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Oct. 25, 2024 - Dr. Oz Podcast
42:22
Negative Calorie Foods & Extreme Diets Explained | Dr. Oz | S7 | Ep 105 | Full Episode
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We told you about zero calorie foods.
Now everyone's talking about negative calorie foods.
The body is programmed to burn calories if you give it the right fuel.
Can you really chew your way thin?
Plus, dangerous diet trends.
I was looking for a reset button.
But is the cotton ball diet or the feeding tube diet healthy?
Do you eat anything besides what goes through your nose?
It's See It to Believe It Month, coming up next.
We'll save lives today.
day We are great and healthy.
Today's show goes inside the web, deep inside, revealing the new online diet crazes and extremes revealing the new online diet crazes and extremes many of you are commenting, blogging, and posting about.
So we're going to start with the new phrase, negative calorie foods.
Many of you are talking about them, but do you really know what they are?
We're going to tell you what they are and lots more.
Jenna Wolf goes to one of the country's top metabolism research labs to find out if negative calorie foods really work to speed up your metabolism.
And Dr. Drupinski is here as well with the new online diet extremes that will shock you.
But first, it's the show topic that actually created the most buzz on social media this year.
Zero calorie foods.
We investigated these foods that claim to curb your cravings and cure your sweet tooth without gaining weight.
Today, our investigation continues with a new trend that's currently dominating diet blocks.
It's called negative calorie foods.
But what are they?
Are they safe to eat?
And can you really chew your way to thin?
Negative calorie foods.
They're a key component in one of the latest dieting trends, promising a new safe and easy way to shed pounds.
Go online.
You don't have to look far to find a negative calorie plant.
They're everywhere.
And so are so-called negative calorie foods like celery, cucumbers, lettuce, apples, even grapefruit.
The idea?
When you eat negative calorie foods, your body burns more calories digesting them than you ingest.
And the more you eat, the more you lose.
We've told you the truth about zero calorie foods.
Today, the bottom line on negative calorie foods.
Will they lead you to victory in the war on fat?
Here's how these negative calorie foods claim to work.
Eat an apple, an orange, and a mango salad, let's say, right?
Put them all together.
It's got 175 calories.
Your body uses 220 calories, in theory, working hard to digest that salad.
That means you've actually burned off an extra 45 calories from your stored fat even while you were eating.
Audience, what do you guys think about that?
Does that sound too good to be true?
Sure it does.
Sounds too good to be true.
A little suspicious, huh?
Yeah.
What do you think?
Yeah, I agree.
If I could actually do that, if I give you those foods, would you eat them?
Sure.
Why not?
Give it a shot.
Why not, right?
Are you suspicious about the math that it's possible to eat food and lose weight because of it?
No, I don't know.
Not sure.
I'm not sure.
There are a lot of folks who are stuck in the middle.
I actually am a little skeptical about the concept, but I understand the appeal of these foods, and so I was curious if the science actually supports the hype.
So I sent Jenna Wolf, journalist, fitness expert, and of course one of my core team experts, to one of the top labs in the country that studies and researches the science of metabolism.
Here is what she found.
Hey Dr. Oz, we're talking today about foods that cause you to lose weight.
Yes, you heard me correctly, I said lose weight.
These are so-called negative calorie foods.
And to see if this stuff really works, we came down here to one of the epicenters of metabolism research in the United States.
We're here at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.
I'm going to play the role of guinea pig here to see what effect, if any, these so-called negative calorie foods play on the body.
Mind you, if this works, it could be the holy grail of dieting, if it works.
I'm here with Dr. Todd Miller.
He's the director of the Weight Management Laboratory here.
Todd, what's going to happen now?
What are we doing?
Well, Jenna, different foods metabolize differently in the body, so what we're going to do is measure whether or not these so-called negative calorie foods actually have any effect on your metabolism.
Okay, great.
Now, you haven't eaten anything at all today, correct?
No, I've eaten nothing.
I'm actually starving, not even coffee.
Can I eat something now?
No, not quite yet.
First, we have to measure your resting metabolic rate.
Now that's the rate that my body breaks down calories completely at rest, right?
Without food?
That's correct.
So what we're going to do is we're going to hook you up to this machine.
This is a CosMed metabolic heart, and we're going to measure the amount of oxygen that your body's consuming at rest.
By knowing how much oxygen you're burning, we can calculate how many calories you're burning.
Well, let's do that then.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
Are you ready?
Yeah, let's do it!
Let's go!
Okay, okay.
Oxygen in, CO2 out.
My resting metabolic rate?
It's my starving metabolic rate!
Okay, Jana, the test is over.
Do you want to know how many calories you're burning?
Yes.
