Why Anti-Inflammatory Vegan

I have been vegetarian more or less all my life.  However this Rosh Hashanah I came to a spiritual realization and made the decision to become vegan.  I have never felt deprived for my lack of eating meat, I never craved it, I may have felt marginalized or even ostracized for my being a lifelong vegetarian but my decision was never even a decision.  I never developed the proper enzymes to digest meat, in fact if even the smallest piece slips accidentally into my food it will make me violently ill: a condition my sister and I have come to call meat poisoning. The point is I never felt deprived of food until I went vegan.  Suddenly I found myself craving foods like Cheese Pizza and Nutella and white chocolate all of which I could not eat as an ethical vegan.  This was my first experience with what it truly must be like for a meat eater to try to go vegetarian.

A few weeks after my decision to go vegan I was thrown a curve ball by my need to take up the anti-inflammatory diet for medical reasons.  This diet put my choice to go vegan on steroids limiting not only things that overlap with a vegan lifestyle (eggs, dairy, honey, most meats--which I never ate anyway) but also things that are traditionally mainstays of a vegan diet (all soy except tempeh and miso, potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, all variations of peppers from sweet delicious red bell peppers to spicy jalapenos, all sugar including natural cane sugar, citrus, peanuts and the most drastic: wheat and all other forms of gluten (e.g. Barley, Rye, etc.).

Additionally the diet restricts corn to only organic corn, and rice to only brown or basmati.  There is a "strong suggestion" to give up all caffeine including caffeinated tea and to heavily limit alcohol (beer of course is entirely out because it is wheat/barley, a.k.a. gluten). This diet made the deprivation of going vegan seem trivial.

Basically this is a diet more drastic than a vegan celiac's.  But after three different doctors from all areas of the country have told you to give the same diet a try over the past 5 years, it might be time to listen and getting rid of my pain--if it really works--might just be worth it.


I am making this blog as a personal journal about my experience with a vegan anti-inflammatory diet at the end of my first full week of the diet (the first two were sort of teasers and I cheated more than once).  Hopefully if it works it can help others and if nothing else will be a place for me to record the recipes I want to try as I think of them.