The Asa Banana Diet... what is it??

The Asa (Morning) Banana Diet was a phenomena of the late summer/early fall of '08 here in Japan. Circulated by the popular social networking site Mixi and propagated by television news, the Asa Banana Diet is simple: eat bananas for breakfast, drink only room temperature water, lunch, dinner, snack all before 9pm and no desert. Oh, and you have to go to bed before midnight.

The pseudo-science of it is that the luke warm water and high vitamin content of the bananas is supposed to jump-start your metabolism. It was brought into ridiculous fad status when one of Japan's few overweight female tv stars tried the diet and lost 15 pounds in six weeks.

The Banana Boom

Imagine walking into your supermarket and your supermarket has an assortment of bananas ranging in price from USD $1 - 5 per bunch depending on locale and brand. Now imagine them all being sold out. This was the scene greeting shoppers for a good month or more last year. The most irritating thing to me about the banana diet was the total lack of bananas for my morning breakfast cereal. Lemming impulses in the Japanese psyche caused a total break in banana availability, at a rate so fast and unexpected that by the time demand was met it was far too late to matter.

The Banana Boom also changed the face of consumer products. Just as you might see things like Acai berries and blueberries become diet hot in the US, so too did the consumer image of bananas become a healthy diet-friendly food. Processed food makers started making banana everything from cookies, pastries and cakes to hone the diet-conscious eye to energy bars, protein shakes and low calorie jellies.

I would laugh at this a bit if I didn't know first hand that it worked. I was shocked one day that my usually intelligent and on-the-ball dad ordered a fruit bear claw and when I asked him about his diet without skipping a beat he assured me that it was fine because it had fruit in it. He then went on to explain that there would have been trouble had he gone for the chocolate muffin!

We associate foods with healthy points as being somehow better for us, even if we can look logically at the ingredients list and clearly see otherwise. Banana dieters went from eating only bananas in the morning to eating banana-heavy processed foods which, depending on nutrition, nullified any positives from their supposed diet.

Not the First One, Not the Last One

Japan, honestly, is king of the fad diets. Every time I watch tv there are literally four commercials on at any given time shilling different diets. These rotate in and out of favour depending on which celebrities have done it or what the buzz is. Sometimes these explode into fads. As far as single-food diets go, before the Banana Diet there was the Tomato Diet, and the Konnyaku Diet. Both had very similar premises and similar results.

The show that caused the big boom for the Banana Diet was a show where several diets were highlights by different "chubby" tv stars. Other diets included the cookie diet and a diet that required specific food pairings to be acceptable. Like, it was okay to eat steak but you had to drink oolong tea first, things like that.

Kumiko Mori did the Banana Diet and lost 15 pounds and her results were pronounced astonishing. But were they, really? 15 pounds in 6 weeks translates to 2.5 pounds per week which is a little higher than the normal weekly weight loss recommended by most diet websites. Her results were better than many of the other girls but... and not to be disrespectful, she also started off much heavier than the other girls. At Kumiko Mori's weight for the number of calories she consumed she would be predicted to lose more than the other girls who were significantly smaller than her. This is said with no ill will meant, but this fact was never exposed on the TV show and I wouldn't think is common knowledge to a skinny obsessed culture like Japan.

Honestly, the best, most successful "diet" of the show was, I thought, MachaMacha and her cycling diet. Really, the idea was simple: healthy diet with some splurging here and there and a committed bicycling routine. She didn't lose nearly as much as Mori did because she was already fairly slim. However the muscle tone and overall shape in the results section was pretty incredible and more than being a fad diet like the others MachaMacha's routine actively encouraged a healthy lifestyle.

Thoughts on the Banana Diet

Honestly, the possible weight loss of the Banana Diet has nothing to do with bananas. The advice is simple: three healthy meals, one snack, no late night snacking, lots of water and no dessert. Put like that doesn't it sound like any other diet? For health benefits I would much rather substitute the three or four morning bananas for a bowl of whole wheat or bran cereal, milk and use that last banana to top it off.

But, you know, I have learned over the years that diets are tricks to keep us motivated/scared of breaking rules. If four bananas is an easier way to remember your calories than 1 cup of cereal, 1 cup of milk and 1 banana then it's worth doing. There is nothing inherently bad about the banana diet, there's just nothing supernatural about it either. Claims that you will lose 10 pounds in a week are just as bogus with this diet as with any other. (and if you are losing 10 pounds in a week, contact your doctor).