Dana, while I laud your desire to be fact-based, rational, and concerned for people’s welfare, have you considered that in our modern world we’ve essentially engineered so many safety features that evolution can no longer work? We’ve got automobiles with airbags, crumple-zones, passenger cages etc. so you can text & drive with impunity. We’ve got a medical system that (if you can afford it) somewhat mitigates atrocious diets and a sedentary lifestyle. Everywhere we look, the consequences of folly are dampened and thus evolution has little or nothing to work with.

Surely what we need are more fad diets, not fewer? Surely we need sufficiently mad ideas that, if practiced, will reliably remove from the gene pool those unsuited to pass on their lack of intellect and common sense? Otherwise we’re heading straight for the world depicted in the movie Idiocracy. So let’s hear it for zero-water fasting, planking high above city streets, jumping from aircraft without a parachute, wrestling polar bears, and whatever else Instagram can transiently empower!