[mistermann]

> As long as people only understand nutrition in terms of reductionist extremes, "alternative" diets are going to continue being a bad joke that achieves little more than inflating the ego and bank balance of people like Lustig.

That is demonstrably false both in the laboratory but more importantly in massive amounts of anecdotal experience by regular folks. Go read some fitness and diet forums, you think all those people who tried various different diets are imagining they're losing 20, 40, 100+ pounds on low carb diets?

[snowwrestler]

Plenty of people lost weight on low fat diets too when those were the hot shit a decade or two ago.

The problem with fad diets is that most of those people gain their weight back after the initial enthusiasm fades.

Without long-term (decades) follow up, it's impossible to distinguish the effect of a particular diet from the impact of simply being on a diet of any kind--which typically induces much closer attentiveness to calories and nutrition, at least in the beginning.

Also, Internet forums are hardly a random sampling.

[acangiano]

Not to mention the virtually universal control of Diabetes Type II without medicines by those who adopt this type of diet. Seriously, people go from insulin dependency to normal blood sugar levels in weeks.