So this bad boy’s been advertised ALOT around London.

The Sirtfood Diet – the promise of losing 7lbs in 7 days.

You can eat all sorts of great things, apparently. Red wine, notably pinot noir and some dark chocolate. Who wouldn’t want to eat those on a ‘diet’ that helps you lose 7lbs in 7 days.

James Haskell’s ethical policy on his website suggests he ‘fundamentally believes in and….exceeds exceptions”. So you’d think that this product, with that kind of endorsement might be something worth noting.

You will be right this is going to be be a ridiculous concept but I want to pick apart everything in it so we can continue to develop a good critical eye when it comes to ‘diet book’s’.

I’ll give you a quick run though.

Apparently eating certain foods on this Sirtfood Diet, you activate these sirtuin genes that should help keep you young, burn more fat and boost your metabolism. These, 7 or so genes have been researched with big budgets from companies such as GlaxoSmithKlein spending a reported $700million.

The initial program was set up for a gym in London called KX Gym by Aidan Goggins and Glen Matten. Apparently KX wanted a detox program backed by science. The reported cost of the sirtfood diet program was £1475 but, conveniently you can purchase this book for £7.99 with all the ‘secret’s’.

First 3 days on the sirtfood diet are apparently around 1000kcal’s consisting of two green drinks and one meal. These greens drinks contain kale, celery, rocket, lovage, green tea and lemon. Your one meal is like a buckwheat noodle, white meat stir fry. Now I’ve done some calculation’s and a shake of the ingredients listed comes to about 100kcal’s. Thats based on around 100g of each ingredient. So that would leave you around 800kcal’s for dinner. A reasonable sized prawn stir fry and some buckwheat noodles (as suggested in the book) contains a little more than 500kcal’s. A typical female in the UK weighing 70kg, would be starving on this intake for 3 days.

Apparently from day 4 to day 7 you should then consume, 2 juices and 2 meals to come to around 1500kcal’s. These numbers are a little overestimated and will likely leave people in extreme deficits. With the likely low protein intake there is a going to be a significant drop in performance in the gym and no real hope of keeping that hard earned muscle mass which is one of the promised benefits of the sirtfood diet.

The most annoying part for me is this use of ‘science’ to make this diet more credible. In the evening standard the authors of the book talk about a trial they ran with 40 of the KX gym goers. Aidan Goggins is reported to have said “there was a degree of calorie restriction, but this was way beyond what we had expected”.

So some 1000kcal’s a day is regraded as a ‘degree of restriction’. Ridiculous. 

Further if we take that average, in the UK of around 70kg for a female you will be losing 4.5% of your bodyweight. Thats a tremendous amount when compared to a conservative, muscle maintaining 1%.

In one of the newspapers a study is highlighted to support this Sirtfood Diet. Its a study in some mice that lived longer when activating a particular sirt gene but failed to quote or even mention a researcher that said “the case whether any one of them is important to ageing and longevity in mammals is somewhat weak and circumstantial.” Funny that.

I think it goes with out saying that these (including the sirtfood diet) are ‘new year’ fad diets. Or as I like to call them Food Avoidance Diets. Reporting weight loss like this in such a short space of time should be a massive alarm bell. Its a gimmick, its unsustainable and not even worth the £7.99 let along some ridiculous £1475 you might have paid these numpties.

Just, please, be critical and ignore a diet that has been built around making money.