Without moving a finger, without eating any food at all, you're burning 1,437 calories per day.
Great.
Can we eat?
Yep, let's eat.
This is what is sometimes referred to as negative calorie food.
So I got together with our medical team and we looked up on the internet.
What are some of the key foods that are supposed to give us negative calories?
So you have your cucumber, apples, celery, carrots, watermelon, strawberries.
All of this comes up to 500 calories, which will be consumed by me right now.
This is good.
This is a lot.
This is a lot of food.
Celery, apples, cucumber, watermelon, strawberries, carrots.
This is a lot of food.
Alright, well I'm not hungry anymore.
I'm sure you're not.
That was a lot of food.
That was a lot of food.
Yeah.
So now we're going to run the test again and we're going to see whether or not your metabolic rate has changed after eating that meal.
So we're going to see an estimate of how many calories my body burned while eating all of it.
That's exactly right.
So we're going to sit back down and we're going to put the mask on and we're going to take the test again.
Let's do it.
So I have to sit here for another 15 minutes, but this time I won't get the results.
Those are going straight to Dr. Oz.
Jenna Wolfe is there.
We'll get to those results in a second.
But this is your sweet spot.
You live for this.
I love data.
I love knowing what's going on inside my body.
I love knowing how we process food, how it turns into caloric output.
This was like a toy land for me.
I love this.
You're welcome.
I apologize.
Thank you so much.
You're so fantastic for sending me down.
We even fed you.
Yes, you did, because that was a well-balanced meal, let me tell you.
So, ready to hear your results?
Yeah, I'm dying to.
She's dying to.
Dying to.
All right, let's go to the videotape here.
These are the scoreboards for you.
Okay.
The resting metabolic rate we heard in the pack, which was 1,437 calories.
That's pretty typical, by the way, for a lot of women.
That's my metabolism before doing anything without eating it.
That's how many calories I'm burning throughout the course of the day.
And, of course, everything is added to that, but if you do nothing else, that's not a lot of food.
Right.
So the question is, what can we do to increase that number to make it a more livable number?
Exactly.
So the little experiment involved you eating that 500-calorie gourmet meal I prepared for you.
So good.
So tasty.
Drolly, she says.
All right, so that meal actually, your results showed that you burned 72 calories just to get through the meal.
Just eating that meal?
Just that one meal.
So, Dr. Oz, what happened to the 500 calories that I just ate?
So you think you ate 500 calories.
And if it had been butter or something bad for you, it would have been.
500 calories would have gone to your hips, so you would have to exercise off.
But you didn't really eat 500 calories.
Your body thinks you ate 500 calories minus the 72 because you burned off 72 calories.
Based on the food I was eating.
Based on those specific foods because they tend to change your body and trick your body.
This is a huge breakthrough because fundamentally what we're saying is that you can actually get a discount.
Imagine going shopping and getting, you know, 20% off of all the food you could eat.
That means you can get away with stuff you couldn't have gotten away with before.
So, in theory, just three meals of that very nature, you'd have to burn off 216 calories.
Those are free calories, basically.
They're just doling them out to you.
That's, you know, running a couple miles.
It's a lot of activity.
Basically, what we're saying is your metabolic rate goes from a depressingly low 1,437.
The new metabolic rate becomes 1,653.
Just by eating the right foods.
Yes.
This is a big deal, everybody.
Big deal, because small little shifts like that every single day of your life add up.
And to really explain what it means, I brought in a world expert.
Let's join a colleague of ours.
He's a leading authority in disease prevention.
He's also the author of the Negative Calorie Effect, Dr. Neil Barnard.
You've been studying this for decades, and there is a ton of misperception, including among brainiacs like Jenna here who didn't really know much about them.
Right here.
What are these foods actually doing to us?
How is it possible we get a free ride on some foods?
Well, because they work with your natural biology, every cell in your body has burners in it, just like your kitchen has a burner.
These foods turn that on in a process called thermogenesis.
So as soon as you start eating them, you start getting this extra burn that you wouldn't have otherwise.
So specifically progenic, the 216 calories a day that in theory she'd burn through, What does that actually mean?
Okay, so she comes into the laboratory, she hasn't eaten a thing, and she's burning calories fairly slowly.
As soon as she begins eating, her body starts this thermogenesis process, so minute by minute she's burning more and more and more calories.
Now, had she eaten something different, a big stick of butter, some heavy cream, not going to work.
Those are calories in that they don't have that thermogenic effect.
Are you surprised, just at its very face value, that there are some foods that violate that basic principle that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie?
Of course.
I think we all are.
And I never really factored metabolism into this at all.
It was always about calories.
And now for the first time, I watched it happen.
I watched my metabolism actually get better because of the foods that I was eating.
