Dieting is the practice of eating food in a regulated way to decrease, maintain, or increase body weight, or to prevent and treat diseases such as diabetes and obesity. As weight loss depends on calorie intake, different kinds of calorie-reduced diets, such as those emphasising particular macronutrients, have been shown to be no more effective than one another. As weight regain is common, diet success is best predicted by long-term adherence. Regardless, the outcome of a diet can vary widely depending on the individual.
In nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food.
The Atkins diet is a low-carbohydrate fad diet devised by Robert Atkins in the 1970s, marketed with claims that carbohydrate restriction is crucial to weight loss and that the diet offered "a high calorie way to stay thin forever".
Ancel Benjamin Keys was an American physiologist who studied the influence of diet on health. In particular, he hypothesized that replacing dietary saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced cardiovascular heart disease. Modern dietary recommendations by health organizations, systematic reviews, and national health agencies corroborate this.
A fad diet is a diet that is popular, generally only for a short time, similar to fads in fashion, without being a standard scientific dietary recommendation, and often making unreasonable claims for fast weight loss or health improvements; as such is often considered a type of pseudoscientific diet. Fad diets are usually not supported by clinical research and their health recommendations are not peer-reviewed, thus they often make unsubstantiated statements about health and disease.
Low-carbohydrate diets restrict carbohydrate consumption relative to the average diet. Foods high in carbohydrates are limited, and replaced with foods containing a higher percentage of fat and protein, as well as low carbohydrate foods.
Super Size Me is a 2004 American documentary film directed by and starring Morgan Spurlock, an American independent filmmaker. Spurlock's film follows a 30-day period from February 1 to March 2, 2003, during which he ate only McDonald's food. The film documents the drastic effect on Spurlock's physical and psychological health and well-being. It also explores the fast food industry's corporate influence, including how it encourages poor nutrition for its own profit and gain.
Morgan Valentine Spurlock is an American documentary filmmaker and television producer.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is a non-profit animal liberation research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., which promotes a plant-based diet, preventive medicine, and alternatives to animal research, and encourages what it describes as "higher standards of ethics and effectiveness in research." Its tax filing shows its activities as "prevention of cruelty to animals."
Donald A. Gorske is an American world record holder known as the "ultimate Big Mac fan," having eaten over 32,672 such hamburgers from the U.S. fast food chain McDonald's in his lifetime, earning him a place in the Guinness Book of Records. A resident of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Gorske claims the Big Mac constitutes 90–95% of his total solid food intake. He is featured in the documentaries Super Size Me (2004) and Don Gorske: Mac Daddy (2005), and is the author of 22,477 Big Macs (2008).
A low-fat diet is one that restricts fat, and often saturated fat and cholesterol as well. Low-fat diets are intended to reduce the occurrence of conditions such as heart disease and obesity. For weight loss, they perform similarly to a low-carbohydrate diet, since macronutrient composition does not determine weight loss success. Fat provides nine calories per gram while carbohydrates and protein each provide four calories per gram. The Institute of Medicine recommends limiting fat intake to 35% of total calories to control saturated fat intake.
Gary Taubes is an American journalist, writer, and low-carbohydrate / high-fat (LCHF) diet advocate. His central claim is that carbohydrates, especially sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, overstimulate the secretion of insulin, causing the body to store fat in fat cells and the liver, and that it is primarily a high level of dietary carbohydrate consumption that accounts for obesity and other metabolic syndrome conditions. He is the author of Nobel Dreams (1987); Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993); Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), titled The Diet Delusion (2008) in the UK and Australia; Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It (2010); The Case Against Sugar (2016); and The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating (2020). Taubes's work often goes against accepted scientific, governmental, and popular tenets such as that obesity is caused by eating too much and exercising too little and that excessive consumption of fat, especially saturated fat in animal products, leads to cardiovascular disease.
Intermittent fasting is any of various meal timing schedules that cycle between voluntary fasting and non-fasting over a given period. Methods of intermittent fasting include alternate-day fasting, periodic fasting such as the 5:2 diet, and daily time-restricted eating (TRE).
Diet plays an important role in the genesis of obesity. Personal choices, food advertising, social customs and cultural influences, as well as food availability and pricing all play a role in determining what and how much an individual eats.
Weight management refers to behaviors, techniques, and physiological processes that contribute to a person's ability to attain and maintain a healthy weight. Most weight management techniques encompass long-term lifestyle strategies that promote healthy eating and daily physical activity. Moreover, weight management involves developing meaningful ways to track weight over time and to identify ideal body weights for different individuals.
Criticism of fast food includes claims of negative health effects, animal cruelty, cases of worker exploitation, children-targeted marketing and claims of cultural degradation via shifts in people's eating patterns away from traditional foods. Fast food chains have come under fire from consumer groups, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a longtime fast food critic over issues such as caloric content, trans fats and portion sizes. Social scientists have highlighted how the prominence of fast food narratives in popular urban legends suggests that modern consumers have an ambivalent relationship with fast food, particularly in relation to children.
"Supersize Me" is the seventh episode of season 8 and 207th episode overall of the American animated television series Beavis and Butt-Head. It aired on MTV on November 17, 2011, along with "Bathroom Break".
Nutrition psychology (NP) is the psychological study of the relationship between dietary intake and different aspects of psychological health. It is an applied field that uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the influence of diet on mental health. Nutrition psychology seeks to understand the relationship between nutritional behavior and mental health/well-being NP is a sub-field of psychology and more specifically of health psychology. It may be applied to numerous different fields including: psychology, dietetics, nutrition, and marketing. NP is a fairly new field with a brief history that has already started to contribute information and knowledge to psychology. There are two main areas of controversy within nutrition psychology. The first area of controversy is that the topic can be viewed in two different ways. It can be viewed as nutrition affecting psychological functions, or psychological choices and behavior influencing nutrition and health. The second controversy is the defining of what is "healthy" or "normal" as related to nutrition.
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! is a 2017 American documentary film directed by Morgan Spurlock. A sequel to the 2004 film Super Size Me, it explores the ways in which the fast food industry has rebranded itself as healthier since his original film through the process of Spurlock working to open his own fast-food restaurant, thus exposing some of the ways in which rebranding is more perception than reality.
Eating You Alive is a 2018 vegan health documentary film about why Americans are suffering from chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disease, among other diseases, and whether the outcome can be changed.
