Fad diets are always increasingly popular at the start of a New Year as they offer to help you effortlessly shred the extra pounds gained over the Christmas festive period.
Some of the current popular unhealthy fad diets include The Carnivore Diet, OMAD(One Meal A Day), The Snake Diet, Fruitarian and Fully Raw Vegan.
As someone who has been around the natural health and diet industry for over 15+ years now, fad diets not only fascinate me, but I actively and passionately enjoy debunking the pseudo-science and false claims that surround these fad diets.
Fad diets and their promoters prey on vulnerable individuals by offering unsustainable quick fix unhealthy solutions for the likes of weight loss or now the fad diet market has expanded into preying on individuals with serious health problems such as autoimmune disease or even cancer!....
It doesn't matter what health problem you are suffering from these days, you will likely have received some unsolicited advice somewhere, maybe even from a friend telling you to try out some latest fad diet because they have "heard" or read someone on the internet saying that it was effective for "curing" X health problem.
In the end what you are left with is effectively nothing more than mass hysteria and chinese whispers, where the message and pseudo-science gets passed around so much, that it becomes more distorted and more pseudo-scientific with each unqualified individual who relays the false claims surrounding these fad diets.
What amazes me is that despite both of these fad diets i.e carnivore(all-animal food) and raw vegan(all plant-foods) being at virtually the complete polar opposite ends of each other on the dietary spectrum, they are promoted using pretty much entirely the same rhetoric, pseudo-science, weak anecdotes and incorrect appeals to nature.
Exploring Fad Diets In 2020: From The Carnivore Diet To Raw Vegan
The Carnivore Diet
The "Carnivore Diet" is typically an extreme all-animal food "diet", usually "nose to tail" consuming most parts of the animal including organ meats for example.
Although depending on what carnivore diet proponent you listen too, some excessively restrict their diets to "all-meat" or even just "all-beef", which is even more ridiculous, unhealthy and of course downright dangerous, not to mention sub-optimal.
Promoters of "The Carnivore Diet" make all sorts of ridiculous claims of the "diet" being able to "cure" serious health problems such as autoimmune disorders, heart disease, cancer, GI diseases and so on.
The Carnivore movement is essentially nothing more than a massive disinformation campaign towards consistently proven healthy plant-foods such as fruits and vegetables using all sorts of pseudo-science.
The Carnivores demonize healthy plant-based foods based on a misunderstanding of a variety of "boogeymen" nutritional factors such as "anti-nutrients", phytic acid, tannins, phyto-estrogens, dietary fiber, phyto-chemicals, prebiotics, you name it, virtually every nutritional factor found in plant-foods is incorrectly feared due to "toxins".
The Carnivore Diet is basically once again yet more eating disorder behavior but "masked" as yet another wonder cure all fad diet, much in the same way the fruitarian and raw vegan diet built its propaganda on.
Whilst the raw vegans irrationally fear cooked and animal foods due to perceived "toxins".
The carnivores now irrationally fear even consistently proven health promoting basic plant-foods such as fruits and vegetables, fearing imaginary "toxins".
No human diet is going to be optimal for health, longevity or disease protection that is completely void of all healthy plant-based foods.
The Carnivore fad diet cannot even reliably provide the lowly RDA/DRI for Vitamin C to prevent scurvy at 42 mg/d. This is before we even get to the proposed optimal RDA of 90-100mg/d for Vitamin C for optimal health and disease protection.
The Carnivore diet ends up lacking/low in all sorts of vital important basic essential nutrients, especially heart health/blood pressure/electrolytes such as magnesium and potassium. Especially if an individual already has existing deficiencies in these minerals or increased demands.
Summary:
The "Carnivore Fad Diet" is lacking in Vitamin C, completely void of dietary fiber, absent of all health-promoting/disease protecting phyto-chemicals, is low in magnesium and potassium for heart health, usually contains no intake of healthy plant-foods and is based around excessive intake of certain animal foods such as red meat which may promote serious disease such as colorectal cancer with higher excessive consumption.
Overall: The "Carnivore Diet" is a complete recipe for disease promotiong and early mortality.
2. The Fully Raw Vegan Diet & Fruitarian
Although every now and then raw vegan fad diets tend to make a reemergence due to various vegan Youtubers and internet marketers promoting the likes of fruitarian, dangerous extreme juice feast regimes or very strict 100% raw vegan style diets, usually for the supposed purpose of "detoxification".
Raw vegan diets and in particular "The Fruitarian Diet" has to be some of the worst and most unhealthy fad diets I have come across in the past decade and I have seen hundreds to thousands of individuals ruin their health due to raw vegan diets.
I have personally talked with hundreds of women who have developed the likes of amenorrhea due to following extremely low fat/high carb raw vegan diets.
To the many individuals who have become completely emaciated on raw vegan diets, losing their hair, having their teeth fall out/developing multiple teeth cavities in the space of months on the diet, thyroid issues, strange health problems happen such as parotid gland swelling and many other health problems, mostly as a result of these multiple nutrient deficient fruitarian and raw vegan fad diets.
There is absolutely no viable scientific reason for healthy or even "unhealthy" individuals to irrationally remove or restrict even healthy cooked plant-based food-groups such as whole grains, beans/legumes, nuts, seeds or to extremely restrict their diets to nothing but fruit or raw foods.
As with all fad diets, the desire and incessant requirement to go raw vegan and fruitarian is largely driven by eating disorder behavior and "orthorexia" once again.
In the case of raw vegan diets, the individuals typically have developed an intense fear of cooked or heated foods believing that they contain "toxins".
Summary:
Raw vegan and "Fruitarian diets" are typically unhealthily low in protein and essential fatty acids, lacking and/or deficient in multiple basic essential nutrients from minerals such as iodine, zinc, selenium, calcium to vitamins such as Vitamin B12.
Many raw vegan diet promoters often don't even recommend to supplement with Vitamin B12, which considering these are strict raw/vegan "diets" void of a reliable dietary vitamin B12 source, its potentially very dangerous diet advice and not surprising that many of these raw vegans have encountered Vitamin B12 deficiency as a result.
As always seek the advice of a qualified professional such as a doctor or nutritionist before making any significant dietary or lifestyle changes.
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