Since you’re a smart reader of The Fit Shack (yes, you! ) you already know that there is no shortcut to weight loss. You know that there’s no magic pill and that it takes a change in lifestyle to get the weight off and keep it off.

If you do opt for a fad or crash diet you just don’t learn new ways of eating and if you’re an emotional eater you certainly don’t learn how to solve that problem.

The Sprinkle Diet

Well guess what? There’s a new fad diet being advertised, maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called “The Sprinkle Diet” (also known as Sensa) and the premise is that by sprinkling some granules on your food before you eat that you’ll eat less and lose weight.

The sprinkles were developed by Dr. Hirsch who focuses his studies on taste and smell. The sprinkles are supposed to heighten the flavor of the food, making sweets sweeter and salty food saltier, tricking your brain into thinking you’re full.

The Sprinkle Diet promises you that you can eat whatever you want without a thought for nutrition or health and that you’ll still lose weight because you’ll eat less. The same video that you’ll see in this link to CBS was what I saw on my local news and the woman who says she has lost over 20 pounds eats all of the sugar-filled, processed, addictive, metabolism halting foods that I choose to stay away from. They will not help you lose weight but even if that isn’t your concern, those foods will not give you high energy.

The MAJOR Flaw

Below I have put together a list of the reasons that I think The Sprinkle Diet is NOT the solution to overeating, however there is one flaw that is so glaring it deserves to be separated from my list below.

The #1 major flaw with The Sprinkle Diet is that the majority of people who are overweight and/or obese eat when they are not hungry and do not stop when they are full!! If you’re overweight you’re very likely an emotional eater, a compulsive overeater, a binge eater, a food addict, or some combination of these.

So even if The Sprinkle Diet tricks your brain into thinking it’s full by using “ingredients” that (according to the news cast I saw) do not need the FDA’s approval (well, that doesn’t really mean anything anyway), then you’ll still overeat just to eat - it won’t matter if you think you’re full or not!

5 More Reasons The Sprinkle Diet is a No Go

Here are 5 more reasons that I don’t recommend The Sprinkle Diet:

1. No nutritional education - This diet is all about eating the fast food, the processed food, all of that food that contains sugar, unhealthy fats, loads of sodium, the highly processed food that will bring your metabolism to a slow crawl (hint: whole foods speed up your metabolism and help you quickly shed pounds). And if you put weight loss aside and only look at health, those are the same foods that lead to inflammation in the body, the #1 cause of dis-ease (you can learn all about that in YOU On A Diet - a must read). If you care about your health and not just losing weight, The Sprinkle Diet is not the way to go.
2. No exercise plan - The Sprinkle Diet does nothing to promote regular cardiovascular activity or strength training. It is designed to be a quick fix and if it does help you lose weight your body will only look like a thinner version of your “fat self” - that’s what happens when you leave out exercise in your weight loss plan. I don’t know about you, but I want to reshape my body with exercise, not just lose weight.
3. Lack of personal growth - Those little sprinkles will not help you learn why you overeat and why you gained weight in the first place. The Sprinkle Diet doesn’t promote personal growth and pride in accomplishment that comes with the achievement of healthy lifestyle changes that include regular physical activity. It does absolutely nothing to help you solve emotional eating or the bottom line issues that are driving you to overeat.
4. Lack of long term results - If The Sprinkle Diet works and and you aren’t concerned with making lifestyle changes you will have to continue to use those sprinkles forever. Could you do that? Sure, if they are still available and if you’re willing to continue paying $60.00 a month (yep, 60 bucks a month) for the rest of your life - well, that’s assuming there won’t be a price increase. And we also don’t know what the long term results will be on your health from putting these sprinkles on your food - look at Splenda for example, that’s a sweetener that greatly enhances the sweetness of your food also, and we don’t have any idea what the long term health effects will be from using it.
5. Lack of naturalness - If you’re into a lifestyle of whole, clean foods then you sure wouldn’t want to use The Sprinkle Diet because it definitely isn’t natural! I haven’t found the ingredients posted anywhere but the media reports that, “the sprinkles are non-caloric and contain artificial and natural ingredients approved for use in food products”. Well what else is currently approved for use in food products and isn’t healthy? Crystalline fructose, high fructose corn syrup, Splenda, natural flavors, MSG, and plain old table sugar. None of them are healthy for you, they don’t help you lose weight, and they mess with the chemical balance in your body. I wouldn’t be surprised if those sprinkles even contain MSG/”natural flavors”, we’ll have to wait and see, though.

The Sprinkle Diet does nothing to help you understand why you are overweight and why you overeat. It’s not a cure for depression, low self-esteem, a lack of nutritional understanding, emotional eating, a sedentary lifestyle, or unhealthy habits. It’s a possible short term fix without any long term health benefits.

And What About…

Here’s something I question about the reports on The Sprinkle Diet - the Dr. Hirsch states that he did a “peer reviewed clinical study of nearly 1,500 people who used the sprinkles on everything they ate without changing their diet or exercise routine” and found that there was an average weight loss of 30.5 pounds in 6 months.

We don’t know who these 1500 people were and the line that they “didn’t change their diet or exercise routine” set off a red flag for me - let’s say that those people were already leading a healthy or semi-healthy lifestyle, exercising regularly and eating healthy the majority of the time, so they were already working on losing weight. Well hey, if you give The Sprinkle Diet to a group like that then of course you’re going to see weight loss - they’re already working on it!

It would be different if it were specified that the group of 1500 were sedentary, sugar addicts who needed to lose on average 100 pounds each - then if you said that they didn’t change their diet and exercise program, while it’s still not a healthy way to lose weight (you’re certainly not getting fit), it would be a true study.

The Cost

If you would consider plunking down $60.00 or more per month for those sprinkles I strongly urge you to put your money into something that will give you lifetime, healthy results - spend 2 of those Sprinkle Diet months and get the 3 months of Shrink Yourself to heal yourself of your emotional eating once and for all. And/or take that money and invest one time in the 6-Week Body Makeover to learn how to change your lifestyle, stoke your metabolism, and drop that weight. If you would consider buying those unnatural sprinkles or any other magic pill there’s no way you can give me any excuses for not going the healthy route.

Yeah, I might sound tough, but when it comes right down to it you deserve to do everything you can to provide a healthy, top-notch energy-filled life for yourself. Start treating yourself like you would treat someone that you love with all your heart and soul and give up the hunt once and for all for the magic pill, the quick fix - those quick fixes add up to a lifetime of continual searching and it’s just not worth it.

Here’s to your health - not only in body, but also in mind and spirit.

Update 6/20/08: Another name for The Sprinkle Diet is Sensa and I now have the full ingredient list of The Sprinkle Diet/Sensa:

1. Maltodextrin
2. Tricalcium Phosphate
3. Silica
4. Natural and Artificial Flavors
5. FD&C Yellow 5
6. Carmine
7. Contains Soy and Milk ingredients

This is exactly what I mentioned in reason #5 above, that I wouldn’t be surprised if the ingredients contained natural flavors/MSG: Natural flavors/natural flavoring is another name for MSG and maltodextrin very likely contains MSG.

You probably already know that MSG is a “flavor enhancer” however if you’d like to learn even more about it I suggest checking out both of those sites as well as Truth in Labeling.org (very interesting stuff!). You can also refer to my posts on natural flavor and MSG.

Update 6/25/08: If you want to learn even more about the health dangers of MSG as well as learn more about the topic of how it is craftily hidden inside many different ingredients that are not even named “MSG”, please read my follow-up post on MSG.

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