Fad Diet Bonanza

I have a simple rule when it comes to evaluating diets. If it tells you to completely cut out a food source, it is wrong.*  Maybe we need to eat less of something – in the case of meat, probably a lot less of it – but we’re not dealing with this level of nuance. We’re talking about completely cutting out legumes, or every drop of dairy, or all cereal grains.

Watching otherwise intelligent people fall into goofy diets and become hardcore evangelists has been sort of fascinating. Like people who’ve suddenly found religion, it’s not enough that that they’ve subscribed to a shiny, new theory of life. They need to bring it up as often as possible, alternating between rubbing their superiority in your face and trying to pull you into the fold.

The newest kid at the dance is something called the Paleo Diet. It’s an impressive feat of pseudoscience, weaving together a poorly understood version of evolutionary science with outright anthropological lies to advocate for a diet that resembles that of our caveman ancestors.  All fad diets grate on me, but Paleo’s scientific pretensions make it especially obnoxious. At least Atkins stuck with promising weight loss.

And, really, if you strip away the evolutionary nonsense, Paleo is nothing new. Stop eating carbohydrates! Eat more meat (but, y’know, also fruits and vegetables, too)! Bread is the source of all evil, and the price of apostasy is Type 2 Diabetes!

Another good way of telling that a diet is crap is a dearth of peer reviewed scientific studies on it. If the only research you can find is on websites with the name of the diet in the url, you should start to feel uneasy.  So should the fact that what little research there is has been narrowly focused on things that probably don’t concern you.  You know, like when the only available clinical trials talk about the effect of Paleo vs. the standard Diabetes diet in Type 2 Diabetes patients. Or when the same study admits things like, “A limitation of the study is the small size of the study population. This prevents the conclusions from resulting in nutritional recommendations for patients with type 2 diabetes.”  If a website promotes research with caveats like that in it as proof of something, they probably only read the headline.

Not that science matters to evangelists.  That the NHS thinks a study is insufficiently scientific is not a problem; it’s proof. Proof of the truth being suppressed, of the persecution quotient of your fringe belief being reached.  So what if only a few doctors think the diet sounds like a good idea? The rest are just part of the establishment. The anti-caveman establishment.

I submit to you that if you are on one of these diets and have lost weight, it is the fact that you are paying attention to what you are eating that’s causing the weight loss.  Further, there are plenty of unhealthy things you can do to lose weight.  No matter how many studies come out that say that the immediate exclusion of all carbohydrates will cause rapid weight loss, the diet still isn’t healthy.  What state your body will be in ten years down the road is far more important than the twenty pounds you dropped last month.

But you know what? Ultimately, what you do to you body is your concern. If cooking for you weren’t such a fiasco, or if your every mention of food didn’t somehow include a plug to your awesome fad diet, I probably wouldn’t care at all.

So, here’s a deal: I’ll try not to tell you what a sham your diet is if you don’t complain that you can’t eat anything at my party.

* I’ve always felt vegetarianism is a special case. Like most diets, if you aren’t rigorous you can deprive your body of essental nutrients. But people have been surviving as vegetarians for thousands of years. It’s not fair to call it a fad diet. It’s also healthier than the default American diet of a pile of meat for every meal, even if it goes too far in the other direction.