Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt write in their Freakonomics column (Times Select membership required), in the New York Times Magazine about Seth Roberts a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley who’s come up with what he calls the Shangri-La Diet. As excerpted below, the diet involves tricking the body into believing times are lean, and it should burn fat instead of storing it. I’ve done a search of the web to no avail and was wondering if anyone here could provide more specific details.
[Seth Roberts] had by now come to embrace the theory that our bodies are regulated by a ‘‘set point,’’ a sort of Stone Age thermostat that sets an optimal weight for each person.…According to Roberts’s interpretation of the set-point theory, when food is scarcer, you become less hungry; and you get hungrier when there’s a lot of food around.…
During an era of scarcity – an era when the next meal depended on a successful hunt…this set-point system was vital. It allowed you to spend down your fat savings when food was scarce and make deposits when food was plentiful. Roberts was convinced that this system was accompanied by a powerful signaling mechanism: whenever you ate a food that was flavorful (which correlated with a time of abundance) and familiar (which indicated that you had eaten this food before and benefited from it), your body demanded that you bank as many of those calories as possible.…
Today, however, at least in places with constant opportunities to eat, these signals can lead to a big, fat problem: rampant overeating.
So Roberts tried to game this Stone Age system. What if he could keep his thermostat low by sending fewer flavor signals?…After a great deal of experimenting, he discovered two agents capable of tricking the set-point system. A few tablespoons of unflavored oil (he used canola or extra light olive oil), swallowed a few times a day between mealtimes, gave his body some calories but didn’t trip the signal to stock up on more. Several ounces of sugar water (he used granulated fructose, which has a lower glycemic index than table sugar) produced the same effect. (Sweetness does not seem to act as a ‘‘flavor’’ in the body’s caloric-signaling system.)