[beagle3]

You have no reason to trust anyone. Michael Pollen and Gary Taubes (to name two writers) show how nutrition recommendations that are considered trustworthy cannot, in fact, be trusted and are often perverted by special interests or just wrong.

But if we use reputation is a proxy for trustworthiness (and we all do, for luck of time and resources to verify every since thing ourselves), then Seth Roberts has the credibility and reputation - he's prof emeritus of the Psych department at Berkeley (which is not nutrition, but his work did touch on similar issues with rats) , the paper about what inspired the diet contains dependable (by standard metrics) references, and while it is not an independent or double blind study, there are lot of independent testimonies of success and failure, and they seem to track the 80% success quite well. One of the problems with this diet is that there is no way to make money with it (except for writing a book ... which he agreed to do after giving away all the info for free), which means studies are unlikely to happen in a reasonable time frame.

The traditional understanding of metabolism-at-large, by the way, is incompatible with a lot of data; in the sense that while it reasonably describes a good percentage of the population a good percentage of the time, there are way too many repeatable counterexamples (some of which, especially the peer reviewed works of Robert Israel and Michel Cabanac, are referenced and elaborated on in the paper).

[beaconstudios]

I don't know why you think I should trust the credibility of a psychology professor on the topic of nutrition - sure, his psychological study may have "touched on" dietary issues but that hardly makes him an expert.

As for your suggestion of relying on uncontrolled anecdotes - there are far too many variables to rely on people saying that a. they lost weight and b. it was due to the diet specifically.

Bear in mind, I'm not saying all this as a way to declare that the diet doesn't work. I'm just pointing out all the red flags for yet another false diet. There are more red flags than most fad diets I've seen. Especially the claim that you can still eat whatever you want at whatever portion and lose weight.