Stanford nutrition scientist Christopher Gardner notes that “no matter how crazy a diet might be, it will work for someone if enough people try it. . . . If you give it to 100 people, it might work for only two of them, but the people promoting the diet don’t test it that way; they simply focus on the two successful stories.” Maybe what’s really going on is that following a diet, any diet, causes you to pay more attention to the foods you’re eating—to engage in mindfulness—and that’s where their effectiveness is, not in the particulars.
