I have just finished correcting the proofs of the paperback edition of The Shangri-La Diet, due out in May. The paperback edition has much less about drinking sugar water, and more about omega-3s, nose-clipping, and lessons learned from the SLD forums. The first three interludes (case studies) are different.
All of the changes are due to user feedback. In This Film is Not Yet Rated, Fred Von Lohmann, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says
Everyone always forgets . . . that Sony thought the VCR would be primarily used for time-shifting. We all know that’s not what it’s good for; it’s good for going to Blockbuster and renting movies, right? It took some time in the hands of consumers for that device to sort of find its highest and best use.
Perhaps someday everyone will forget that SLD was originally based on drinking sugar water.
Just when I thought I was seeing, on the forums, a small shift back toward sugar water.
This is interesting, I hadn’t realized you were shifting your thoughts away from sugar water. Any reason? I’m curious if an aspect of your diet works, why would you want people to forget it? Obviously oil seems to work better for most, but I wouldn’t discount the importance of sugar water to some.
The decreased emphasis on sugar water is because (a) most people, given a choice between sugar water and oil, chose oil and (b) oil has benefits that sugar water does not. The right oils have huge benefits in addition to weight loss.
Is the Shangri-La Diet a higher-fat diet?
FAT IN SHANGRI-LA DIETS
The typical American diet in recent years has consisted of 33% calories from fat, 52% calories from carbohydrates, and 15% calories from protein.
It has been observed that this distribution reflects a recent substantial decrease in fat intake. In the middle of the twentieth century the average American diet had contained 40% or more calories from fat. It is often further observed that the decrease from 40% fat to 33% fat has been accompanied by increasing rates of overweight and obesity.
(Basic factual information of this kind is discussed in Walter C. Willett, Eat Drink and Be Healthy (Free Press, 2001), mentioned by Seth Roberts in The Shangri-La Diet.)
The Shangri-La Diet proposed by Seth Roberts uses what seems like an unexpected mechanism: if you dose yourself with two Tablespoons of flavorless olive oil a day (not eating or experiencing any flavor for an hour on each side of the oil dose), you’ll find that your appetite decreases so you can eat less, and lose weight without great hunger. (Call taking oil in this fashion “Shangri-La oil”–other oils, such as those high in Omega-3s, may be substituted for olive oil.)
Now one effect of the Shangri-La Diet when practised with olive oil is to increase the proportion of calories from fat back to the dietary levels of 50 years ago (though now with what we believe are healthier fats). This is really not much of a discovery, it’s just basic arithmetic.
Here’s the arithmetic. Assume that someone eats 1800 calories per day on the typical current American diet:
No Shangri-La Oil
Calories: 1800 Fat: 594 (33%) Carbs: 936 (52%) Protein: 270 (15%)
Such a diet provides 594 calories a day from fat (33%), 936 calories a day from carbohydrates (52%), and 270 calories a day from protein sources (15%).
Now add two Tablespoons per day of olive oil, which has 120 calories per Tablespoon, a total of 240 calories, with all the rest of the diet remaining the same:
Two Tbsps Oil
Calories: 2040 Fat: 834 (41%) Carbs: 936 (46%) Protein: 270 (13%)
But increasing the total calorie intake by 240 extra calories per day is not a technique for weight loss–quite the contrary. The point of adding the olive oil is to suppress appetite and thus decrease the amount of other food eaten.
Note that the Shangri-La olive oil does not directly replace other fats in the diet–you don’t put olive oil on vegetables in place of butter, for instance. The olive oil has to be consumed separately, not in connection with any other food or flavor. So the other food which is subtracted will not be fats only, but some combination of calorie sources. Most simply (though other possibilities could be considered) all other food will be decreased in proportion to how much of it is ordinarily eaten.