And it changes my perception on how I'm going to eat and obviously what I'm going to eat.
And Jenna, that was one meal.
Right.
If we do this every meal, in our research we've done this for as much as 14 weeks or even longer, and what we discover is if you go back into the lab, eat exactly the same meal, your burn is that much greater.
And we've gone out to two years, two and a half years, the weight never comes back.
So what are these negative calorie effect foods?
That's what you're thinking right now.
We're going to call from that, from now on, we're not going to call it negative calorie foods because they're not negative.
You don't actually lose calories, but they have the effect of moving in that direction.
So we'll call them negative calorie effect foods.
How do they melt that and turbocharge your metabolism?
and we're going to find that when we return.
Next, find out which foods can have a negative calorie effect How do they fuel your metabolism and help you burn more calories?
We shed some light on how this works.
The body is programmed to burn calories if you give it the right fuel.
Coming up next.
The truth behind one of your favorite foods.
Why is this mozzarella different from the cheese that's found in a lot of other pizzas?
We go inside America's Pizza.
It's about what's hiding in the crust.
What you need to know.
Plus...
New chemicals reach into our food from these boxes.
Oz investigates.
And our chemicals in your cookware.
We sort through which are the safest.
All new Oz.
That's coming up tomorrow.
Today we're investigating foods that have the negative calorie effect.
These are foods that speed up your metabolism and help you melt fat just because of what they are.
And I'm back with Neil Bardard and Jenna Wolf.
You're a fitness expert.
It's hard to wrap your mind, I bet, around this concept.
Well, you know why?
It's because metabolism was always that thing that we blamed for, you know, not being able to lose weight.
Oh, I have a slow metabolism.
There's nothing I can do.
Well, guess what?
There is something you can do, and it's as easy as eating the right foods.
And I think that, for me, is a novel concept.
I'm sure for people out here, they are wrapping their head around the fact that now there's actually something they can do.
So let's get into the details about these foods.
Dr. Bernard says that there are three key components to a negative calorie effect foods.
They are water, fiber, and you can't have any fat.
So again, you've got lots of water, foods with lots of fiber, and you can't have any fat in them.
So Dr. Bernard, give us a bunch of ideas, Neil.
Well, I should say that there are traces of fat, but you don't want to have lots of extra fat because it doesn't give you really any burn at all.
So it's not a zero-fat diet, but you don't want to be adding fatty foods to it.
About fiber, you get an extra benefit, and that is not only is it a component of these foods, but it also tricks the brain into thinking you've eaten a lot, when in fact fiber has effectively no calories of its own.
So that's an added benefit, too.
So let's be the categories, the different foods, and I'll put a whole bunch back up here of examples of foods that you say are negative calorie effect foods, but put them in a couple different categories.
Sure.
Really four.
Fruits.
Now, I'm going to leave out the fatty fruits like avocados or olives, but otherwise, Just about all of them fit.
Vegetables, including the starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes, perfectly fine.
The legume group, that's beans, peas, lentils.
They are your fiber champions.
And whole grains, emphasize whole.
What you notice, all of these foods are plant-derived.
I always tell patients, when you eat your plants, you look good in your pants.
So plant foods are going to help you.
What do you think about that?
Pants and plants.
I'd love to think about you and your pans, and that's a beautiful visual.
I'm going to take a step away from that, though.
And I notice there's no protein on here.
You don't stress protein as a calorie-burning, metabolism-boosting food.
Great question.
There is protein in all of those foods.
If you take a piece of spinach, send it to a laboratory, they will call you up and tell you that there's a substantial amount of protein in it.
Between 25 and 50% of the calories in typical green vegetables are protein, which is why that bowl that gives you the meat, they're eating green vegetables all their lives.
Those are vegans.
So how is it that these negative calorie effect foods, the ones behind us, actually have the ability to change the metabolism?
Well, think what happens when you swallow a food.
It doesn't just automatically go on your body.
Your body has to break it down.
Your body has to absorb it.
It gets into the bloodstream, and if you make fat out of it, then you've somehow got to turn an apple into fat.
That's a challenge for certain foods, and so your body, in doing that work, is burning up a whole lot of calories.
Now, what happens if you're eating, say, chicken fat?
That's a whole lot like human fat.
It doesn't take much work to add that to your body fat.
Come on over here.
I made just a demonstration that you will love.
Jenna loves fires.
She's a very fiery personality, so she'll appreciate this.
Let's bring it to life.
With a very simple demonstration.
This little piece of tissue paper, Jenna, represents the usual kinds of foods we always have, processed foods.
This log Represents the negative calorie effect foods that Neil has been talking about today.
Come close.
Don't be scared.
What's the worst that could happen?
Believe me, there's a long list.
