The Shangri-La Diet
non-fiction work by Seth Roberts
The Shangri-La Diet is both the name of a book by the psychologist Seth Roberts, a professor at Tsinghua University and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, and the name of the diet that the book advocates. The book discusses consuming 100–400 calories per day in a flavorless food such as extra-light olive oil or canola oil one hour outside of mealtimes as a method of appetite suppression leading to weight loss.
Inspiration
As a graduate student, Roberts studied animal cognition. As a psychology professor, Roberts read a report by Israel Ramirez, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, about the effect of saccharin on the growth and weight of rats. Based on this research, he developed a new theory of weight control. The theory is based mostly on self-experimentation data that led him to conclude a relationship with calories consumed and "flavor" programmed by the brain. A key insight came from the observation of subjects who were unfamiliar to drinking common soft drinks; they uniformly recoiled at the experience. He recommended eating foods with a low glycemic index like sushi. The result was a loss of significant weight.
In 2000, Roberts visited Paris.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Shangri-La Diet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.