For instance, take the case of a dieter who has been consuming 1800 calories per day and who adds two Tablespoons of olive oil (240 calories), and subtracts 240 calories of other foods distributed over the diet in proportion to the prior distribution, totalling the same 1800 calories:
Two Tbsps Oil
Calories: 1800 Fat: 755 (42%) Carbs: 811 (45%) Protein: 234 (13%)
To achieve this result, the dieter has added 240 calories of olive oil, and subtracted 79 (240 * .33) calories of other fats, 125 (240 * .52) calories of carbohydrates, and 36 (240 * .15) calories of protein daily. The net effect of adding two Tablespoons of olive oil is to increase the proportion of fat in the diet from 33% to 42%, to reduce carbohydrates from 52% to 45%, and to reduce protein from 15% to 13%.
To take a further case, suppose that a dieter consuming 1800 calories per day adds two Tablespoons of olive oil, and with the resulting appetite suppression manages to reduce total calories to 1600 per day, again distributed over the total former diet.
Two Tbsps Oil
Calories: 1600 Fat: 689 (43%) Carbs: 707 (44%) Protein: 204 (13%)
To achieve this net reduction of 200 calories per day (implying a weight loss of under half a pound per week), the dieter has added 240 calories of olive oil and subtracted a total of 440 calories, divided into 145 calories of other fats, 229 calories of carbohydrates, and 66 calories of proteins.
Thus, the 1600-calorie diet with two Tablespoons of Shangri-La olive oil has a distribution not very different from the 1800-calorie diet with oil, and the proportion of fat is increased from the current average American diet, from 33% fat to 43% fat. This is a large enough shift that some result would be expected.
The reader can easily experiment with other examples, using just pencil and paper.
For instance, suppose that a dieter starting from 1800 calories per day increases Shangri-La oil to three Tablespoons per day (360 calories), and with the increased oil dosage manages to suppress appetite to eat only 1400 calories per day.
Three Tbsps Oil
Calories: 1400 Fat: 703 (50%) Carbs: 541 (39%) Protein: 156 (11%)
This 1400-calorie diet, compared to the original 1800-calorie diet with no oil, adds 360 calories from olive oil and subtracts a total of 760 calories, distributed as 251 calories from other fats, 395 calories from carbohydrates, and 114 calories from protein. The dieter will be eating only 1,040 calories in all meals daily, plus the 360 calories of oil taken separately.
At this rate of loss, nearly a pound a week, the fat intake has increased from 33% to 50% of the total diet, quite a large numeric change. The dieter, apart from the three Tablespoons of olive oil, has not increased other fats, but is just eating less of the normal distribution of food sources. (Seth Roberts suggests not exceeding 400 calories a day from Shangri-La oil, so some value around 50% of calories from fats would be about the maximum.)
DISCUSSION
People who follow Seth Roberts’s Shangri-La Diet, and who discuss it
in his forums, frequently talk about the phenomenon of “appetite suppression” as being a distinctive feature.
Various reasons for the appetite suppression have been suggested, by Roberts and by others, but I suggest there may be partly an additional and simple reason: the Shangri-La use of olive oil suppresses appetite by increasing fat as a proportion of the diet.
Some people have reported that a higher level of fat in the diet acts to reduce appetite and a lower level of fat acts to increase appetite (hence, it is sometimes claimed, the apparent historical correlation of lower-fat diets with more obesity). Most proponents of low-carbohydrate diets claim that substituting fat for carbohydrates will permit a dieter to eat fewer calories with less hunger than on a lower-fat diet. The fact that the Shangri-La Diet with olive oil pretty much has to increase fat in anyone’s diet might contribute to its ability to suppress appetite.
Obviously, a change in the proportion of dietary calories from fat need not be the only factor in growing obesity or the only way that the Shangri-La diet promotes weight loss; all the other factors discussed by Seth Roberts in his book may well play a significant role, perhaps a dominating role. But a diet which has the effect of shifting people’s proportion of fats from 33% to 42% or 50% of total calories should expect some result from that.
It’s also interesting that many of the people on the Shangri-La website find that drinking sugar water acts very differently for them from taking olive oil, and that more and more people (including Seth Roberts, to judge from this blog post) seem to find that olive oil is the more generally effective option.