How can diet plans be effective for some but not all individuals?
In: Biology
I always recommend the series of articles, [A Chemical Hunger ](https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/). It does a great job of reviewing all of the uncertainty surrounding nutritional science. It also proposes some new avenues for research, (including a rather bold idea for figuring out how lithium affects people’s diets, but that proposal hasn’t been scientifically tested yet).
On your specific question, the answer is that even though every human shares 99.9% of the same DNA, that 0.1% can make a huge difference. For instance, some bodies are better at turning lactose into energy than other bodies are – with the extreme event being lactose intolerant people who don’t gain any calories from milk and cheese because they vomit it. But some people’s bodies are at the other end, and are turning all the various types of food we eat into body fat much more efficiently than other people do. That would have been great for those people during times when food was really scarce, but now it makes those people extremely prone to gaining extra weight, and it makes it harder for them to lose the weight. So some people do a juice cleanse diet and their body responds by releasing excess body fat instead of feeling hungry, while other people do the juice cleanse and their body goes, oh boy free fruit sugars let’s release the hormones to make our body feel hungry so we can turn this delicious fruit juice into body fat.
Those are just some random examples. The point is, while most health advice works for most people, when you hear a weird diet, it’s likely that it only works for some people and not everyone.
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