Category: Shangri-La Diet

Eczema, Nighttime Cough, Antibiotics, and Fermented Food (more)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

This comment was made recently on an earlier post:

I am so glad I found this blog.

My daughter has had coughing fits for 24 months (she’s 5 1/2 yo).

Inhalers, several doctors, nothing helped. She routinely coughed until vomiting. After one 10 hour coughing fit I reached my limit and scoured the web.

After putting in her whole medical history as search qualifiers I found this [post]. The prior eczema and antibiotics were key indicators.

After 3 days of drinking 1 probiotic shake a day, she showed very marked improvement. After 1 week, no symptoms. This is a girl who’s been unable to run and play for 2 years. Who woke up coughing and gagging most nights.

After 6 weeks of the same regimen, she still shows no symptoms and is running and playing full blast.

The pulmonary specialist discounts the results we’ve seen as a fluke . . . we’ll see. Previously my daughter’s lung capacity was measured at 47% of expected.

“Unable to run and play for 2 years”! I’m impressed. Not only (a) the improvement is huge, but also (b) it resembles verification of a prediction, not just something a theory can explain, (c) it wasn’t obvious to “several doctors” or (d) the rest of the Internet, and (e) after it happened it was dismissed by an expert, even though the evidence for causality is excellent. The verification aspect reminds me of Pale Fire:

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.

Modern Biology = Cargo-Cult Science (continued)

Seth Roberts31 Comments

In an earlier post I pointed out that modern molecular biology has one big feature in common with cargo-cult science (activities with the trappings but not the substance of science): relentless over-promising. David Horrobin, in a 2003 essay, agreed with me:

Those familiar with medical research funding know the disgraceful campaigns waged in the 70s and 80s by scientists hunting the genes for such diseases as cystic fibrosis. Give us the money, we’ll find the gene and then your problems will be solved was the message. The money was found, the genes were found – and then came nothing but a stunned contemplation of the complexity of the problem, which many clinicians had understood all along.

During the question period of a talk by Laurie Garrett about science writing at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, I said there was a kind of conspiracy between scientists and journalists to make research results (in biology/health) appear more important than they really were. Oh, no, said Garrett. If she’s right, then journalists are completely credulous. They have no idea they’re being scammed. If I wrote a book called The Real Scientific Method, there would be a whole chapter on better ways (cool data) and worse ways (over-promising) to promote your work.

The discovery of leptin, the hormone that tells the brain how much fat you have, was front-page news in 1994. Supposedly this discovery would help people lose weight. It is now abundantly clear that it hasn’t and won’t. The discoverer of leptin, Jeffrey Friedman, gave a talk at UC Berkeley several years ago and resembled a deer caught in the headlights. All he knew — following the party line — was that genetics was important. That genetics was so obviously not the reason for the obesity epidemic . . . he didn’t mention. This interview gives a sampling of his views. He really does believe in the primacy of genes:

Over the years, Dr. Friedman says, he has watched the scientific data accumulate to show that body weight, in animals and humans, is not under conscious control. Body weight, he says, is genetically determined, as tightly regulated as height.

Never mind animal and human experiments that show adult body weight is controlled by recent diet. Adult height is not controlled by recent diet. What about the obesity epidemic? Well,

“Before calling it an epidemic, people really need to understand what the numbers do and don’t say,” he said.

This is what one molecular biologist — a professor at Rockefeller University — is reduced to: telling us what data collected by other people “do and don’t say”. Not to mention qualifying the obvious (Americans are much fatter now than 50 years ago). I’m sure his lab has all the trappings of modern science. But the planes don’t land.

A journalist named David Freedman has figured this out.

Review of Other Diets

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

This comment by goblyn on the Shangri-La Diet forums made me laugh:

When you’re on Atkins it gets harder when you start wanting to sell your first born for a piece of bread. On Weight Watchers you’d kill for a pizza. On South Beach you’d sleep with Donald Trump for an order of buffalo wings. On the cabbage soup diet, you’d willingly chop off your hands if you could eat something…anything…other than cabbage soup. On SLD it gets harder when you are suddenly only losing 1 lb a week rather than 4.

So well written! The comment continues, in very gratifying way:

It’s harder when you effortlessly eat 1400 calories a day and don’t feel deprived. It’s harder when you have to buy a whole new wardrobe. It’s harder when you’re out with friends and they all think you’re anorexic because you get stuffed from the bread they served before the meal… But there’s rarely a moment when it’s actually HARD. SLD is easy. Yes the weight loss slows down, yes the AS [appetite suppression] gets less noticeable, but at no point does it stop working. You won’t suddenly find your weight skyrocketing from eating a piece of celery.

The Monster Is Asleep

Seth Roberts2 Comments

This old comment made me laugh me when I reread it recently:

It was slightly embarrassing when friends would ask how long I had been on [the Shangri-La Diet]. I lied and said a day – it had only been eight hours but, hey, without SLD, I normally would have done a great deal of damage in those 8 hours. It’s now been a week and I’ve lost three pounds. I love the luxury of choosing finer foods now that I’m no longer compelled to eat everything in sight when dinnertime comes around. The Monster has been rocked to sleep

Instant Willpower

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

From a review of The Shangri-La Diet:

Seth Roberts, the diet founder and book author, attempts to explain the science behind how this works, but I won’t even begin to try to explain it here. I will admit that it is both counterintuitive and at times seems contradictory, but since there was little risk involved I was willing to give it a try.

