinking, see what various nutrition experts have to say about various types of food, and then draw your own conclusions. No one has all the answers, nor is there one ultimate answer that applies to everyone. The black and white point of view sells books, but it rarely educates.
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