nonfiction; health/functional medicine for autoimmune disease.
Easy to read explanations of what foods and supplements are good for you and which are not, from a doctor who has had her own troubles with autoimmune disease.
Recommended for anyone who suspects they may have food sensitivities (or autoimmune issues). ( )

Information packed! Read it on Kindle but will also buy hardcover to implement her strategies. ( )

To see this review and my favorite recipe from this book, please visit www.readrantrockandroll.com

The Immune System Recovery Plan by Susan Blum is one of a myriad of books I purchased after I was diagnosed with not one, but two serious autoimmune disorders. I was on a mission to cure myself and this book was just one of my tools.

The book is a doctor’s 4-step plan to overcome autoimmune disease. The author, Susan Blume, was suffering from an autoimmune disease and shares with readers what she believes are the answers to living a healthy life after autoimmune disease.

The four step plan includes:

*Using food as medicine – I believe this is a proven method in my own case. The author offers self assessments for foods that can trigger issues with our bodies and helps create a plan for discovering these food sensitivities. She also covers the “good stuff” and highlights a healthy diet by telling readers what they should eat with recipes included.

*Understanding the stress connection – It’s no surprise that in our world, people are stressed. It’s known to cause scads of issues including some less serious symptoms like fatigue to more serious diseases like autoimmune disease and cancers. The key is removing the inflammation from our bodies by destressing our lives, something many people could benefit from. How stressed are you? Take the self assessment to find out your stress number. This section includes some recipes to help counteract stress as well.

*Healing your gut – This section covers the importance of intestinal bacteria and what happens when your flora is out of order. She covers leaky gut and how we can heal our digestive tracts. There are more self assessments and a treatment program included with recipes.

*Supporting your liver – In this section you will learn all about toxins and how our livers simply can’t keep up with the amount of toxins we ingest everyday from our skin, breathing, eating and drinking. The author covers some of the most problematic toxins and discusses how to remove them from our bodies. Another self-assessment is offered which will help you discover if you’re dealing with toxic overload.

This book, in my opinion, would be good for anyone suffering disease in general. The steps that she outlines including healing the gut and supporting the liver can make anyone feel better and will also help to ward off disease before it strikes. I love most of the recipes in the book and use them on a regular basis. My rating on this one is:

5***** ( )

This is an immensely valuable book for those with an auto-immune disease (I have several). The author, who is a doctor, herself developed Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and this meant that she had to cure this auto-immune disease herself, since traditional medicine had no satisfactory answers.

She found out that the four steps to healing and preventing auto-immune disease are:

1) Using food as medicine
2) Understanding the stress connection
3) Healing your gut
4) Supporting your liver.

The ingestion of gluten is believed to cause auto-immune disease, and genetic modification of crops like corn, soy and wheat exacerbates the problem. Modern-day diets in general trigger the development of auto-immune disease.

Also, a diet high in animal-based foods such as dairy, eggs and beef can promote inflammation and throw off the balance of good bacteria that live in your gut.

Potential triggers are chronic stress, hormone imbalance and infections.

The author discusses gluten, celiac disease and gluten sensitivity and foods bad for your immune system, such as sugar and saturated animal fat and trans fats from processed foods. She informs us about the benefits of an anti-inflammatory diet, and other “good stuff”, including essential fatty acids, vitamin D, selenium, zinc and green tea. Each part of the book includes a workbook for each theme and beneficial recipes.

We are informed of which foods to avoid and which to include.

There are three valuable chapters on stress, and tests to enable us to assess our degree of stress.

We are told about leaky gut syndrome and how to heal our gut. Important additions to our diet are coconut oil and probiotics.

The author includes three chapters on supporting your liver, and edifies us about toxins such as mercury, lead, plastics, pesticides, prescription medicines, heavy metals, vaccinations and xenoestrogens – the latter being chemicals that mimic the effects of estrogen in the body.

We need to detoxify our body, and remove metals by means of glutathione. Heavy-metal chelating agents include chlorella, cilantro and fibre.

This is an absolutely valuable, excellently-written book on healing auto-immune diseases, perhaps the only one of its kind. I highly recommend that you purchase this book. It provides detailed information on what to eat, what not to eat, what to do and what not to do. ( )

Great book on dealing with autoimmune disease and inflammation. Perhaps a little too technical at times but still understandable for the layman. ( )