I’m sure you’re a well meaning guy, but unfortunately in this case Seth Roberts conclusions on fructose sugar are right on the money. I’ve got 20 lbs. of weight loss so far to prove it.

Maybe you’ll use what I’m going to say to actually bolster your argument, however I would think Seth could say the same.

1. I eat less now that I drink the fructose during the day. Mind you, I’m a foodniks foodnik. Love tasty foods.

2. I avoid desserts and overeating far more than before the fructose. Aha, you say, that’s why you’re losing weight. Paul, it’s the fructose taking away that hunger edge that allows me to avoid them. 8 years of trying to cut them out didn’t work, but the fructose did.

It looks like your trying to find reasons to dis Seth’s work. Lighten up, open up your mind and I’ll tell you why.

At some processed food company right now, they’re freaking out (no pun intended) at Seth’s work and hoping it doesn’t get around too much. At some point in the future they’re going to open up the document vault in that processed food company only to find out they knew all along what Seth knows following his experiment. It will be discovered that they knowingly used it to profit from by raising the weight set points of hundreds of millions of American’s, basically fattening them up for the proverbial slaughter of a hundred health problems.

David Zemanek

Thanks for the explanation. I completely agree with the distinction you draw between my work and previous self-experimentation such as Barry Marshall’s. That was a point I tried to make in my paper, that self-experimentation could be used for idea generation, not just idea confirmation or demonstration.

I am less sure than you that comments on blogs are “utterly useless for the purposes of scientific testing.” The flaws are pretty obvious; but so are the flaws in conventional scientific tests. A “scientific” study of a weight-loss plan uses subjects who may be paid for participation or receive other benefits (such as blood tests); thus their motivation may be different from the average dieter, who just wants to lose weight. Any study will involve considerable data collection, which is time-consuming; thus the subjects must be more motivated than the average dieter. Such studies usually have high drop-out rates (such as 50%), so that it becomes even less clear how representative the final sample is.

I am also less sure than you that “people who have failed in their diets rarely like to advertise their failure — even under the cloak of Internet anonymity.” I can’t think of a good reason that blog comments should be biassed toward success, much less heavily biassed.

Thanks for your nice comments about my work.

Seth