A Diet of Sweet Nothings

There are reasons why Florida is the country's capital of scammers, spammers, and other assorted sleazebags. A chief one is the state's homestead exemption, which allows debtors to keep their homes even when they have judgments entered against them or when they declare bankruptcy.

This could explain in part why so many fad diets seem to be created there. Not that the diet creators are necessarily thinking of the homestead exemption when they come up with stuff like the "cookie diet," but in a culture of sleaze, such schemes just seem to arise naturally.

I will now make the obligatory statement—"diets don't work." It's been said millions of times, and yet it never seems to get through to the sorts of people who fall for whatever they hear on daytime television, unless what they hear is "eat sensibly and exercise."

And if diets don't work, surely Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet doesn't work. But that didn't stop people like Christina Kane from trying it. Kane served as the anecdotal lede in the New York Times' look at the Cookie Diet on Wednesday. She has, according to the Times' Abby Ellin, "tried everything from the grapefruit diet to Atkins, with no success.

"Then she heard about Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet, which involves eating six prepackaged cookies a day, plus one 'real' meal—say, skinless chicken and steamed vegetables."

Why would she fall for such a transparent scheme? "I thought, 'That diet looks so incredibly easy,' " she said.