Sirt food diet

Thanks, @rabbitjb for saving me from following a link. OP, there is no such thing a sirt.

Looks like they have all the buzzwords and ridiculous nutrition industry cliches covered. Even has celebrity endorsements and a clever marketing hook. This should sell a lot of copies.

Are your body's fat burning powers like Wonder Twin powers? Do you have to fist bump to activate them?

The so called skinny gene pathways......................................

Oishii wrote: »

This diet was in all the papers and magazines this New Year in the UK, I don't know about elsewhere. Is it 100% mumbo jumbo or are there elements of truth to it?

Sirtuins appear to be a thing http://symposium.cshlp.org/content/72/483.long and there's some connection with metabolism (at least in animal models) :-

Gain lean muscle while losing 7 lbs in a week? Oh I wish that is how it worked

If the diet worked I would weigh 98 lbs soaking wet . . .

Oishii wrote: »

I put this in the Nutritional Debate category for a reason: i'm not asking for advice. Therefore, please don't try giving me advice!

I lose weight faster than I 'should' according to any calculator, so I am always fascinated by any research that might suggest a reason why (the obvious answer is that I log too many calories, but that goes against all research of people's logging, so I am always open to other possibilities). The first seven days of this diet are clearly a success because you eat very little, but what interests me is the notion of 'sirt' foods. Having been on mfp for years, I know there are some very knowledgeable people on here and I would love to know their opinions of the mechanism described.

I may or may not be very knowledgeable, but here is my opinion of the mechanism described.
First, you find a find an obscure component of human biology that is somehow related to the vector you want to exploit as a basis for your argument, and is documented in some scientific literature as having potentially desirable benefits, but very under-researched.

The target audience sees the ad for your book, and thinks: "What is a SIRT? I don't know, but you say it is related to increasing metabolism and fighting diseases? Great! The only thing I can find out about it from Google is a bunch of info that I don't understand, because I am not a specialist in the field. Fortunately, now someone has written a book about how I can use that knowledge in practice to apply to my diet to lose fat and avoid disease!"
This is the marketing hook that I mentioned. Bonus points because the studies that do exist involve references to the possibility of manipulating sirtuins for treatment of cancer, diabetes, and aging. Sounds very impressive.

Now you just have to build a science-y sounding argument to support your claims. Since the claimed benefits of the topic in question are under-studied, this is pretty easy, because we have several preliminary papers that show possible benefits that warrant further study. How do we activate sirtuins? Resveratrol? Perfect! Everybody gets to eat chocolate and drink wine! The authors of the book claim to have Master's degrees in Nutritional Medicine, so building a somewhat plausible argument here should be easy for them.

I don't know anything about the authors, and I don't know anything about the scientific references they used in the book, but I would be willing to bet it is very heavily influenced by confirmation bias. This is a particularly annoying modern trend that is unfortunately very profitable. For example, take this criticism of the science research used by Dave Asprey, author of The Bulletproof Diet. From: http://gizmodo.com/bulletproof-coffee-debunking-the-hot-buttered-hype-1681321467
"There are no peer-reviewed studies that corroborate the idea that eating nothing but fat (and caffeine) in the morning, sets you up for burning body fat. Conversely, the majority of the studies Asprey sites for his diet were done on rats and mice. Some were four decades old. Some used humans, but in incredibly small numbers. One study's entire sample consisted of two people. One was just on rats with an auto-immune kidney disease.

This is what's known as confirmation bias. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it's when you start with a conclusion and then go looking for evidence to support it, generally ignoring evidence that may contradict it. It is the opposite of good science."

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/the-bulletproof-diet-simplistic-invalid-and-unscientific/
"Prof Paul Garner, director of the Effective Health Care Research Consortium at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, describes the Bulletproof Diet as “extraordinary” and the references Asprey gives to support it “unreliable … highly selective, many over 30 years old, of one or two patients.

“Very few of the references are of current research, and most is picking out studies that are of low or very low quality, none of which is put into the context of other research or systematic reviews.”

Garner says it doesn’t take a scientist to point out that a study of two people published in 1976 is suspect. “It’s just not credible to build this kind of commercial fiction on this.”"

And you have this nice account from one of Asprey's former employees in charge of finding supporting references for Asprey's books:
https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/1keybu/armi_legge_tells_how_he_became_a_writer_for_a/
He alleged that Asprey would just use a bunch of scientific references that are somewhat positively related to his argument, even if they didn't make sense in the context of the point he was trying to convey. Most people don't read the references anyway.

I am not alleging that Asprey is full of it or that Bulletproof coffee is just a marketing gimmick. Maybe it is great, I don't know, I have never tried it. And maybe the Sirt Diet is great and actually lives up to all of its claims. I don't know, and I am not going to try it, because everything on the website describing the book tells me that it is completely marketing nonsense. Like Rabbit mentioned, if science ever develops a strong argument to support it, everyone will know all about it, and you won't have to buy a single author's book to read a single person's evaluation and application of the science.