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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. [12] : 9–13
Many fad diets, at the time called "foodie", [51] were promoted during the 19th century. [5]
Lord Byron was obsessed with his appearance, as he had a "morbid propensity to fatten". He tried several diets, such as his favorite meal of biscuits and soda water, and others which he devised, such as the "vinegar and water diet" in the 1820s, which was very popular at the time, and involved drinking water with apple cider vinegar. [18] [51] He would cycle perpetually between self starvation, measurements, and binge eating. His influence was such that he was accused of encouraging melancholia and emotional volatility on Romantic youth, making girls "sicken and waste away". Indeed, according to Byron, "a woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only truly feminine and becoming viands". [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. [51] This idea would later reappear in 1903 under the name of "Fletcherizing", derived from its author's name Horace Fletcher, "a self-taught nutritionist". Fletcher promoted chewing all food until it was thoroughly mixed with saliva, to the point that it was swallowed in a liquid state. [51]
"Banting" or "to bant" became a highly popular synonym of dieting in 1863, when William Banting published "A Letter on Corpulence", which detailed the first known low-carbohydrate diet, which he followed from Dr. William Harvey, a surgeon known for a starch- and sugar-free diet treatment for diabetes. He immediately lost weight, from 202 to 156 pounds eventually. Banting is credited for writing the first diet book, which at his death in 1878 sold more than 58,000 copies over a total of 12 editions published between 1863 and 1902. Although the 2500 copies of the first and second editions were printed at his expenses and distributed for free, in the hopes of "benefitting to the working-class people", he sold later copies. [13] [52]
Around the same time, Sylvester Graham, of Graham cracker fame, is often given credit for creating the first fad diet in the 1830s and is considered the father of all modern diets. [13] The diet recognized the importance of whole grains food. 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". [5] [51] In 1830, he was appointed a general agent of the Pennsylvanian Temperance Society. During his time there, and due to his history, and inspired by the French vitalist school of medicine, he thought nutrition had moral as well as physical qualities, and viewed any desire for food or drink not due to necessity (stark hunger or thirst) to be depravation. Consequently, he viewed gluttony as the debilitating consequence of an unhealthy urge. He was determined to fight against what he perceived as nutritional "debauchery" and gluttony. 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. He also described the use of corsets as "disfiguring" and advocated loose, comfortable clothing, which further attracted women to his precepts. 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. Graham's ideas proved to have a lasting influence on American diet, as the per capita meat consumption dropped gradually in the subsequent years, whereas vegetable consumption increased and Americans started to eat more balanced diets. [5] [13]
The 19th century also saw the first and one of the most dangerous fad diet pills, with the marketing of arsenic pills for weight loss, which not only did not work, but which dieters often consumed more quantity than the prescribed dosage. Some diet hoaxes also appeared, such as the tapeworms diet, where the dieters would purportedly willfully ingest tapeworms in the hopes they would reach maturity in the intestines and absorb food, until the dieter attains the weight loss goal and consumes an anti-parasitic pill to kill and hopefully excrete the worms, if the dieter was lucky enough to not experience gastric obstruction. [18] [53]
The concept calorie restriction appeared under the name of "calorie counting" in the 1917 book "Diet and Health, With Key to the Calories" by Lulu Hunt Peters. [13] [51]
Other fad diets appeared in the 1930s. The grapefruit diet was a low-calorie plan, which became popular and known as the "Hollywood diet", and involved eating grapefruit or its juice with other items such as toast or eggs, totaling about 500 calories per day. [54] Such liquid diets, cleanses and detox diets would prove popular over the following decades with the Master Cleanse or Lemonade Diet in 1941 and Last Chance Diet in 1976. [55] Around the same time, in 1925, Lucky Strike launched the "cigarette diet", relying on the appetite-suppressing effect of nicotine, with the famous marketing slogan "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet". [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. Despite the American Medical Association opposing this use of amphetamines as early as 1943 due to problems of addiction, doctors continued to prescribe them, in addition to barbiturates to reduce the addiction cravings. [13] The first liquid protein diet appeared also in the 1930s with the marketing of the "Dr. Stoll's Aid". [51]
In 1950, another liquid diet appears, the "cabbage soup diet", highly restrictive but promising great weight loss in the first week, at the expense of causing flatulence. [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. [6] [51] [57]
