Fad diet
[9][10] At best, fad diets may offer novel and engaging ways to reduce caloric intake, but at worst they may be unsustainable, medically unsuitable to the individual, or even dangerous.
[1][2][4] The Federal Trade Commission defines fad diets as those that are highly restrictive and promoting energy dense foods that are often poor in nutrients.
[13][14] Several factors can cause someone to start a fad diet, such as socio-cultural peer pressure on body image, self-esteem and the effect of media.
[2][6] The restrictive approach, regardless of whether the diet prescribes eating large amounts of high-fiber vegetables, no grains, or no solid foods, tend to be nutritionally unsound, and can cause serious health problems if followed for more than a few days.
[1][2] Fad diets generally fail to address the causes of poor nutrition habits, and thus are unlikely to change the underlying behavior and the long-term outcomes.
[26][35][37] According to David L. Katz, "efforts to improve public health through diet are forestalled not for want of knowledge about the optimal feeding of Homo sapiens but for distractions associated with exaggerated claims, and our failure to convert what we reliably know into what we routinely do.
[42] Improving dietary habits is a societal issue that should be considered when preparing national policies, according to the World Health Organization.
[13][9][24][45][47] The word "diet" comes from the Greek diaita, which described a whole lifestyle, including mental and physical, rather than a narrow weight-loss regimen.
[48][49] An early dietary fad is known from about 500–400 BC, when athletes and warriors consumed deer livers and lion hearts, thinking these products would impart benefits such as bravery, speed, or strength.
[50] In the Corpus Hippocraticum, Hippocrates, a Greek philosopher and physician c. 460–370 BC, describes his views on human health, as being primarily influenced by alimentation and the environment we inhabit.
He made several recommendations, some of which being: walking or running after eating, wrestling, avoiding drinks outside of meals, dry foods for obese people, never missing a breakfast and eat only just one main meal a day, bathing in only lukewarm water, avoiding sex, and the more dangerous "induction of vomiting", which he considered particularly beneficial.
[18] In the classical world, what foods were eaten, and how much, played an important role in ethical, philosophical, and political teachings and thinking, centered on the ideas of luxury and corruption.
Food was for sustenance alone, overindulging was morally and physically bad, at least a manifestation of a lack of self-control, but at worst leading to further passions and greed of other luxuries.
[12]: 9 As Matt Fitzgerald describes it: This modern cult of healthy eating is made up of innumerable sub-cults that are constantly vying for superiority. ...
The recruiting programs of the healthy-diet cults consist almost entirely of efforts to convince prospective followers that their diet is the One True Way to eat for maximum physical health ...
His influence was such that he was accused of encouraging melancholia and emotional volatility on Romantic youth, making girls "sicken and waste away".
[18] His views on women's diets and appearances worried his contemporaries, such as the American physician George Miller Beard, who fretted that young ladies may live their growing girlhood in semi-starvation because of their fears of "incurring the horror of disciples of Lord Byron".
[13][18] In 1825, Jean Brillat-Savarin wrote about a low carbohydrate diet and focusing on chewing and swallowing to better taste food and supposedly eat less.
Designed from a religious motivation, Graham promoted a raw-food vegetarian diet that was lower in salt and fat, emphasizing an anti-industrial, anti-medical "simpler" or "natural" lifestyle, opposing the meat and other rich, calorie-dense foods produced in great quantities in the industrial era, declaring them "sinful".
He became a controversial figure, an evangelical New England preacher and speaker, with his spartan views on nutrition at a time where Americans' diets were primarily made of meat and white bread, by advocating adamantly in favor of raw vegetarian food and whole-grain food, authorizing but limiting meat, and forbidding highly refined or commercially baked white bread.
After his death in 1851, his followers, dubbed "Grahamites", most of them being women but also including famous men such as John Harvey Kellogg of cornflakes fame, continued to advocate vegetarianism, temperance, and bran bread.
[56] The use of amphetamines, initially designed to treat narcolepsy, skyrocketed when doctors began prescribing them for appetite suppression and the treatment of depression, becoming a high success in the diet industry.
[51] Later, and although it did not become a fad for another generation, the Zen macrobiotic diet was developed by the Japanese philosopher George Ohsawa, purporting a "yin and yang of food" to help maintain the body's balance, and proposing a grain-heavy diet composed of 50–60% of whole grains (e.g., brown rice), discouraging refined or processed food and certain cooking techniques and utensils.
Macfadden was one of the most effective promoter of diets in history, as he is believed by historians to be largely at the root of 20th- and 21st-century health and fitness practices in America.
[59] In 1997, the American Heart Association (AHA) "declares war on fad diets [...] to inform the public of misleading weight loss claims".
[6][77] An analysis of the top trending diet-related queries on Google's search engine between 2006 and 2016 reveals that diet practices are highly variable and ever changing.
[6][55] In Sweden, in 2005, the Atkins diet was at the crux of a controversy, when Dietician Annika Dahlqvist [sv] started recommending it to her diabetic patients, which prompted an investigation by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health (Folkhälsoinstitutet).
