Resources
BOOKS
Bales, Connie Watkins (ed.), and Ritchie, Christine Seel.
Handbook of Clinical Nutrition and AgingTotowa, NJ:
Humana Press, 2003.
Dangour, Alan (ed.), Grundy, Emily (ed.), and Fletcher,
Asrtrid.Ageing Well: Nutrition, Health, and Social
Interventions.Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2007.
Lam, Pat.Nutrition: The Healthy Aging Solution.Carol
Stream, IL: Allured Publishing Corporation, 2004.
Watson, Ronald R.Handbook of Nutrition in the Aged, Third
Edition.Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2000.
ORGANIZATIONS
Meals on Wheels Association of America, 203 South Union,
Alexandria, VA 22314. Telephone: 703-548-5558.
Website: [www.mowaa.org]
National Institute on Aging, Building 31, Room 5C27, 31
Center Drive, MSC 2292, Bethesda, MD 20892.
Telephone: 301-496-1752. Website: [www.nia.nih.gov]
United States Administration on Aging, 330 Independence
Avenue, SW, Washington, DC 20201. Telpehone:
202-619-0724. Website: [www.aoa.gov]
United States Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition
Information Center, 10301 Baltimore Avenue, Depart-
ment of Agriculture, Beltsville, MD 20705-2351. Tele-
phone: 301-504-5719. Website: [www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/]
Judith L. SimsShangri-la diet
Definition
The Shangri-la diet is not a diet in the usual sense
of a set of meal plans or detailed instructions about
calorie intake and nutrition. The book that was pub-
lished in 2006,The Shangri-la Diet, is perhaps better
described as a discussion of a psychological theory
about human appetite than a diet book strictly speak-
ing. The core of the author’s theory is that people gain
weight because they have been conditioned to have a
strong association between food and flavor, which
keeps the appetite demanding more of a specific source
of calories in order to continue tasting the flavor. If a
person can break the association between flavor and
food intake, they can lose weight because they won’t
feel hungry as often or as intensely. The book suggests
several ways in which this association can be broken,
thus leading to lifelong reduction in calorie intake with
relatively little physical or emotional distress. As one
newspaper reporter describes the diet, ‘‘... it seems
that you may eat whatever you wish under the
[author’s] plan, but you just won’t want to.’’ The diet
has generated considerable controversy since its pub-
lication, not only in regard to its theory of appetite and
weight control, but also about the role of expert review
and clinical trials in evaluating new diets.
The name of the Shangri-la diet comes from a
novel titledLost Horizon, written in 1933 by James
Hilton about a mythical paradise called Shangri-la,
hidden from the world somewhere in the Himalayas
and guided by the wisdom of a Tibetan lama. The
word Shangri-la entered English common speech as a
synonym for a utopia or Garden of Eden when Frank
Capra directed a movie based on Hilton’s novel in- Seth Roberts, the author ofThe Shangri-la
Diet, maintains that he chose the name of his diet
because of its association with an earthly paradise.
He told an interviewer in 2005, ‘‘ [I picked the name]
because it puts people at peace with food—like being
in Shangri-la, a peaceful place. It reduces or eliminates
food compulsions, such as eating between meals and
eating late at night. It is also a kind of ideal diet, just as
Shangri-la was a kind of ideal place.’’
Origins
Seth Roberts, the originator of the Shangri-la diet,
is (as of 2007) a middle-aged (b. 1953) professor of
psychology at the University of California, Berkeley;
he is not a medical doctor or nutritionist. He has said
in the course of several television interviews, including
a November 2005 segment with Diane Sawyer on the
ABC News programGood Morning America, that the
Shangri-la diet emerged over the course of some years
of self-experimentation coupled with a chance discov-
ery during a visit to France in 2000. With regard to
self-experimentation as such, the paper available on
the official website of the Shangri-la diet is essentially
a discussion of self-experimentation as a potentially
fruitful approach to generating topics for further
research; it is not a report on the Shangri-la diet by
itself.
According to this paper, which Roberts published
in 2004, he experimented with his own body systems for
over 10 years concerning other issues before focusing on
weight control. He began with acne and then decided to
study his long-standing problem with awakening too
early in the morning and feeling tired most of the day.
He states that he first noticed this problem in 1980. By
experimenting, he noticed that he could improve the
quality as well as the duration of his sleep by skipping
breakfast, exposing himself to an hour of morning light,
standing up for 8 hours a day, and ‘‘seeing faces on
television in the morning.’’ Roberts concluded from
these apparently unrelated changes in food intake and
other activities that human beings are still better suitedShangri-la diet