With diets, liking it is pretty much essential to staying on it, as far as I can tell from myself and people I know. e.g. I’ve been on Tim Ferriss’ slow-carb diet for a year and a half, and it’s great, but only because I like all the food on it already and it suits me. If it didn’t I’d have quit in a week. So I laughed at the bit you quote, but I’d say in practice it’s not far off the mark and I laughed because it implies my first sentence.
Liking a diet may be necessary for it to have positive health consequences, as you say, but for most people it’s not sufficient. So it’s probably a mistake to treat “X diet has positive health consequences” as equivalent to “I like X diet” when uttered by most people. (For example, I might be able to experimentally demonstrate the latter and demonstrate the opposite of the former for the same diet and speaker.)
With diets, liking it is pretty much essential to staying on it, as far as I can tell from myself and people I know. e.g. I’ve been on Tim Ferriss’ slow-carb diet for a year and a half, and it’s great, but only because I like all the food on it already and it suits me. If it didn’t I’d have quit in a week. So I laughed at the bit you quote, but I’d say in practice it’s not far off the mark and I laughed because it implies my first sentence.
Liking a diet may be necessary for it to have positive health consequences, as you say, but for most people it’s not sufficient. So it’s probably a mistake to treat “X diet has positive health consequences” as equivalent to “I like X diet” when uttered by most people. (For example, I might be able to experimentally demonstrate the latter and demonstrate the opposite of the former for the same diet and speaker.)
I took it as literary allusion in a place where such may not have been suited to something in a literalist genre. Which may count as a mistake.