The new issue of Circulation has an article best summarized here. Sadly, what we already know is reenforced: the Western diet of higher intake of fried foods, salty snacks, eggs and meat significantly increases the risk of heart disease. This was compared to the Orietal diet, high in tofu and soy, which was heart disease neutral and the “Prudent diet,” high in fruits and vegetables, which was preventative of heart disease. None of this is a surprise, but this data just keeps compounding.

Also this week, the British Medical Journal published a study on eating habits that shows that your mother was right. Eating quickly and eating until full are both associated with increased risk of overweight. So, pushing away from the table before feeling completely full and eating more slowly which are both behaviors that I advocate for weight loss are in fact associated with lower body mass.

The lesson from these two studies, I suppose is that one should slow down and not quite eat their fill of a “prudent” selection of fruits and vegetables.

But that’s ok because it doesn’t work.

I’ve commented on HCG based weight loss strategies before. Well, the Federal Trade Commission has actually found Kevin Trudeau’s “secret plan” so deceptive that he’s banned from doing informercials for three years following a court battle. Over the last several years he has promoted his book,”The Weight Loss Cure ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About.” As an added bonus, he’s been penalized $5 million.

Why did they go after him? Because he’s simply lying. His informercials promoted a book that contained an at best difficult if not impossible diet plan that he promoted as “simple.”

Among other things the court found:

• the diet protocol could not be done “easily” and “at home,” because the protocol described in Trudeau’s book requires colonics, which must be done at the office of a licensed practitioner, as well as injection of hormones;
• dieters could not “complete” or “finish” Trudeau’s four-phase program, because Trudeau’s book states that “Phase 4 is for the rest of your life”;
• dieters could not eat “anything” they want, because Trudeau’s book prescribes that dieters following Phase 4 must eat “only 100% organic food,” and no “brand name” food, “fast food,” or “food served by regional or national chain restaurants”; and
• the diet protocol did not require “no exercise,” because Trudeau’s book states that three of the diet’s four phases, including Phase 4, require walking one hour outside every day.

This is to say nothing of the book’s promotion of the original Simeone protocol that required a 500 calorie diet.

There are no easy answers for weight loss and a guy effectively selling easy diet results out of the trunk of his car is definitely not to be trusted.