Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

Ben Goldacre with The Guardian wrote up this article explaining why most diet books make things more complicated.

• badscience – Nutritionist-free diets – by Ben Goldacre

His idea is that we all know that a healthy diet consists of eating your fruits and vegetables, some whole grains and some protein. Simple, right? Yes. It’s so simple that you could fit all the recommendations on a 3X5 card. Not much to fill up a book.

More importantly, when things are that simple, there is nothing left for marketing. If all we need to do is go to the Farmer’s Market to get healthy food, then we don’t need the prepackaged stuff. Atkins Nutritionals may have gone out of business, but the idea was genius. You can only buy a diet book once, but if the public becomes dependent on your food line, then you keep them coming in.

It’s one of the reasons that I feel uncomfortable with Weight Watchers. They have helped me lose weight, but they also have their fingers in the food industry. Can I really trust them when they assure me that their Weight Watcher shakes “count” as a milk? Should I even believe them when they tell me that I need 2-3 servings of milk a day? When the diet industry has their fingers in the food industry, suddenly everything is called into question.