I was nervous to add the calories into my diet (approximately 120 per tablespoon of olive oil), when all my life experience told me that I should be cutting fat and calories. However, I have only been following the plan for about a week and am amazed at the results. After just one day it was like having instant willpower.

Bad Review of the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A professor in the Berkeley nutrition department recently told a friend of mine he knew about the Shangri-La Diet. He advised:

Don’t try it. He’s a psychologist, not a nutritionist.

As if weight control didn’t involve the brain. Perhaps my friend was talking to Marc Hellerstein, who told a student reporter that the theory behind the diet makes “no sense.” The theory says we stock up on energy when it’s cheap.

Smoking and SLD: “Maybe the Shangri-La Diet Curbs All Kinds of Appetites?”

Seth Roberts5 Comments

This is from Confessions of a Nicotine Addict:

Smoked like a chimney this weekend.

But on Tuesday I started the “Shangri La Diet,” as outlined in the book of the same name by Seth Roberts. It’s a strangely easy plan and I may be too obtuse to understand how it works, but my appetite was noticeably down all day. (Ok, I had a headache & nasty nausea — but not hungry!)

And I had very few urges to smoke. In fact, I went almost the whole day without nico fit. The thought of smoking was utterly distasteful. Really gross. Now, for the past couple months I’ve been working on all kinds of visualizations & relaxation techniques, but I really think this weird-ass diet had something to do with it. I ended up giving in at the end of the day, but I only smoked a couple. Yesterday was about the same; today, too.

Maybe the Shangri La Diet curbs all kinds of appetites?

So well put!

Maybe it does. Here are two possible explanations: 1. The mental effort it took to fight off the urge to eat is no longer necessary, leaving it available to fight off the urge to smoke. This story contradicts this explanation — the urge to smoke went down. 2. Addictions are self-medication. You feel bad, the addicting substance provides relief. If you feel less bad — less hungry, say — then you need less relief. This story doesn’t support this explanation either; nothing is said about relief from overwhelming and unpleasant urges to eat. There is certainly some truth to this basic idea, however — witness the term addictive personality.

However, in this case I’d put my money on Explanation #3: Addictions are heavily linked to the environment. The environment triggers a craving. It’s Pavlovian learning. Shepard Siegel, a psychology professor at McMaster University, originated this explanation and has collected a lot of supporting data. You take Drug A in Environment B. After a while experience B triggers a desire for A. (Obviously it makes sense that we learn to become hungry when food is available. That’s how appetizers work.) In this case SLD changed her environment. She felt different.

Advances in Nose-Clipping: A New Use For Pantyhose

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In the Shangri-La Diet forums, Maychi has posted about a new way of nose-clipping (eliminating the smell of food) that is socially-acceptable: Putting tiny pieces of pantyhose in your nose. They are invisible. Her husband and son wouldn’t eat with when she wore noseclips.

I started this on 1st August. After about five days I got AS [appetite suppression] I had never managed to achieve with sugar or oil or anything else.

She eats about 95% of her calories this way. It doesn’t entirely block smells but perhaps it changes them enough so that they aren’t recognized or are less recognized. Maychi started losing weight and so did someone else who tried it.

One little problem: You have to be careful what you say.

It’s not possible to produce certain sounds. So in order to not sound like you have a horribly blocked nose, you have to say “delicious!” instead of “yummm!” and and “super!” instead of “Nice!”

The SLD Effect

Seth Roberts2 Comments

After three days of the Shangri-La Diet, kitty-cat did a little experiment:

I tried something last night Very Happy I really tried to eat much of sweets and chips and stuff like this … I couldn’t!!! I had a little bit and then quit because I felt … I don’t know … full – more than

As far as I know, the Shangri-La Diet is the first weight-loss method to produce this effect quickly. Most diets, such as the Atkins Diet, ban “sweets and chips and stuff like this”; early in the diet you would have no trouble eating them. After a long time on the diet you won’t want to eat them but only because they’re no longer familiar.

Long before SLD, Michel Cabanac did experiments about a related laboratory phenomenon. As you eat, Cabanac found, food becomes less and less pleasant. That’s why you stop eating. You say “I feel full” to explain why you stop eating but your stomach isn’t actually full. Cabanac also found that this effect depended on your set point. If your set point was high, the decrease in pleasure slowed down. It took longer to reach zero (= no pleasure) so it took longer to stop eating.

It follows from Cabanac’s work that if your set point is unusually low — lowered by SLD, for example — then you will stop eating unusually soon, as happened here. The paradox is that you can feel “more than full” from a tiny amount of attractive food.

Revenge is Sweet

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In 2006, Julie Powell, the blogger now on screen in Julie & Julia, reviewed The Shangri-La Diet in the Washington Post

I’m almost 95 percent sure that Seth Roberts . . . is a snake-oil salesman. [Later true. Snake oil is high in omega-3] . . . He brings a whole lot of pseudo-science to the table, as diet-book-writing PhDs tend to do.

Now, from a review of Julie & Julia by Laura Shapiro, author of a book about Julia Child:

There’s no question that Powell had a great idea for a blog. What she didn’t have was anything interesting to say about cooking her way through Mastering. Her writing is hollow, narcissistic, and unforgivably lazy—qualities so foreign to Julia that it’s not at all surprising that she once said she couldn’t abide Powell’s work.

Curious that revenge (“sweet”, “a dish best served cold”) is associated with food.