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Nutrition News: Fad Diets

Here is a quick overview of poplar diets available with their premises, main backers, and what scientific evidence shows.  A diet should help you decide what and how much to eat, a permanent life style change not a quick fix.

Slim-Fast:

  • Premise:  Drink a Slim-Fast for breakfast, another for lunch, then eat a sensible dinner.  This diet also includes exercise, 30-60 minutes a day, and three snacks, such as fruits, vegetables, or a Slim-Fast snack bar.

  • Facts:  Provides limited choices, which results in foods being consumed repeatedly.  Diets such as the Slim-Fast have been proven to be difficult to maintain.  It can be challenging to eat and drink the same food day after day.  The Slim-Fast diet has however been proven to be a good form of weight loss if followed for a sustained period of time. 

Eat Right 4 Your Type: 

  • Premise:  The author of this diet claims that each blood type has its own unique antigen marker that reacts in negative ways to certain foods, and that a person’s stomach acids and digestive enzymes correlate with blood type.  This diet provides detailed lists of foods to eat or avoid based on your blood type.

  • Facts:  It might be comforting to have a list of foods to eat or avoid, there is no actual scientific evidence that correlates blood type with a person’s diet.

New Diet Revolution (Robert C. Atkins, M.D.): 

  • Premise:  This diet suggests drastically reducing the intake of dietary carbohydrates to force your body to burn fat.  This helps to lose pounds and inches while still eating protein and high fat foods, such as beef, pork, chicken, eggs and butter.

  • Facts:  The problem with a high protein diet is that it may also have you eating high amounts of saturated fat, which may increase blood cholesterol levels and increase the risk of heart disease.  Because this is such a new diet there are no long-term studies to show that this diet works or is safe for long-term use.

The Zone Diet (Barry Sears, Ph.D.): 

  • Premise:  This diet is about entering “the zone”.  By doing this you need to eat the proper quantities of food at the right times.  Meals should contain carbohydrates, protein and fat in the ratio of 40 percent, 30 percent, and 30 percent, respectively.

  • Facts:  Although this diet is not overly restrictive with food choices as the high protein low carbohydrate diets, the typical zone diet contains less than 1,000 calories per day, which may result in an inability to meet vitamin and mineral needs for most people.  The zone diet has not been proven scientifically.  There is not scientific reasoning behind the set food ratios.

 

Supplemental Information:

Information for this article was obtained from the web site of the Mayo Clinic. 

 

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