You don't want me to get into it.
So, processed foods, right, like this piece of paper, don't require much work for your body to digest.
So, go ahead and do the magic.
Just light it?
Light it on fire.
So, your body is struggling.
What are you doing?
I'm figuring out how to work it.
Give me a second.
Oh, my goodness.
I got it.
I got it.
Oh, here we go.
You ready?
Stand back.
Look at that.
So, watch.
Boom, it's gone.
Now, lots of action here.
Whoa.
But what happened to happen was nothing, right?
What went into your body was rapidly digested without your body wasting a lot of energy.
That's very different from this log.
This log represents negative calorie effect foods because it takes a lot of work for the body to digest this.
Your body's over here trying its best to digest stuff.
And it can't digest fibers, as Dr. Bernard mentioned.
And I put my negative calorie food on there and slowly it revs up the body's need to digest it so you burn off calories.
You're not running.
Your body literally is just trying to get past the food you just ate.
And this is exactly why that fire is gone.
You're not burning calories.
This fire is raging.
And despite the fact you may have eaten the same 500 calories, the generalists of the world are over here burning off a bunch of them without doing any work, which gets you mad at them if you're this person.
You're saying, how can they possibly be losing weight when I ate the same number of calories and I'm gaining weight?
That's why we don't eat paper.
So if anyone is wondering, that's the lesson learned.
So Neil, why is it we are just now learning about these negative calorie foods?
I really think we've been focusing on all the wrong things.
Don't eat carbs, don't eat bread, don't eat this, don't eat that.
And what we've been neglecting is the body is programmed to burn calories if you give it the right fuel.
And that's what we're doing.
Up next, what we're going to do is give you my negative calorie effect meal that you can eat all day long.
You're going to adore this!
Thanks, guys.
Beautiful day.
Next, we've got the perfect recipe that will put negative calorie foods to work.
Not only are they low in calories, but they'll help your body burn the fat too.
We put it all together.
It's a big, robust vegetable hug for an Oz approved meal you will love.
Next.
We're back talking about negative calorie effect foods.
That means not only are they low in calories, but they'll help your body burn off fat.
So today, I'm introducing, for the first time, the negative calorie effect soup that passes the Oz Test.
And the best part is you can eat it all day long.
So here to show us how you can make this negative calorie effect soup are 10 women from my audience.
You guys ready to do this?
All right, let's start off.
First off, you start with the crux of any soup, veggie broth.
After the broth's in there, then you gotta add some onions, cause you wanna give the broth some flavor, then some celery, quintessential negative calorie effect food.
Cauliflower's gonna add bulk.
You wanna feel full after eating after all.
Green beans will give your meal a little bit of crunch, just the right amount.
Cabbage makes your soup feel hearty, wanna keep you satisfied.
Zucchini adds texture.
And those turnips, I love those.
Make the soup very thick.
Make sure you stay full.
And then finally, of course, garlic and hot chili.
You want both to give it a kick.
We don't want any of these foods to taste bland.
Then you top the soup off with spinach because it cooks really fast.
So put it at the last second.
And, my friends, you end up with this soup, which is...
It's like liquid sunshine.
It's a big, robust vegetable hug.
Think about it as a garden in a warm rain.
You put it all together all at once.
You've got to give it a shot.
And don't forget, because it's all made with negative calorie-effect foods, you can eat this all day long.
So cuddle up next to a fire no matter where you are.
The rest of these will be found at DrIs.com.
When we come back, Dr. Drew Pinsky is here with the most extreme diets that you have to see to believe.
Nice job.
Coming up next, the strangest diet taking the internet by storm.
This is a bizarre behavior.
Could this also be one of the most dangerous trends out there?
What you need to know about the cotton ball diet.
These are people with eating disorders.
Next.
The truth behind one of your favorite foods.
Why is this mozzarella different from the cheese that's found in a lot of other pizzas?
Inside America's Pizza.
It's about what's hiding in the crust.
What you need to know.
All new laws.
That's coming up tomorrow.
I thought I'd seen every crazy diet fad out there until I found this one online.
The cotton ball diet.
Users claim just one cotton ball dipped in juice can be eaten to fill your stomach, so you feel full and you lose weight.
This extreme diet has taken the internet by storm.
In fact, how-to links are popping up in chat rooms or on YouTube, even pro-anorexia sites, making this one of the most dangerous diet trends out there.
We've seen the corset diet, the baby food diet, even the tapeworm diet.
But the newest extreme weight loss fad may be the most dangerous of them all.
The cotton ball diet is taking the internet by storm, with how-to links popping up in chat rooms, on YouTube videos, even on pro-anorexia websites.
It's controversial, dangerous, and some say, potentially life-threatening.
