Sira-sira store: Next food fad, please

Friday, February 17, 2012

I WAS swimming around the sea of information—the Internet where people surf and skim around for wisdom—when I found this green new thing they call the next superfood.

There was once the cabbage soup diet, which ran on the principle that if you ate nothing but low-calorie cabbage soup over seven days, you would lose weight.

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Who wouldn’t? Even if you ate nothing but kamunggay, you would be as trim as Heidi Klum. Since it was short-term loss—maybe good enough to prepare for a high school reunion where you will bump into an old flame—followers were not committed to the program. It has become an obsolete diet.

Imagine having cabbage soup paired only with as much fruit as you like (excluding bananas) on the first day, and the next day having another companion to your soup, till you reach the seventh day when you are allowed brown rice, veggies (hold the potatoes) and unsweetened fruit juice.

Boring, aside from the fact that many medical professionals criticized the diet.

Not discouraged at all, acai (say ah-sigh-ee) moved into the consciousness of dieters.

It is the berry of an Amazonian palm tree, which instantly gives it an exotic ring, added to the lore that it has a long history of traditional usage in Brazil.

After a Dr. Perricone told Oprah during her show that the berry is a good source of antioxidants, there was a flood of curiosity. That is after Oprah said she added acai into her diet.

Some websites even promote the berry diet as Oprah’s new diet plan. But then again, like all diets it must be paired with a sensible nutritional program and exercise.

According to everydiet.org, “there isn’t a specific acai berry diet, but rather dieters use acai berry in conjunction with any other weight loss plan they prefer to follow.”

The Japanese have thrown their idea into the diet pool. The “Morning Banana Diet” or MBD is perhaps the simplest of all diets and could be the lazy dieter’s diet.

This is the simplified version of the “Banana Diet.” You have nothing to memorize, no calories to count. Morningbananadiet.com instructs: “Rather than eating banana before every meal, the MBD has you eat bananas for breakfast, with a glass of unchilled water. For lunch and dinner your menu selections are not particularly restricted.

You only need to avoid eating past fullness, and use common sense in cutting down on problem foods like fried foods.” But then again the diet has received criticism, too.

What’s on the horizon of fad diets?

The seaweed diet is pretty hopeful.

“It seems that sea veggies are a hot new superfood, with reported benefits ranging from heart protection to weight loss,” according to Cynthia Sass, MPH, RD, in her article in Shape (Oct. 27).

Whenever there is a positive note, a negative one emerges. Research at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minnesota, reported that “alginate, a substance from brown seaweed, did not curb appetite, increase or decrease stomach emptying or alter digestive hormone production in a 10-day study.” But if you take it from Sass, it’s a fun food. She suggests seaweed pizza: brush extra-virgin olive oil or sesame oil on a whole grain flatbread crust and top with garlic, onions, fresh sliced tomato and nori.

You might want seaweed siomai. Master Siomai carries the flavor. I like it, but not for its health benefit. It’s a matter of taste.