Dr. Sanford Siegal's Cookie Diet: a Closer Look

The Cookie Diet is the latest rage. You can hardly pick up a magazine or watch television without seeing or hearing all about how this celebrity lost weight with the Cookie Diet, how wonderful it is to eat cookies and lose weight, how the Cookie Diet is changing lives. The one thing the Cookie Diet does do right is marketing, but let's look at it a little more closely.

The meat behind the amazing Cookie Diet, is that you eat nothing but six cookies during day, including breakfast and lunch. Then, in the evening you eat a paltry 300 calorie dinner. I just hope you really enjoy all the 500 or so calories in those six little cookies, because while your co-workers may envy you for being able to eat sweets for lunch, once that cookie is gone, the rest of someone else's salad starts to look pretty good as you watch them them eat ,and eat, and eat.
Each specially engineered cookie, which must be purchased from Dr. Seigal's company, supposedly contains a top secret recipe just the right blend of amino acids to curb your hunger. Dr. Sanford Siegal, who is a real doctor, claims to have developed this blend of amino acids during his years of medical practice helping patients lose weight and refuses to reveal what's in it to anyone. The closest we can find to some evidence of ingested amino acids suppressing appetite in a search of the scientific literature does show one study that almost comes close to what Dr. Siegal claims. In 2005, Gilles Mithieux of Universite Lyon in France published a study showing that high protein diets in laboratory rats did in fact decrease their appetite. The high protein diet in the study worked by inducing the small intestine to produce more glucose. When this increased glucose level in the blood stream was detected by the liver, a hormone known to suppress appetite was released. Since the same mechanism is found in humans, Dr. Mithieux concluded that this would work in humans as well.

But let's get back to the Cookie Diet. Most medical sources suggest eating between 0.8 and 1.0 grams of protein for each kilogram (2.2 lbs) of body weight. So let's say you weigh 120 pounds (in which case you most likely don't need to be on a diet anyway), that's roughly 54 kilograms. You should be getting about 43 - 54 grams of protein a day. It's going to be very difficult to even achieve this amount with an 800 calorie a day diet, never mind increasing your protein. I suppose it is possible that some specific proteins cause this intestinal glucose production to increase more than others, and a lower amount of just the right ones might have a therapeutic effect on appetite, but there is no solid evidence of that.

The Cookie Diet, in my opinion owes its success to its sexy name. The fact that you can eat cookies and lose weight sounds too good to be true. The truth is that the Cookie Diet restricts you to about 800 calories a day. So if you stick to it you will probably lose weight. The difficulty lies in maintaining the self-discipline to stick to 6 cookies a day while your friends are enjoying an Italian grinder for lunch. By the way, if you add a soda at lunch, that's another 250 calories. Diet soda may be zero calories, but it seems to have an adverse effect on appetite suppression and conversion of the food you eat to stored fat, so that's not a good idea either. In any case, 800 calories is far to few for sustained health in most people especially if you get most of those from the cookies and don't have enough left over to get proper amounts of fruits and vegetables and all the necessary nutrients they contain. The Cookie Diet, if used at all, should only be used for a very short time period. Once you leave the diet, you'll have to address developing a more complete and sensible diet in order to keep the weight off or you'll soon be right back where you started.

The Cookie Diet is essentially a starvation diet, limiting it's adherents to about 800 calories a day and then turning them loose when they've reached their weight loss goal. In my opinion, it is a classic example of a lose and gain, yo-yo diet. If that's what you're looking for, go for it.

Fortunately, there is a healthir and effective alternative. It's called "The Roughly 1200 Calories of Mostly Fresh Fruits and Vegetables with a Daily Serving of Low-Fat Chicken or Fish Diet." The actual number of calories will vary with each individual, your doctor should be able to help you set the right number for you. That number will almost certainly be more than 800 calories a day, though. If you stick to this diet, not only will you lose weight, but there are actually hundreds of real scientific studies proving many other health benefits as well. Best of all, as long as it's within your daily calorie limit, you can even have a cookie or two for desert. Maybe we'll call it "The Eco-Friendly Hollywood Eat Anything You Want, in Moderation Diet."

Sources:

www.cookiedietonline.com

Mithieux et al.: "PORTAL SENSING OF INTESTINAL GLUCONEOGENESIS IS A MECHANISTIC LINK IN THE DIMINUTION OF FOOD INTAKE INDUCED BY DIET PROTEIN." Publishing in Cell Metabolism, Vol. 2; Issue: 5; November 005, pages 321-329. DOI 0.1016/j.cmet.2005.09.010 www.cellmetabolism.org/content/article/abstract?uid=PIIS1550413105002706&highlight=mithieux