I wonder if Seth has considered performing rat experiments on his diet? I remember Seth telling me that rat experiments are pretty cheap (i.e., you can do them without getting external grant funding), and he discusses in his book how much he’s learned from earlier rat experiments.
The answer is yes. A few years ago, a collaborator and I applied for permission to test the diet on rats. We were denied permission: According to the campus animal care and use committee, what we were proposing — sugar water causes weight loss — could not possibly be true. This sort of thing happens now and then; one of the scientists who discovered that smoking causes cancer was ordered by his boss to stop working on such a ridiculous topic. Of course that was just one person whereas in this case it was a committee.
Nevertheless I hope to return to the subject with animal experiments–to test the underlying theory rather than the diet. (Because the diet obviously works, as far as I can tell, and I don't like to do experiments where I'm pretty sure what will happen.) Although what are the odds that the theory is wrong given that
1. It led me to one counter-intuitive way of losing weight (sugar water).
2. It led me to a second counter-intuitive way of losing weight (flavorless oil) that is in nutritional terms very different from the first.
3. It led someone else to a third counter-intuitive way of losing weight that was even more powerful than the first two methods (what I call the Beneke method — see book for description) and quite different from both of them.
I took a long time for the research on smoking and cancer to develop and much more years for it to be widely accepted.
I hope the research on the counter-intuitive ways for losing weight will be done, if there is truth in it the public is in desperate need of it.