What They Take Off the Table

Dr. Axe’s inflammation teaching is a removal list as much as it is a shopping list. He names fried food, refined flour and sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and the vegetable oils high in omega-6. He ties that pattern to the markers of inflammation and to the long diseases that follow inflammation: trouble with the heart, the joints, blood sugar, the gut. Jordan Rubin’s Maker’s Diet is the same quarrel in older language. He wants food that still looks like it was grown or raised, not food that was taken apart and built again. Processed food, refined sugar, white flour, and the oils of the modern fryer are what both of them walk out of the kitchen.

The oil

Axe’s objection to soybean, corn, and the other seed oils is the proportion of omega-6 to omega-3. He says a body does better nearer four to one than the fifteen to one a fried, bottled-oil diet tends to produce. This kitchen already made that choice. The recipes here use olive oil, avocado oil, butter, and tallow. Axe’s own swaps for the inflammatory oils are the same family: olive oil, coconut oil, ghee, butter from grass-fed cows, and avocado. Rubin treats fat as a real source of calories, not as the enemy. The enemy, for both of them, is the industrial oil and the food fried in it.

The sugar

Axe calls added sugar an accomplice of inflammation, and he is harder still on high-fructose corn syrup in soda and candy. Artificial sweeteners do not get a pardon from him. He points at the gut bacteria and says those sweeteners can disturb them. Rubin’s allowed sweet is the old one: raw honey, eaten in a small amount, the way Proverbs speaks of honey rather than the way a pantry speaks of a bag of sugar. Dates and whole fruit sit on that side of the line. Cookies, crackers, white bread, and a sweet drink do not.

If there is a single change both men would make in a house that wants fewer chronic illnesses, it is this one. Stop feeding the family food that was designed in a factory to be eaten without hunger. The diseases they talk about, the gut disease, the blood-sugar disease, the inflamed joints, are fed every day by that pattern. Removing it is not a cure in a bottle. It is how you stop supplying the injury.

The meat, said carefully

Axe does not treat all meat as the same food. He writes that studies blaming red meat mostly looked at grain-fed and processed meat, not at a fresh roast from an animal on pasture. He is hard on cold cuts, hot dogs, and the cured meats that arrive in a package. Rubin wants the animal too, grass-fed and plainly cooked. A roast is in their kitchen. A long ingredient list on a meat package is not.

What stays is the food in the next essay. What goes is sugar, white flour, soda, the seed oils, and the fried and packaged foods built out of them. Cook the rest of this journal in olive oil, avocado oil, butter, or tallow, and you are already on their side of that argument.

“Every good and perfect gift is from above.”