page_title: Fad diet
section_title: Health claims evaluations
hierarchical_section_title: Fad diet / Health claims evaluations
caption_attribution_description: English: Fad diets short-term pros vs long-term cons From this research/review paper: [1].
context_page_description: A fad diet is a diet that is popular for a time, similar to fads in fashion, without being a standard dietary recommendation, and often promising unreasonably fast weight loss or nonsensical health improvements. There is no single definition of what is a fad diet, encompassing a variety of diets with different approaches and evidence bases, and thus different outcomes, advantages, and disadvantages, and it is ever-changing.
  Generally, fad diets promise short-term changes with little efforts, and thus may lack educating consumers about whole-diet, whole-lifestyle changes necessary for sustainable health benefices. Fad diets are often promoted with exaggerated claims, such as rapid weight loss of more than 1 kg/week or improving health by "detoxification", or even dangerous claims, such as highly restrictive and nutritionally unbalanced food choices leading to malnutrition or eating non-food items like cotton wool. Highly restrictive fad diets should be avoided. At best, fad diets may offer novel and engaging ways to reduce calories intake, but at worst they may be medically unsuitable to the individual, unsustainable, or even dangerous.
context_section_description: Fad diets have variable results as these include a variety of different diets. They tend to result in short-term weight loss, but afterwards, the weight is often regained.
  The restrictive approach, regardless of whether the diet prescribes eating large amounts of high-fiber vegetables, no grains, or no solid foods, tend to be nutritionally unsound, and can cause serious health problems if followed for more than a few days.
  A considerable disadvantage of fad diets is that they encourage the notion of a diet as a short-term behavior, instead of a sustainable lifelong change. Indeed, fad diets often fail to re-educate dieters about a healthy nutrition, portion control and under-emphasize efforts and especially physical activity, so that followers cannot acquire the skills and knowledge they need for long-term maintenance of their desired weight, even if that weight is achieved in the short-term. Several diets are also unsustainable in the long-term, and thus dieters revert to old habits after deprivation of some foods which may lead to binge eating. Fad diets generally fail to address the causes of poor nutrition habits, and thus are unlikely to change the underlying behavior and the long-term outcomes.
  Some fad diets are associated with increased risks of cardiovascular diseases and mental disorders such as eating disorders and depression, and dental risks. For instance, long-term low-carbohydrate high-fat diets are associated with increased cardiac and non-cardiac mortality. Teenagers following fad diets are at risk of permanently stunted growth.
  Some fad diets do however provide short-term and long-term results for individuals with specific illnesses such as obesity or epilepsy. Very-low-calorie diets, also known as crash diets, are efficient for liver fat reduction and weight loss before bariatric surgery. Low-calorie and very-low-calorie diets may produce initially faster weight loss within the first 1–2 weeks of starting compared to other diets, but this superficially faster loss is due to glycogen depletion and water loss in the lean body mass and regained quickly afterward.
  Diet success in weight loss and health benefits is most predicted by adherence and negative energy balance, regardless of the diet type. Fad diets, with their popularity and variety, may be useful to introduce obese individuals via a dietary plan tailored to their food preferences and lifestyle into long-term dietary and lifestyle changes under supervision by nutrition professionals. Indeed, a wide variety of diets aiming at gentle caloric restriction under supervision, including commercial, fad, and standard care diets, have shown considerable and comparable success and safety, both in the short-term and long-term. Comprehensive diet programs are more effective than dieting without guidance. According to David L. Katz, "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.
  There is a commonly claimed figure that "95% of dieters regain their weight after a few years", but this is a "clinical lore" based on a 1953 primary study, with newer evidence demonstrating long-term weight loss after dieting under supervision, although a 2007 review found that one-third to two-thirds of dieters had slight to no long-term weight loss based on lesser quality trials, supporting the Health at Every Size according to its authors. A review reported that extended calorie restriction suppresses overall and specific food cravings.
caption: Fad diets short-term pros vs long-term cons[21]
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