I tried googling, and all my hits were about people selling their system. Is there any truth to this? Does this stuff really work? My gf says no, but she doesn’t give any science behind it. My roommates are doing it, and it’s pissing me off because they are buying all this stuff for their juicer and it’s taking up my fridge space. The diet that they are on is pretty restrictive: no sugars, no/little oil, no processed food, no dairy, very little meat (it must be of the leanest variety), but you can eat as many: green vegetables, flax, and herbs and spices. Oh, and no butter.
The logic behind the dairy part cracked me up: the reasoning is that no other animals in the wild drink the milk of other animals except man. Therefore, we should do it either.
No other animals cook their food either - are your roomates prepared to eat raw meat? I hate the appeal to animal behavior argument. Animals do all sorts of disgusting and dangerous stuff - that’s no excuse for humans to follow suit.
Ask them how many animals cook their food. Or skin it. Or grind beans to create coffee. Or pick leaves to create tea. Or a million other things that humans do to their food.
It sounds as if your friends are using a variation on the Paleolithic diet. This page has a good summary of what that means and why some people advocate it, along with some caveats and views from the other side.
Remember, your gf doesn’t have the burden of proof. The creduloids are claiming that they are “detoxifying” through this diet, so if they can’t prove it (I bet they can’t even coherently define “detoxify”), no reason to believe it.
FWIW, conventional science seems to show that a diet high in vegetables and low in animal fat, sugar, and processed foods is very healthy. But it’s not going to magically purge mercury or pesticides from your body tissues or something.
As for dairy, I think the reason it gets a bad rap is because it does tend to be hard to digest cow’s milk protein, and it is a very common allergen. But it isn’t responsible for every known malady on earth, as some nuts claim.
Note that while the explanation behind the diet is clearly quackery, the diet itself seems pretty sound, health-wise. Basically vegetarian, low on the calories and fat, high in fiber. I’d be a little concerned that it might be a bit TOO low-fat, given all the restrictions, but it otherwise seems like a diet similar to what my doctor might tell me to eat – and that they’re eating for all the wrong reasons.
(Actually, if they’re actually forbidding sugars of any kind, that rules out fruits, too – which means they’re likely nutrient-poor in certain areas. But I suspect they just mean no processed sugars, since avoiding all sugars would be prohibitively difficult.)
Actually, I forgot to point out that it said no sugars at all. But, there is a period where you can eat sugars, but it cannot be from fruit, particularly bananas. They do approve of tomatos though. My roommates were drinking tomatoes, carrots, and spinach for breakfast.
I think this may not even be true; for one thing, any carnivore that eats a smaller nursing female mammal whole is ingesting milk (that may not be ‘drinking’, but the distinction is unimportant), but also I believe it’s the case that dairy animals are reported to suffer lacerated udders where milk has been taken from them by some animal of another species.
Anyway, maybe you could just point out that no other animal except man wears clothes.
I wouldn’t be worried about the lack of dairy so much as the lack of fats. Is flax their only source of fat? Do they eat avocados? What about protein? Soy? Eggs?
There are a number of vegetables that can provide them. But it hardly matters, since after hearing more (“no sugars at all”), it seems like the diet would be impossible to do, anyway.
This morning they woke me up with the more expensive juicer they bought. This new one is $200. From what I can tell, it’s $130 more than the first one, and it is louder (I guess I know where the other $130 went). The juice consisted of a bunch of vitamins and supplements that I’ve never heard of (like enchinea, I don’t even know if I’m spelling that correctly), and contained celery, some sort of grass (maybe it was bean sprouts), carrots, tomatoes, beets, and I think spinach. Anyway, it left this huge pulpy mess. Can anything be done with this? They throw it down the sink afterwards. I think they took some of my oranges this morning, too. Last night, they ate this vegetable medley, and maybe 1 oz of top round. One of my roommates is complaining that he’s starving, and he ate at least three servings of vegetable medley (carrots, zucchini, potatoes, celery, cauliflower and spinach).
Remind these clowns that we are also the only mammal that doesn’t lick its own asshole.
Human beings evolved to eat most plants and any animal that they could get into their mouths. Animals with similar nutritional requirements and flexibility include bears, pigs and dogs. Funny that the last 2 are considered insults if you use them to describe someone.
To find out if they really are hippies, try hiding your oranges in the shower under the soap. If they look there then they’re just guillable food faddists.
The whole juicing thing completely escapes me. All you do by juicing is eliminate the fiber, which is good for you! If you want the health benefits of a carrot, eat a carrot! Throwing out the fiber and drinking the juice is LESS healthful than eating the carrot itself.
I know this is probably a joke, but there are plenty of mammals that don’t lick their own sphincters. Just from the barnyard: horses, pigs, cows, donkeys. I’m guessing dolphins and whales don’t either. They might lick each other’s, but not their own.