The Banana Diet is the Worst Kind of Diet Nonsense

The Banana Diet is all the rage in Japan, but nonsense is nonsense whether you are in the East or the West.

How is this for stupidity?  The author of The Morning Banana Diet says you can eat as many bananas as you want for breakfast along with room temperature water and then eat whatever you want for lunch and dinner, as long as you finish eating by 8 PM.  A mid-afternoon snack is fine but you can’t eat dessert and you have to hit the hay before the clock strikes midnight.

I’d say as far as diet stupidity goes, this ranks high on the list.  But then again, who really listens to me?  In fact, over 730,000 copies of The Banana Diet book have been sold in Japan since March.  Not only has the book sold like hotcakes, but bananas have sold like hotcakes, too.  I don’t have any visibility on the sales of banana hotcakes.

As a matter of fact, Japan is facing a banana shortage as a result of this craze.  All of this banana buzz can be attributed to an Osaka pharmacist who concocted this cacophony of cockamamie claptrap to help her hefty hubby lose weight, which he did.  The pharmacist posted the diet on a Japanese social networking service, and another chapter in nutritional nonsense was written.  When a television program featured a story on this diet, the floodgates really opened.  The banana floodgates.

A story posted on Time Magazine’s website detailed the business of Japan’s banana consumption, and I learned that Japan imported 970,000 tons from Taiwan and the Philippines last year.  It takes anywhere from 10 to 15 months to harvest bananas which makes it tough to meet the sudden increase in demand coming from the Land of the Rising Sun.  Japanese authorities are lining up deals to increase imports, but this increase in demand has brought about a similar rise in prices, as bananas cost 20% more thanks to the shortage.

I have to tell you that I was kind of surprised to learn that the Japanese are prone to dietary dumbness, as since the 1970s Japan has had shortages of the following substances because of ridiculous diets; black tea fungus, oolong tea, konnyaku (alimentary yam paste. Yum!), baby formula, banana, and boiled egg, apple, nata de coco, cocoa, chili pepper, black vinegar, carrot juice, soy milk, beer yeast, toasted soybean flour and fermented soybeans.

Based on the nature of fads, and fad diets in particular, by the time you read this item there’s a good chance the Japanese people will have moved on to another, more disgusting food to use as a catalyst for losing weight. The moral here is fad diets don’t work, regardless of how healthy the featured food is, as evidenced by the never-ending stream of new fad diets.

So consider yourself notified; if the banana diet comes your way don’t waste your time.