Bananas are the World’s Greatest Food.

As an Australian banana farmer and now a banana consultant, I am thrilled to see this great fruit being recognized for what it truly is; Mother Earth’s golden treasure. When you buy your bananas at the supermarket and you place them into your basket, just remember that you have selected the one and only food that has its own gold natural wrapping. The fruit inside has not been touched by human hands. How fantastic is that?

The Banana Diet

With the world in the grip of such difficult times, it is great to see a new and inspiring development on the arena. I am talking about the banana diet that has taken Japan by storm. Since you have visited this Web site you have heard about this amazing diet already, where consuming bananas and warm water for breakfast every day will help you lose weight at a fairly rapid rate. This diet is perfect for the busy person or someone who isn’t the best at sticking to them, much like me. The new banana diet works wonders, as I am on this myself and have noticed a difference in my own weight. This really works.

Health Panacea & Hangover Cure?

Bananas are the best nutritional food available, are great for stomach problems and are also great for a quick energy boost. The best thing I find about them is that they are fantastic for hangovers. Trust me, I know this well.

Banana Man Frank’s Banana Tips

Now for some of my banana selection tips:

• Once you have your bananas at home, you should place them in shaded area in your home, like the kitchen or on your dining table. Do not put them in direct sunlight.
• Do not put bananas in the fridge as they will go black and horrible and lose their nutritional value.
• You can freeze a banana if it gets to the stage of overripe and use it for cooking later on.
• If you have bought an avocado and it is still in a green hard state, grab a ripe banana and put the avocado and the banana both into a brown paper bag, in a few days the avocado will have ripened. You can do this with most fruits. It works well, as I have done this many times before.

What are Those Marks on the Banana?

Selecting the right banana, can sometimes be a difficult decision. You see all kinds of things in the available banana selection at the supermarket, like marks on the fruit and different stages of ripeness.

As for the marks, they usually only appear on the skin and do not affect the taste or appearance on the inside of the banana. You don’t need to worry too much about the marks. Selecting the right colored banana is something you will have to decide yourself, taking in consideration as to when the fruit will be eaten. The riper they are, the quicker they will turn brown. Selecting a slightly green banana may last a week or longer. I suggest you select a few ripe ones and a few green bananas, so this way you can eat bananas every day and enjoy the greatest food on earth.

My Bananas Turned Brown!

One of the most common things people say to me about bananas is, “Well I bought my bananas three days ago, and now they have turned brown.” There are several reasons for this and the most common is that when you buy your bananas and you have most likely selected very ripe bananas, they will go brown and off quickly.

Now, because of where your bananas are grown, say, central America, they have to travel a long distance to get to the wholesaler first and then they are transported to your supermarket. So it takes time, and you have to understand that they will break down within days, occasionally. It also depends on the weather too. If it is warm they will break down quickly. It is not an easy process to get bananas to your kitchen table quickly.

There are a few other factors as well, like growing conditions that often have an effect on the shelf life of your banana, but most of the time your bananas will last approximately one week.

To answer the questions that we’ve been receiving, unfortunately we don’t have an Italian language description of the diet. If any of our Italian visitors wants to summarize or translate the diet in Italian, send us an e-mail, and we’ll post it on the site.

Something about it seems to trigger the “Hit F11 for the prewritten fad diet rant” instinct among health writers, dietitians and other nutrition pundits. They pigeonhole it without even looking into the details.

Here are some recent criticisms of the Morning Banana Diet that have crossed our desk:

“It’s a crackpot fad diet because it doesn’t require exercise!”

Walking is encouraged. Exercise beyond that is optional. But remember that this is a weight loss diet program, not an overall fitness program or a create world peace program or a land a man on the moon program.

There are many worthwhile goals in life, and we encourage people to follow their bliss, and getting fit in the aerobic sense is certainly worthwhile. It’s just that it’s not necessary to be aerobically fit to lose weight, and weight loss is the single, limited goal of the Morning Banana Diet.

Karen Collins reports on research that found that “weight loss during programs focused on dietary change produced two to three times greater weight loss than programs focused on exercise.” And the New York Times reviewed the literature and found that “few people, an overwhelming body of research shows, achieve significant weight loss with exercise alone,” although “exercise has benefits beyond weight reduction.” Individual nutrition and medical experts may or may not agree with this accessment of exercise, but it’s an area where educated, knowledgable people in the field have different opinions and interpret research results differently, so a weight loss program that does not emphasize exercise may be controversial, but it is not completely irrational or outside the mainstream.

“It’s a crackpot fad diet because you can’t continue it for the rest of your life!”

Or putting it another way, “You’ll get sick of bananas.” Or “Diets that limit you to a few foods aren’t sustainable.”

As anyone who reads our forums or the comments on the diet on other sites knows, you can in fact continue it for the rest of your life, if you wish, because many people have been eating bananas for breakfast for their whole lives up till now. “I’ve been accidentally doing this diet!” is the sort of thing we constantly hear.

