A fad diet or diet cult is a diet that makes promises of weight loss or other health advantages such as longer life without backing by solid science, and in many cases are characterized by highly restrictive or unusual food choices. Celebrity endorsements are frequently used to promote fad diets, which generate significant revenue for the creators from the sale of associated products.
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Description
A competitive market for "healthy diets" arose in the nineteenth 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. As Matt Fitzgerald describes it:
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.
These diets are generally restrictive, and are characterized by promises of fast weight loss or great physical health, and which are not grounded in sound science. One sign of fad diets is a requirement to purchase associated products and pay to attend seminars in order to gain the benefits of the diet.
Such diets are often endorsed by celebrities or medical professionals who style themselves as "gurus" and profit from sales of branded products, books, and public speaking.
These diets attract people who want to lose weight quickly and easily and keep that weight off 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.
Fad diets may be based completely on pseudoscience (e.g. "magical 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.
According to Boston University School of Medicine, 98% of people who lose weight regain it within 5 years. Many diets fail to produce lasting weight loss because dieters revert to old habits after the end of the diet, many diets are not sustainable, and deprivation of certain foods leads to binge eating.
Mainstream diet advice
Healthy eating is simple, according to Marion Nestle, who expresses the mainstream view of nutrition:
The 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.
David L. Katz, who reviewed the most prevalent popular diets in 2014, noted:
The 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. Knowledge in this case is not, as of yet, power; would that it were so.