Food faddism

A fad diet is a diet that is popular for a time, similar to fads in fashion. Fad diets usually promise rapid weight loss or other health advantages, such as longer life. They are often promoted as requiring little effort and producing a 'quick fix'. In many cases, the diet is characterized by highly restrictive or unusual food choices, which can cause serious health problems. This modern cult of healthy eating is made up of innumerable sub-cults that are constantly vying for superiority. ... Like consumer products in commercial markets, each of these diets has a brand name and is advertised as being better than competing brands. 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 ... The specific cult whose 'science'-backed schtick a person finds most convincing usually depends on his or her identity biases.:9–13The basic principles of good diets are so simple that I can summarize them in just ten words: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables. For additional clarification, a five-word modifier helps: go easy on junk foods. Follow these precepts and you will go a long way toward preventing the major diseases of our overfed society—coronary heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis, and a host of others ... These precepts constitute the bottom line of what seem to be the far more complicated dietary recommendations of many health organizations and national and international governments—the forty-one “key recommendations” of the 2005 Dietary Guidelines, for example. ... Although you may feel as though advice about nutrition is constantly changing, the basic ideas behind my four precepts have not changed in half a century. And they leave plenty of room for enjoying the pleasures of food.:22The weight of evidence strongly supports a theme of healthful eating while allowing for variations on that theme. A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention and is consistent with the salient components of seemingly distinct dietary approaches.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. A fad diet is a diet that is popular for a time, similar to fads in fashion. Fad diets usually promise rapid weight loss or other health advantages, such as longer life. They are often promoted as requiring little effort and producing a 'quick fix'. In many cases, the diet is characterized by highly restrictive or unusual food choices, which can cause serious health problems. Celebrity endorsements are frequently used to promote fad diets, which may generate significant revenue for the creators of the diets through the sale of associated products. A competitive market for 'healthy diets' arose in the 19th-century developed world, as migration and industrialization and commodification of food supplies began eroding adherence to traditional ethnocultural diets, and the health consequences of pleasure-based diets were becoming apparent.:9 As Matt Fitzgerald describes it: Sylvester Graham, of Graham cracker fame, is often given credit for creating the first fad diet in the 1830s. Graham promoted a religiously motivated vegetarian diet that emphasized an anti-industrial, anti-medical 'simpler' or 'natural' lifestyle, with meat and other rich, calorie-dense foods being declared sinful. Many fad diets were promoted during the 19th century. One of the most effective self-promoters was Bernarr Macfadden, who relentlessly promoted the idea that nearly all diseases were caused by toxins in the blood from poor diet and lack of exercise, and that nearly all diseases could be cured through fasting, eating the correct foods, and physical exercise. The modern fad diet originated in the 1930s. This was the decade when the first liquid diet drinks were marketed, when the grapefruit diet, first became popular, and when the Zen macrobiotic diet was developed, although it did not become a fad for another generation. Most fad diets fall into five general groups: Fad diets are generally restrictive, and are characterized by promises of fast weight loss or great physical health,:9 and which are not grounded in sound science.:12 A typical weight-loss fad diet requires 600 to 800 calories per day, compared to 2,000 or more for a healthy adult. 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. Fad diet tend to under-emphasize physical activity, and tend not to provide followers with the skills and knowledge they need for long-term maintenance of their desired weight, even if that weight is achieved.