Watching Nutrition | Information for a Healthy Life

If I google “Shangri-La Diet” I get about 800,000 hits, a decent amount. “Sonoma Diet” – the book came out the same time as mine – gets 200,000 hits. “Eat Right For Your [Blood] Type” and “Eat Right 4 Your Type” get a combined 150,000 hits. That book was a huge hit when it came out in 1997. The usual pattern is Google hits go down, but SLD hits have gone up over the years.

On the other hand, given that my book contained a new theory of weight control that made about 100 times more sense than the usual ideas and led to counter-intuitive new ways to lose weight that actually worked and that obesity is often considered the world’s #1 health problem – yeah, it is “almost unknown” compared to what one might have expected.

I was wondering if you had any insight as to why it did not go viral, if nothing more from word of mouth from success stories sharing with everyone who will listen to their excitement. It seems all but impossible to me that something this simple, and universally successful which can benefit the masses has managed to not go mainstream in all these years. I am utterly baffled, and assumed there must be a big downside, but all my searching online has revealed nothing but the success stories and initial feedback, mostly from 2006 and 2007, and little since. I am just overwhelmed with curiously as to how this did not become the norm for everyone.

When my agent circulated the proposal for the book, one editor regretfully declined to bid on it because she said the book was “15 years ahead of its time.” Perhaps she was just being nice, but when people tried the diet, and it worked, they wouldn’t tell other people because the diet sounded crazy. Which means it really was far ahead of its time. Good Morning America filmed me for a short Freakonomics-related segment and they played it for laughs: crazy professor.

So that’s my explanation for why it has spread more slowly than one might have expected: fear of ridicule.