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

How About "The Roughly 1200 Calories a Day of Mostly Fruits and Vegetables with a Daily Serving of Low-Fat Chicken or Fish Diet?"

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.