Bernarr Macfadden was another major figure of dieting in the 20th century, taking the legacy of Graham. Macfadden relentlessly promoted a dieting philosophy named "physical culture", 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. 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. [5] [13] He became convinced that all health issues were due to nutrition. He advocated a diet similar to that avocated by Graham, plus regular fasting. His demise happened as a consequence of his extreme devotion to his own ideas: since he was convinced fasting could cure any ailment, he tried to treat a urinary tract blockage he developed in 1955 by fasting, which only caused emaciation which no doctor could undo. [13]
Other notable food faddists of this era include Paul Bragg, Adelle Davis, and J. I. Rodale. [58]
In 1961, Jean Nidetch founded the Weight Watchers. In 1970, the "sleeping beauty diet", using sedative pills to avoid eating, became popular. Slim Fast appeared in 1977, claimed as a "super diet" by having shakes for breakfast and lunch. [51] In 1985, Fit for Life promotes a diet forbidding complex carbohydrates and proteins in the same meal. In 1992, 1995, and 2003, the Atkins diet, Zone diet and South Beach Diets appear successively. [5] [13] [6] The Atkins diet has been described as "one of the most popular fad diets in the United States". [59]
In 1997, the American Heart Association (AHA) "declares war on fad diets [...] to inform the public of misleading weight loss claims". [60] [61]
During the early 2000s, the Paleolithic diet was popularized by Loren Cordain and has attracted a largely internet-based following on forums and social media, [62] in part a tradition of venerating 'primitive' diets and ways of life. [63] This modern fad diet consists of foods thought to mirror those eaten during the Paleolithic era. [64] [65]
The very dangerous cotton ball diet surfaced in 2013, prompting dieters to eat up to five cotton balls at a time to lower hunger, leading to intestinal occlusion and potentially death. [55] [4] Aseem Malhotra has promoted a low-carbohydrate fad diet known as the Pioppi diet. [66] [67] It was named by the British Dietetic Association as one of the "top 5 worst celeb diets to avoid in 2018". [66]
A recent fad diet promoted on social media platforms is the carnivore diet that involves eating only animal products. [68] There is no clinical evidence that the carnivore diet provides any health benefits. [69] [70] [71] Other recent fad diets include the lectin-free diet that has been promoted by Steven Gundry [72] and the pegan diet of Mark Hyman. [73]
Most fad diets promote their plans as being derived from religion or science. [5] Fad diets may be completely based on pseudoscience (e.g., "fat-burning" foods or notions of vitalism); most fad diets are marketed or described with exaggerated claims, not sustainable in sound science, about the benefits of eating a certain way or the harms of eating other ways. [4] [12] : 33, 74, 80, 155
Such diets are often endorsed by celebrities or celebrity doctors who style themselves as "gurus" and profit from sales of branded products, books, and public speaking. [11] [12] : 11–12 [74] One sign of commercial fad diets is a requirement to purchase associated products and pay to attend seminars in order to gain the benefits of the diet. [1] [75]
The audience for these diets is people who want to lose weight quickly [76] or who want to be healthy and find that belonging to a group of people defined by a strict way of eating helps them to avoid the many bad food choices available in the developed world. [12] : 11
Regardless of their evidence base, or lack thereof, fad diets are extremely popular, with over 1500 books published each year, and many consumers willing to pay for diet products, making for an industry worth $35 billion/year in the US. [1] About 14–15% Americans declare having used a fad diet for short-term weight loss. [1] Fad diet is a part of the diet industry with no specific estimation available, with the biggest part being "diet foods" such as light soda, for a total diet industry worth $35 billion/year in the USA. [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. [78]
According to the American Heart Association, a liquid very-low-calorie diet caused at least 60 deaths in 1977. [6] [55]
In Sweden, in 2005, the Atkins diet was at the crux of a controversy, when dietician Annika Dahlqvist started recommending it to her diabetic patients, which prompted an investigation by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health (Folkhälsoinstitutet). [79]
Fad diets are a subset of all named or defined diets, typically identified by being associated by a founding person or organization, making health claims, most often of rapid weight loss.
Fad-diets can be tempting as they offer a quick-fix to a long-term problem.
Even in developed countries, citizens have the right to be provided with good food, but in the United States, for example, many consumers have either wasted their money or harmed their health by various food and diet fads. Many nutrition scientists consider it unethical for "medical quacks" to be making large amounts of money in this way from gullible Americans.
Food faddists in the United States before 1930 were Sylvester Graham, Horace Fletcher, and Bernarr Macfadden. More recent faddists include Adelle Davis, Paul Bragg, and J. I. Rodale.
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