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A review by cyndin
The Immune System Recovery Plan: A Doctor's 4-Step Program to Treat Autoimmune Disease by Susan Blum
1.0
I wanted so much to love this book. I'm the perfect target audience. I have many of the medical conditions, believe in the diet changes, am into alternative and holistic medicine, and already understand the link to toxins the author talks about at length. I was hoping for a book that would explain the science behind autoimmune disease and connect it to the rest. That's not this book.
I don't know if the author has farmed out sections to others and didn't check them well enough, or if she really is that ignorant about things. But there were so many huge glaring errors (big stuff too, not just small things) that it meant I couldn't trust the rest of the book. If I find mistakes in the stuff I already know, how can I tell if the stuff I don't know is correct?
Here are 3 errors I remember off the top of my head.
1) She claims that our diets are problematic because we're eating agricultural products vs hunting and gathering. Okay, there are some valid arguments for that and I can go with it. The error was when she said we (humans) have only changed over to farming 10 generations ago. Ummm, that's about 250 years. So, nope. That's the small error (maybe she meant millennia, but it's still the sort of thing an author (and her editor!) should catch).
2) Celiac Disease is an allergy to gluten. She said this twice that I saw. Not a simple typo. And not the sort of over-simplification that is acceptable in a book about autoimmune disease.
3) In talking about how gluten can be problematic for many (she implies all, which I don't agree with), she blames it all on GMOs. Now, I'm no fan of GMOs and I'm open to any science that shows they create problems in human health. Does she provide that? Nope. She says the reason they cause problems with wheat is that GMO wheat has "more gluten" than regular wheat and that eating more gluten is leading to medical issues.
Oh my God, where do I start? First of all, while GMO wheat exists, it's not yet on the market (as of last year anyway, source Wikipedia). Blum uses William David, author of Wheat Belly, as a source in this chapter and even he has a blog post out saying (in 2012) "While current research efforts continue to work on genetically-modified wheat, e.g., herbicide-resistance and reduction of celiac disease-provoking sequences, such GM-wheat is not currently on the market."
Second, the purpose of GMO wheat is not to increase the gluten content, nor does it as a side effect. Third, I've seen zero evidence anywhere eating a somewhat higher amount of gluten than the usual American is going to make any difference whatsoever.
I skimmed the rest of the book hoping there might be useful information there. Not really. The vast majority of it is quizzes to determine if particular types of treatments are useful to you (and they weren't very insightful quizzes either) and recipes for healthy foods (by her definition, though I didn't have a problem with her version of healthy diets).
All in all, this book was a huge disappointment.
I don't know if the author has farmed out sections to others and didn't check them well enough, or if she really is that ignorant about things. But there were so many huge glaring errors (big stuff too, not just small things) that it meant I couldn't trust the rest of the book. If I find mistakes in the stuff I already know, how can I tell if the stuff I don't know is correct?
Here are 3 errors I remember off the top of my head.
1) She claims that our diets are problematic because we're eating agricultural products vs hunting and gathering. Okay, there are some valid arguments for that and I can go with it. The error was when she said we (humans) have only changed over to farming 10 generations ago. Ummm, that's about 250 years. So, nope. That's the small error (maybe she meant millennia, but it's still the sort of thing an author (and her editor!) should catch).
2) Celiac Disease is an allergy to gluten. She said this twice that I saw. Not a simple typo. And not the sort of over-simplification that is acceptable in a book about autoimmune disease.
3) In talking about how gluten can be problematic for many (she implies all, which I don't agree with), she blames it all on GMOs. Now, I'm no fan of GMOs and I'm open to any science that shows they create problems in human health. Does she provide that? Nope. She says the reason they cause problems with wheat is that GMO wheat has "more gluten" than regular wheat and that eating more gluten is leading to medical issues.
Oh my God, where do I start? First of all, while GMO wheat exists, it's not yet on the market (as of last year anyway, source Wikipedia). Blum uses William David, author of Wheat Belly, as a source in this chapter and even he has a blog post out saying (in 2012) "While current research efforts continue to work on genetically-modified wheat, e.g., herbicide-resistance and reduction of celiac disease-provoking sequences, such GM-wheat is not currently on the market."
Second, the purpose of GMO wheat is not to increase the gluten content, nor does it as a side effect. Third, I've seen zero evidence anywhere eating a somewhat higher amount of gluten than the usual American is going to make any difference whatsoever.
I skimmed the rest of the book hoping there might be useful information there. Not really. The vast majority of it is quizzes to determine if particular types of treatments are useful to you (and they weren't very insightful quizzes either) and recipes for healthy foods (by her definition, though I didn't have a problem with her version of healthy diets).
All in all, this book was a huge disappointment.