So, what is it?
Today, what you really need to know about the Cottonball Diet.
Joining me is addiction expert and my friend, Dr. Drew Pinsky.
So how do these trends gain so much traction?
You know, the real problem today, the vector, much like the infecting sort of pathway for these kinds of phenomena, these behaviors, is now media and especially social media.
You said pro-anorexia website, just the notion of a pro-anorexia website.
Think about that, that that is something that has the power to infect other people.
Why do you think these kinds of strange addictions are taking place?
I mean, I'm seeing more and more and more of them.
How do they compare to other kinds of addictions?
Well, it's complicated.
I mean, the relationship between eating disorders and addiction.
To call this a diet is almost a misname.
You advocate for a healthy diet.
That's a diet.
This is a bizarre behavior in an attempt to manage diet.
And these days, there's a lot of crossover between addiction and health.
Dietary problems, eating disorders.
Let's show everybody why this diet is so extreme, why it's so dangerous for you.
And the best way to do that is with a very simple animation, which you'll immediately grasp.
So, here's your mouth, right?
Back of your throat.
There's the cotton ball.
You take the cotton ball with that juice.
It's got a little sponge effect.
It goes into your stomach, mixes it with maybe other cotton balls you may have taken to put in there.
It does begin to fill up and, you know, for that reason, make you feel like you don't want to eat anymore.
But here's the problem.
Your body can't digest cotton.
We weren't built to digest cotton.
The cotton balls can get together in one little spot, pull together, and they create something called a bezoar, a giant mass of undigested material that gets trapped.
It can get trapped down here in your intestines.
To be fair, bezoars are gross.
They're disgusting.
This is a picture of a bezoar, by the way.
Take a look at this.
That's a bezoar.
They smell bad, they're disgusting, and they'll obstruct.
Which is why what you're putting in your body becomes such an important issue.
Come on back.
Let's go through...
It can obstruct.
People need surgery.
They can die of those obstructions.
I mean, people think obstruction, oh, what's the big deal?
It's not constipation.
It's a bowel obstruction.
And oftentimes, the things that are causing it are things you put in your body that you shouldn't have.
And this is a great example.
So what do you have in a cotton ball?
You sometimes have cotton.
I say sometimes because sometimes it's synthetic.
It could be actually polyester material.
And then they always make it nice and beautiful and white by using a bleach.
And that's not so good for you either.
Wait, slow down.
Bleach isn't good for me?
I'm shocked.
Are you kidding?
That's what's so bizarre about this.
In what world do people eat cotton?
Right?
It's bizarre.
But to that point, who's most vulnerable for this?
Well, let's be clear.
This is not a diet.
These are people with eating problems, eating disorders.
And the people that are vulnerable are the very people that show up on these pro-anorexia websites.
And the other problem is the media hype around these things.
So often, it's a single event.
I remember back in the days when people would report that the kids were pouring different pills into a bowl and having a party.
Remember that whole phenomenon?
Yes, I do.
I think that maybe happened once.
But the way the media reports it, it seems like it's something that's sweeping the nation, so there's very much of a me-too phenomenon.
I'll try that.
Then, of course, those pro-anorexia websites sign off on it.
So you tipped us off as might be the case here.
So we did a little homework.
Why are women all over the country apparently using this cotton ball dye to lose weight?
Is it truly a thing, a phenomenon, or is it media hype?
So my producers spoke to young girls in chat rooms, And they went on those pro-anorexia websites that Dr. Drew mentioned earlier, trying to find people who are using this cotton ball diet.
And these are the real conversations.
One person said, yes, I did it for two days.
It didn't work.
Another person in one of these chat rooms said, I've done it a few times and yes, it keeps me full, but I get really tired and I usually pass out after eating the cotton.
Listen, and you and I know passing out is an indication, I don't care how old you are, to go to the emergency room.
It's called syncope.
So if the cotton makes you pass out, that is essentially a medical emergency.
So we did some digging.
Yeah.
I started looking around to find out how this extreme diet started.
How did the rumor get going in the first place?
And you mentioned, actually, that this video that was online that you'd seen.
We went back and looked at this video.
You're looking at it right now.
It spread like wildfire.
In fact, it's so popular, it is actually the only video we could find on newscasts in the last two years.
And yet the press spread it as though it's something routinely done, as though it's spreading the country.
Everyone's eating cotton.
So the girl in this video, we found her.
Her name is Antonia.
She's the equivalent to patient zero if you're looking for where the virus started.
And we actually got in touch with her.
And she finally broke down and for the first time revealed that her video was a joke.
She never meant it.
Never meant it to be as serious as it has become.
Now she declined to come on the show, which I respect, but she did send us this video message.
