Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2011, as a reaction to an Antena 3 Equipo de Investigacion documentary aired ‘this Monday’. The 5 million copies sold, the 10-euro book price and the 6,000-euro clinic comparison are 2011 figures.
This Monday, Antena 3’s Equipo de Investigación (a Spanish TV investigative programme) aired the documentary The Dukan Diet, or the Business of Losing Weight. I have to say that while Equipo de Investigación has done good investigations until now, this time I honestly believe it didn’t side with the truth but with a multimillion-euro business. They twisted facts, altered words and left out the medical opinion of specialists who could offer a very different view of diets.
In short, they’re out to take down Pierre Dukan, the author of the famous, miracle-working Dukan diet.
Why go after Pierre Dukan?
Dr Dukan makes it possible, for €10 (the price of his book), to get results you wouldn’t get by spending €6,000 at specialist clinics. That puts the profitable business behind the cult of the body in serious trouble, a business that moves billions every year around the world.
Is the Dukan diet dangerous?
According to specialists speaking in private, away from the cameras, the Dukan diet is no more dangerous than any other diet. Let’s start from the fact that the word diet itself already means danger, because it changes the eating habits our body was used to. And we shouldn’t forget that being overweight carries an enormous risk of heart attack, and an overweight person needs to lose weight as soon as possible.
Any diet can cause anxiety and fatigue, because it deprives us of something we want. At no point in the whole documentary did they treat obesity as an addiction, and make no mistake, obesity is an addiction to food, and in any detox process our body will react in many different ways.
Victoria Bernal tells us that the first and second phases of the Dukan diet are the most dangerous for our health, because these are the phases in which we lose weight quickly and limit our intake of carbohydrates and calories, so a person may feel weak, tired and fatigued. However, adding oat bran reduces that drop in energy to some extent. Once the diet allows us to eat everything again, the danger to our health has passed.
“The Dukan diet is very dangerous, above all for weight-loss clinics, which in France were directly affected by the success of Pierre Dukan’s book. Now people fear the same will happen all over the world, causing losses of millions for the industry.”
Oat bran has been criticised
Oat bran is the key ingredient of the Dukan diet, a diet based on protein and with no carbohydrates at all in its first phase. That’s where oat bran comes into play: it is a food rich in carbohydrates, among many other properties, and it also has a gastric balloon effect in our stomach, reducing our appetite.
Dukan is criticised for turning his diet into a business
Every morning I get up with one idea in mind: making money. And Dukan has a product that works, as thousands or millions of people can show. For the first time, Equipo de Investigación had trouble finding anyone willing to speak badly of Pierre Dukan’s diet, since everyone who had tried it was satisfied, with one exception. Was it the exception that proves the rule, or was it the daughter of a doctor? That’s right: as it happens, she was the daughter of a doctor who belongs to the group of professionals who want to sink Dukan.
Dukan has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide and now runs his own line of food supplements in supermarkets. Is he guilty of doing what specialist weight-loss clinics do?
I don’t see specialists criticising liposuction
It has been said that the diet worked perfectly for the people who tried it, and that once they gave it up they went back to their original weight. Come on, give me a break! It’s like quitting smoking and then trying a cigarette. You’d go back to smoking as much as before, and the same goes for alcohol and any other addiction.
Has anyone ever warned you that if you have liposuction and don’t change your eating habits, the liposuction will do you no good? Well, that’s how it is. After liposuction, if you keep eating the same way and don’t exercise, within a few months all the fat they removed will come back.
In short: I’m not in favour of any kind of diet. I’m more in favour of eating healthily from a young age and exercising regularly. However, when I see so many organisations all pulling in the same direction against one person, I can’t help wondering whether there are purely economic interests behind it, because that’s how this world works. Let’s not forget that many products have been taken off the market because they had one problem: they were very effective and hurt the interests of certain companies.
A few years ago the WHO said olive oil was harmful to health, so it’s an organisation I don’t trust much, especially after learning that, like most organisations, it sells out to economic interests. And let’s not forget Antena 3 itself, which some time ago welcomed Pierre Dukan as a special guest on its programme Espejo Público, praising his professional work, and today sets a trap for him by questioning his professionalism.
The Dukan diet is a matter of faith. I imagine it is neither as good as people say nor as bad as they want us to believe. I’m happy to hear opinions and criticism about this view. But before you criticise harshly, ask yourself whether you start from the premise that, in this life, business is business 🙂
Featured image: BBFrance, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
