page_title: Fad diet
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Fad diet / History / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Tapeworms fad diet ad In the perennial battle of will over weight, consumers were finally offered an effective means of weight reduction around the turn of the 20th century – tapeworms! Fortunately, this “easily swallowed,” “sanitized,” and “jar packed” product proved ineffective. For more information about FDA history visit www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/WhatWeDo/History/default.htm
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 as we know them really started around the Victorian era in the 19th century. A competitive market for "healthy diets" arose in the 19th-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.
  Many fad diets, at the time called "foodie", were promoted during the 19th century.
  Lord Byron was obsessed with his appearance, as he had a "morbid propensity to fatten." He tried several diets, such as his favorite meal of biscuits and soda water, and others which he devised, such as the "vinegar and water diet" in the 1820s, which was very popular at the time, and involved drinking water with apple cider vinegar. He would cycle perpetually between self starvation, measurements, and binge eating. His influence was such that he was accused of encouraging melancholia and emotional volatility on Romantic youth, making girls "sicken and waste away". Indeed, according to Byron, "a woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only truly feminine and becoming viands". His views on women's diets and appearances worried his contemporaries, such as the American physician George Miller Beard, who fretted that young ladies may live their growing girlhood in semi-starvation because of their fears of "incurring the horror of disciples of Lord Byron".
  In 1825, Jean Brillat-Savarin wrote about a low carbohydrate diet and focusing on chewing and swallowing to better taste food and supposedly eat less. This idea would later reappear in 1903 under the name of "Fletcherizing", derived from its author's name Horace Fletcher, "a self-taught nutritionist". Fletcher promoted chewing all food until it was thoroughly mixed with saliva, to the point that it was swallowed in a liquid state.
  "Banting" or "to bant" became a highly popular synonym of dieting in 1863, when William Banting published "A Letter on Corpulence", which detailed the first low-carbohydrate diet, which he followed from Dr. William Harvey, a surgeon known for a starch- and sugar-free diet treatment for diabetes. He immediately lost weight, from 202 to 156 pounds eventually. Banting is credited for writing the first diet book, which at his death in 1878 sold more than 58,000 copies over a total of 12 editions published between 1863 and 1902. Although the 2500 copies of the first and second editions were printed at his expenses and distributed for free, in the hopes of "benefitting to the working-class people", he sold later copies.
  Around the same time, Sylvester Graham, of Graham cracker fame, is often given credit for creating the first fad diet in the 1830s and is considered the father of all modern diets. The diet recognized the importance of whole grains food. Designed from a religious motivation, Graham promoted a raw-food vegetarian diet that was lower in salt and fat, emphasizing an anti-industrial, anti-medical "simpler" or "natural" lifestyle, opposing the meat and other rich, calorie-dense foods produced in great quantities in the industrial era, declaring them "sinful". In 1830, he was appointed a general agent of the Pennsylvanian Temperance Society. During his time there, and due to his history, and inspired by the French vitalist school of medicine, he thought nutrition had moral as well as physical qualities, and viewed any desire for food or 
caption: The tapeworms diet, a probable hoax, purportedly involving dieters who would willfully ingest tapeworms to absorb food in the intestine.
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