I was about 15 when I first tried the cotton mold diet.
Models were eating cotton so that they wouldn't be hungry and they would lose their appetite and I just didn't believe that it was possible so I went home and as a joke made a video of eating this cotton and to my surprise it had Ended up being completely blown out of proportion.
There were many negative side effects from eating that cotton ball involving my stomach and my digestive tract.
I do not recommend even trying it as a joke.
Dr. Jewel, how do you respond to that?
Well, I mean, you kind of realize it's not a diet.
She's soaking the cotton ball in essentially sugar, which is juice.
I mean, so there's nothing dietetic about this.
This is not a diet.
This is an eating disorder.
And it's sad that women feel, A, that they have to live up to some standard, the models she's talking about, that they have to live up to that.
They have to go to extremes where they're putting themselves in harm's way.
And then people who are really at risk are going out and acting out their eating disorder.
It's very scary.
So when we come back, we're going to show you a diet that says you can lose one to two pounds in a day and you'll never be hungry.
You got to see what it is to believe it.
That's next.
Coming up next, another extreme diet that claims to drop pounds fast.
It was a reset button for me.
But is it too good to be true?
I did not crave food.
How far would you go to lose weight?
Why not just eat less?
Wouldn't that be easier than having someone put a tube down your nose?
Coming up next.
We're back talking about the most extreme diets you have to see to believe.
And this next extreme diet made me shake my head in disbelief.
It's called the feeding tube diet.
Let me just show you how doctors claim it works.
You take a feeding tube, it's about the size of a string of spaghetti, and you put it in the nose, all the way down the swallowing tube, down into your stomach.
Then you hook up a very low calorie, protein and fat rich solution to feed your body for 24 hours a day for up to 10 days.
And when you're actually doing it, that's sort of what it looks like.
They'll have you swallow some water through a straw as you suck in, the tube will go into your nose.
We do this in the hospital for other reasons.
We want to empty things out from your stomach or feed you if you're really, really sick.
But with this diet, you're restricted to 800 calories a day, slowly titrated in the whole time.
So I asked investigative reporter Elizabeth Lemie to find out the truth about the feeding tube diet.
Take a look.
The Feeding Tube Diet is designed for women like Alejandra.
She's about 30 pounds overweight and wants to shed those unwanted pounds.
This is her second time undergoing the Feeding Tube Diet.
The first time she lost 17 pounds but gained some of the weight back due to an unexpected injury.
Alejandra believes the Feeding Tube Diet will be the jump start she needs to lose the extra weight.
But what is a typical day like for a woman on this extreme diet?
We followed Alejandra to find out.
Every day for 10 days I will get up and mix one scoop of the protein with a liter of water.
I will fill the pouch with the protein and then this is good for 12 hours of feeding.
Alejandra will have to repeat this procedure again every night before she goes to bed.
Surprisingly, Alejandra says the feeding tube diet does not significantly interfere with her daily life.
I'm able to exercise every day and continue on with my routine just as I was doing before.
Sometimes when I'm walking down the street, I see people occasionally looking at me because they assume I'm sick, but it doesn't bother me because it's all worth it.
The feeding tube diet may seem extreme, but Alejandra thinks it's the weight loss catalyst she needs.
So this is the end of day one and I feel really energized and I feel ready to shed off the pounds.
Let's talk about why this diet is gaining some traction.
I've got addiction specialist, Dr. Drew Pinsky.
He's back, along with Jacqueline and Alejandra, both of whom have been on this program.
Jacqueline lost 15 pounds.
How are you, Jacqueline?
Good.
Lost 15 pounds after doing a 10-day cycle with the feeding tube.
And Alejandra, I'll come to you in one second.
So I'm going to show a picture of you from before and from after, if that's okay.
Of course.
So we'll put them up on the screen so everyone can see them at home.
Now, here she is before.
And here she is right after being on one of these cycles.
So I see the difference, but the bigger question to me is why would you resort to such an extreme measure to lose the weight?
Once I understood what the diet was actually about, it wasn't so extreme.
It was more about a 10-day reset to get my health and lifestyle back.
Do you eat anything besides what goes through your nose?
No, not for the 10 days.
I just drank water.
Just water and the nose feeds.
Correct.
And then after you're done the program, then?
Then I began to eat.
And it was effortless.
I literally never felt hunger, never felt withdrawal.
I kept the weight off.
It's been over a year, and I remained exactly the same way.
I was energized.
I never felt tired.
I remained full the entire time.
And it just became a lifestyle.
It was literally like a reset button for me.
Okay.
So you did eat differently, I gather, after using a 10-day program than before, or you would have gained the weight back again.
Yes.
And Alejandra, let me, if I can, discuss your case.
You lost 17 pounds.