If bananas are not for you, the diet permits other fruit. Granted, bananas are really cheap, and don’t require cutting up or dishwashing, so are perfect for getting you out of the house quickly in the morning, but other fruits fit the diet fine, as the rules make clear.

Is the diet monotonous? We chuckle at this, because it directly contradicts another criticism, that the diet allows you to “eat anything.” You just can’t win, can you. Folks, you’re only eating a couple of hundred calories in bananas a day. Is eating fruit everyday as part of an otherwise varied diet monotonous? Tough.

Of course, the diet in fact allows not only other fruit, but any other food you want for breakfast, as long as you eat it 30 minutes after the bananas. This is in line with standard advice from American dietitians to wait 20 minutes after eating to let your sense of satiety catch up with what you’ve eaten. (The punchline here is that if you’ve eaten yourself 80 percent full with bananas, 30 minutes later you in fact aren’t usually going to be hungry.)

“It’s a crackpot fad diet because it lets you eat pizza and fries for lunch!”

The Morning Banana Diet has some soft edges that seem to unnerve many critics. It seems to allow you one or two extra snacks during the day if you want them. It seems not to limit the quantity of food you eat at meals. It seems not to limit the types of food you can eat for lunch and dinner.

But let’s look at what the diet actually says.

You can eat “normally” for lunch and dinner. The diet doesn’t say you can eat “whatever you want” or “as much as you want.” It says “normally.” But quantity is in fact limited. You can eat until you’re starting to feel full. That’s called “80 percent full” in Japanese, or “7 out of 10 on the fullness scale” by American dietitians. If you normally eat pizza and fries for lunch, you can continue to do so, as long as you remain cognizant of your feeling of satiety and stop when you reach a 7. Will you lose weight? If you were maintaining a particular weight before, you probably will lose weight. You’re still eating crap food, but less of it. Remember, the Morning Banana Diet is to help you lose weight, not make you fit, unclog your arteries, or whiten your teeth.

But in fact, the Morning Banana Diet gently encourages you to eat better. The Japanese version of the diet suggests cutting your rice serving in half and finding substitutes for fried foods (the shogayaki ginger pork set menu rather than the karaage fried chicken set menu at your lunch counter). In our rules and our members’ forum posts you will find similar suggestions, internationalized for the non-Japanese dieter. But is there an absolute rule about eating better? No.

All this softness, all this leaving it up to the dieter to make decisions, all this Japanese subtlety, it seems to freak some people out. If you can’t cope with this, and you need guidance to the gram on how much to eat and specific menus telling you what foods to eat, you’re going to need to look for another diet. As the Morning Banana Diet Rules page says, we’re all different, and no diet works for everybody.

“It’s not magical!”

This is the number one “complaint” about the Morning Banana Diet among its critics. That the diet isn’t magical. That it works because you eat fewer calories, not because it’s magical. That there’s nothing magical in bananas. That there’s nothing magical about not eating after 8:00 p.m. That you lose weight simply because you eat less.

Well, duh.

Sorry we didn’t come up with a magical diet. Again, quoting from the often cited but apparently not read Rules page, first paragraph no less:

Every diet has rules. If a diet works for you, it’s simply because the rules have had the effect of making you eat less food (nothwithstanding whatever magical claims a diet may make). Diet rules generally do this by making eating a little harder or less convenient, through restricting when or what you can eat. Throw in a little “scientific theory” for motivation, and you have a diet. And remember, no diet works for everybody. So what are the Morning Banana Diet rules? Here’s a synopsis collected from various sources …

How can someone complain that the Morning Banana Diet is not magical and imply that we are claiming it is, when the very first paragraph of the most prominent page on the Web site is the above?

Bottom line

So what conclusion is to be drawn from all this? The Morning Banana Diet is a healthy, sustainable diet for weight loss and weight maintanance that asks you to eat fruit (you know, the stuff that the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Ameicans also asks you to eat — in greater quanitity than the Morning Banana Diet asks you to eat?) to fill yourself up, be conscious of your satiety, and regularize your meals and bedtime. It doesn’t spell out everything you put in your mouth to the nth degree, and if you don’t have the judgment to fill in the blanks, then your eating difficulties are not the sort that this diet can effectively deal with, so you need to keep looking. The diet is a bundle of behavioral rules of thumb and motivational techniques whose goal is to get you to eat less, as measured in calories. It works for some people and doesn’t work for others, which unfortunately is a characteristic of any diet.

Dr. Wansink is a 48-year-old Iowa native who somehow manages to talk like a California surfer dude. But he must be a smart guy, since he’s a professor at Cornell and the current Executive Director of USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion — the guy in charge of developing 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and promoting the Food Guide Pyramid.

So why are we discussing him on the Morning Banana Diet blog? Dr. Wansink is making an appearance because of his recent blog post titled “Morning Banana Diet Scandal.” The post appears in a couple of versions, at Amazon.com and at Prevention Online, and apparently it was also sent out in an e-mail newsletter.

