Penn & Teller's Bullshit!

The blueberry cayenne thing, I'm going to try.

yeah that piqued my curiosity tbh

diet sounds pretty healthful to me too, any vegetarians around to weigh in on this? like he says, seems like he eats a lot, it's just mostly fruits and veggies. isn't that what we're all supposed to be doing?

He starves himself and then he overeats. He also has periods of not eating nutritiously, which is disguised by all the veggies and fruit he eats, but most of us are guilty of that.

Intermittent fasting isn't starving yourself.

Only thing that sticks out to me is that it's very light on protein but Furman is largely anti-protein IIRC.

He describes eating several pounds of food, really prodigious quantities, and he'll follow that up with huge snacks four hours later. And periodically going 36 hours without food sounds more like deprivation than fasting.

No, that's a pretty standard fasting style - eat dinner, skip a day, eat breakfast.

His 'pounds of food' is watermelon, which has a crazy high water content even for fruit. It's not like eating four pounds of beef or French fries.

but I don't see any particular health benefit in eating tons of watermelon?

like it's a nutritious and hydrating fruit to consume but id imagine the absorption of the vitamins in it isn't infinite, and like there's only so much fiber and fruit sugar you really need in a day?

Watermelon has low calorie density (filling but not terribly calorific) and the red pigment is lycopene, the same skin protecting carotenoid that colors tomatoes.

Penn's diet follows Dr. Fuhrman's guidelines, basically caloric restriction with optimal nutrition style, but achieved via ranking foods into seek/reduce/avoid categories rather than the spreadsheets etc. used in CRON, and there are few healthier. Some of Fuhrman's rhetoric about "toxic hunger" is unfounded, and I didn't care for the recipes. Most data sees diminishing returns on fruit and vegetable intake after 8 or so servings a day, and I'm increasingly convinced the health benefit of whole plant based diets owes more to what they don't include (fats and excess protein), so I've opted for a more comfort food diet (ie, more potatoes, beans, & corn tortillas), but I'll sometimes have a Fuhrman-style dinner salad with over a pound of greens, veggies, 'shrooms etc.

• Fuhrman, 2008. Effect of a high nutrient density diet on long-term weight loss: a retrospective chart review. Alternative therapies in health and medicine, 14(3), p.48.
• Dunaief et al, 2012. Glycemic and cardiovascular parameters improved in type 2 diabetes with the high nutrient density (HND) diet. Open Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2(03), p.364.
• Fuhrman and Singer, 2015. Improved cardiovascular parameters with a nutrient-dense, plant-rich diet-style: a patient survey with illustrative cases. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, p.1559827615611024.

It's not just pounds of watermelon. He eats two entrees and rice at the Indian place, and then at the airport he eats two containers of pineapple. He eats four big containers of blueberries, and the "big" containers I get in the stores around here are all 32 ounces. Maybe he means a smaller container, but he says "big." He eats an "insane" amount of watermelon, a "whole" container of cherry tomatoes, a "big, big" bowl of soup, and "a lot" of blueberries; that's just one evening meal. On the 8th, he seems to eat a reasonable amount of food, albeit three meals' worth in the evening, but he appends that entry with "I eat a lot of food," which makes me wonder how large the portions are. For one meal, the base is three pounds of spinach (is one container even a pound?) to which he adds brown rice and four vegetables, including four ears of corn. This is the evening after he eats a store bought wrap, so much peanut butter "it would make you sick," a whole watermelon, and the blueberries snack in the afternoon. At midnight he eats three melons, popcorn, and more peanut butter.

And whose fasting style is this? For what purpose? It sounds like a gimmick diet fast to me.