Yes, I did.
And again, one of these 10-day cycles got you there.
Here's a picture of you from before and right afterwards.
And what prompted you to try this feeding tube diet?
Okay.
I found that it was very easy to do.
I didn't have to count calories, measure, think about what I was eating.
I was looking for, like she said, a reset button.
I have a sugar addiction.
And I was looking to lose weight initially very fast and then my plan was to continue on with a healthy diet after I lost the initial.
Were you hungry at all when you were on this 10-day plan?
No.
I felt no hunger and no cravings at all.
It's really surprising.
Why not just eat less?
Wouldn't that be easier than having someone put a tube down your nose?
I tried that.
You tried that.
And then when food is available and you're craving it and you have a sugar craving or a carbohydrate craving, it's there and you eat it.
But with the tube, the cravings are just not there.
Dr. Drew, why don't women go to such extremes?
It does seem to be mostly women doing this diet, by the way.
Probably some men, you may know.
I mean, listen, it's not even just why do we go to extremes.
It's why can't we help people without going to these extremes?
And why do people have to go to these extremes?
And whether or not...
The real question here is not so much, does these things work?
Is it good medicine?
Is it the good practice of medicine to put a feeding tube in somebody?
For instance, why don't you just drink the liquid as opposed to having a feeding tube?
Too much to think about.
Too much to prepare.
Too much to mix.
Our relationship with food in this country is very strange, isn't it?
In other parts of the world it's looked as a very intimate partnership.
In our country it's the enemy.
It's the enemy we have to fight against.
And we don't do a good job of helping people manage their appetite and understand the compulsions around food and when we have emotional issues around food we can really get out of hand very easily.
I can relate very strongly to what you're saying.
I've got carbohydrate addiction and I've got a whiff of an eating disorder too.
And so to hear that you could do this, a reset, very compelling to somebody like me, not healthy for me, not good medicine if somebody had me do this.
So it's a very complicated topic, and it's no one answer to that question, why we go to extremes.
Were either of you worried about regaining the weight?
Because that's something that I had heard periodically would be expected even if you did this.
I did gain some weight back.
I had surgery, leg surgery, so I did not continue on exercising.
You do have to have a maintenance plan to go on after you finish this.
But I did, I have to say, I did kick that sugar habit.
I must say, I'm intrigued.
I'm intrigued.
So when we come back, let's meet the doctor who invented this diet.
He's going to be here.
We're going to ask him if the feeding tube diet is a gateway to an eating disorder or if it's something people should be trying.
Stay with us.
Coming up next, Dr. Jew and I have some tough questions for the doctor and his unusual diet It's basically a controlled starvation diet.
Does it really help his patients keep the weight off?
And is it safe?
Next.
The truth behind one of your favorite foods.
Why is this mozzarella different from the cheese that's found in a lot of other pizzas?
Inside America's Pizza.
It's about what's hiding in the crust.
What you need to know.
All new odds.
That's coming up tomorrow.
The Feeding Tube Diet is designed for women like Alejandra.
She's about 30 pounds overweight and wants to shed those unwanted pounds.
Alejandra believes the Feeding Tube Diet will be the jumpstart she needs to lose the extra weight.
But what is a typical day like for a woman on this extreme diet?
We followed Alejandra to find out.
Today we're talking about the safety surrounding an extreme diet that uses a feeding tube and claims you can lose one to two pounds a day.
Dr. Drew is back along with Dr. Oliver DiPietro.
He's an obesity medicine specialist.
He invented the feeding tube diet.
There are so many diets out there, Dr. DiPietro.
Why would you want to use this technique to get folks to lose weight?
Well, I felt that we need more options in this war against obesity.
That really, as a profession, we were losing the war against obesity.
So I heard of this diet.
It had started in Italy about 10 or 15 years ago.
I went there, met with the surgeon that had started doing this.
He was doing it differently with a very low carbohydrate diet without fat.
So I modified it, brought it to America, started using it on my patients four and a half years ago and noticed this dramatic weight loss and published our first 281 patients that had greater than 90% weight loss without hunger because of the nutritional ketosis which is produced by this type of diet.
It's basically a controlled starvation diet.
Are you worried that folks are gonna walk away after the 10-day experiment with the wrong message that it's okay to starve themselves?
Well, actually, Dr. Oz, it is not a starvation diet.
No, by definition, a starvation diet is less than 400 calories per day.
So it's a very low calorie diet.
It's done under medical supervision.
It's a meal replacement diet.
It's definitely an extreme diet.
It must only be done under medical supervision.
But my intention was to use this as a jump start because we have this enormous treatment gap in patients that are overweight where they're not...
Heavy enough to qualify for bariatric surgery, a lot of patients don't want to take medications.