Scandal?! What scandal? Reading the blog post, Dr. Wansink informs us that a television show was aired in Japan that promoted the Morning Banana Diet with falsified scientific data and fake subtitles to an interview of an English speaking university professor.

Update: Dr. Wansink corrected his blog posts on Amazon and Prevention,
removing the references to a falsified television broadcast.

Those of us who follow the Japanese dieting scene might react, Again? Will they never learn? That’s exactly what happened in January 2007 with the Natto Diet on a show produced by Kansai Television!

But wait a minute … I never heard of any scandal involving the Morning Banana Diet. When was this? According to Dr. Wansink, this emerged “about a month ago.” (This, despite his claim earlier in the article that he got this story “6 months ago” from the wife of a Japanese student.)

At any rate, I never heard of the Morning Banana Diet scandal (or more properly, Asa Banana Diet, since he’s talking about the Japanese version of the diet) because it never happened. Somehow Dr. Wansink combined and confused two differnt Japanese diets and two television shows that were broadcast a year and a half apart. The Natto Diet scandal is described in excruciating detail at the Japanese Wikipedia and Wikinews sites and many Japanese blogs and news sites, and there are a number of videos about it on YouTube. There is exactly nothing anywhere on the Web outside of Dr. Wansink’s blog posts about any Asa Banana Diet scandal.

But it makes a good story. Just like the stories in Mindless Eating. And I wonder now how reliable those are. For 2007 alone Dr. Wansink lists 13 academic journal publications. When does he find time to surf? With a schedule like that you can’t blame him for being sloppy with his sourcing and facts.

But what does Dr. Wansink think of the Morning Banana Diet? That there’s not anything “magic” about it. Sure, you will “lose weight if you eat only bananas for breakfast and no dessert for dinner,” and sure, “the high fiber in bananas will keep you full,” and sure, “it’s likely you would weight 20-30 pounds less at the end of a year” by cutting out dessert every day as the diet recommends. But it’s not “magic,” and anyway some woman told him six months ago the diet “ended in scandal” a month ago. Or something like that.

We’ve collected up some more information and links on Brian Wansink and his Morning Banana Diet Scandal gaffe. (Maybe he should have just settled for calling it the Morning Banana Diet Scam.)

This is only a short excerpt, which explains some of the claims of Asa Banana Diet promoters, and the funniest parts are not included. For instance, the ravenous Mori films herself getting up in the middle of the night for a snack, and she postpones the diet for a day because she’s just too hungry. They also followed her around pre-banana, adding up the calories in her normal diet.

And Gail dug up another, perhaps less neutral, source of scientific support for the Morning Banana Diet: those boffins at the “Dole Nutrition Institute” (is this like McDonald’s “Hamburger U”?). In a detailed Web page entitled “The Morning Banana Diet: Health Impact” the Dole researchers (or Dole’s ad agency’s copywriters — it’s not entirely clear) not only mention resistant starch, but the contribution of nutrients from bananas to satiety and fat burning.

Convinced? I don’t really know what to make of all this. It seems like scientific overkill for such a simple diet.

A competing toymaker, Epoch, has announced for December release a banana toy, the Mekurumeku Otona no Banana, that allows you to repeatedly peal an infinite mini-banana. Sound effects were recorded by a voice actress. The toy fruit will come in four colors, and the “riper” model’s sound effects may be slightly R rated. Below is a preproduction prototype photograph and a product information sheet for retailers. The actual product may differ.

As members of the Morning Banana Diet forum know, one market that had run out of bananas stocked the banana section in the produce department with Morning Banana Diet books instead. How can you do the diet without the bananas?

But the worst is yet to come: not only is there banana donut mix in the banana section, but there are a bunch of Meiji’s new Rich Banana Chocolate bars there. Well, maybe you can eat the banana chocolate for your 3:00 p.m. chocolate snack — that’s allowed under the diet.

And the banana chocolate is actually pretty good. Even better than the new Lotte Banana Crunky ice cream bar. There is certainly a banana boom in Japan, but it’s somehow gone off the rails from a weight loss diet to a weight gain sweets boom.

The Meiji Rich Banana Chocolate bar, by the way, is white chocolate with lots of dehydrated banana solids as the third ingredient after cocoa butter and sugar. It doesn’t taste at all like artificial banana (one of the simplest artificial flavors to make, the one you make on the first day of Food Science 101). White chocolate uses cocoa butter without cocoa: in other words, they remove the cocoa from the cocoa mass, leaving the cocoa butter, replacing cocoa with a flavor. In the United States the flavor is almost universally vanilla (even though the USDA allows other flavors), but in Japan you find green tea and strawberry and all kinds of other white chocolate.

The Lotte Banana Crunky bar contains banana juice and solids, although somewhat buried in the other ingredients.

And another expat who’s peeved by the diet.

On the other hand, two thirds of the populations of the United States and Australia are overweight or obese.