We need more options for that patient who's in the BMI of 27 to 35, and this is what this targets, patients in that treatment gap.
And are folks gaining the weight back after this pretty acute abrupt drop?
Excellent question.
We actually tell patients that they must do something after or they will gain all the weight back.
So we insist that patients make a deal with us.
I will only treat patients if they agree to go on a lifestyle modification program.
They must do something else after to keep the weight off or else they will gain it back.
Dr. Drew, it sounds a bit like yo-yo dieting.
You and I are concerned with good medicine, right?
And our question is, is this good medical practice?
Two great fears, then.
So here are women that are not obese taking it for appearance purposes.
That's my fear that it's going to be overused, number one.
And number two, are we screening for eating disorders first when the people come to us?
What kind of mental health, psychiatric screening goes on to really understand the population, to really select the right population for this and not trigger a full-blown eating disorder?
True, true.
But what we do, what I do in my practice, and I've done over 300 of these, and any of the 15 obesity medicine specialists doing this diet in the U.S., Screen for eating disorders.
We do screen for bulimia, for anorexia.
Not appropriate for them.
We do get them psychological help.
It's hard to find psychologists that...
Again, bulimic anorexia is very secretive.
They don't tell you.
You've got to understand how to pull that out of them.
We've all seen them.
And they're going to be attracted to things like this.
Absolutely.
I consistently turn them down.
That's why we have a telephone screening before, and then the doctor has to see them before accepting them.
So I do believe that they must be screened for eating disorders.
One of the concerns, the women advocated this idea of resetting, and a lot of people that, a lot of patients I have do the resetting treatments.
They go down, they take EvoGain and all this.
I don't know what they're doing, but they're not resetting.
So I don't know what that is.
The whole resetting phenomenon of the brain, faulty.
Your computer resets.
Your brain does not.
You can change your brain chemistry, and maybe that will help you in sustaining, make recovery possible from an eating disorder, from a carb addiction, from a drug addiction.
But everybody, drop the idea that you reset.
That's a computer reset.
Your brain is much more complicated.
Let me speak to folks at home because they've heard a lot.
Some of them will be enticed to think about this.
I'm going to recommend for now that you do not think about doing these extremes, at least yet.
It introduces unnecessary health risks from my perspective.
And until I see more data, I'm concerned that it will jumpstart folks.
But it's not going to offer you the long-term lifestyle changes for sustainable weight loss that we offer here on the show and that I pray you think about as your main way of getting healthy.
We'll be right back.
Coming in February on The Dr. Oz Show.
Exclusive interviews.
What's next for Charlie Sheen?
Jamie Lynn Siegler speaks out on her secret battle with MS. Nalanda Foster opens up about her invisible disease.
In-depth investigations.
The truth behind America's biggest foods.
And it's see it to believe it month.
Dangerous diet trends.
Coming this February on The Dr. Oz Show.
It's the online show that everyone is talking about, Making a Murderer.
The documentary chronicles Stephen Avery, who is serving a life sentence for killing photographer Teresa Halbach.
He says he is innocent.
The last time a murder case captured the attention of America like this was probably O.J. Simpson, so I've asked Dr. Drew Pinsky to stick around for an extra 30 on this online craze that everyone is obsessed with.
Why is everyone in this country talking about Stephen Avery?
I think it's the moment is right when people are very upset with people in authority perhaps misusing their authority or injustice being done.
Black Lives Matter movement has got a lot of momentum and it's built around these same kinds of feelings that these documentarians brought out in this case.
Folks are agonizing.
I know we have in my household about whether this gentleman's innocent and whether he's in jail despite that.
I have this very strange phenomenon.
I have spoken to literally dozens of profilers and mental health experts, and 100% of them tell me the same thing.
He is guilty.
He will re-offend if we get him out.
He should not be in prison.
Isn't that crazy?
How crazy that is.
So guilty?
He will hurt someone if he's free.
He will definitely re-offend, but the system that put him in prison was so flawed in how they did it that we have to have a just system, but we better watch that guy very carefully.
Everyone agrees that's the guy that did it.
Doesn't that scare you all?
It scares me.
I'm the one saying it.
It's crazy.
But the case that he has people even more upset is his nephew, Dassey.
Brenda Dassey, which was a young autistic kid with an IQ of maybe under 70, who was railroaded in, who frankly should have been a witness to the case.
That kid, that's a tragedy.
We can get goosebumps thinking about it.
Listen, guys, be careful what you wish for.
Yes, we all want the system to work properly.
It was sloppy.
It was unconscionable.
But you put that guy out in the world, it's not going to go well.
Thank you very much for all the advice.
It's always scaring me.
Remember, happy and healthy starts at home.
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