10 Seemingly Healthy Diets That Are Actually Bad For Your Health | Nutrition & Dieting slideshows | Well Being center

The Apple Cider Vinegar Diet - Too Much to Swallow?

The apple cider vinegar diet is based on claims that apple cider vinegar can help accelerate your metabolic rate and the diet calls for adherents to take between one and three teaspoons of vinegar before each meal. The facts. however, are that apple cider vinegar is acidic enough to do some damage to your throat if you use it regularly. Once it's down your throat, though, it's in an extremely acidic environment, the stomach, where it has to compete with the far lower-pH stomach acid. It's unlikely to have much effect on your insides, apart from giving you a sore throat!

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What is a Fad Diet, and What's so Bad About It?

A fad diet is one that owes its popularity to popularity. Vegetarianism owes its popularity to concern for land use, moral objections to the perceived needless killing of animals for food, or sentimental feelings about animals. Th cabbage soup diet owes its popularity to magazine articles asking what it is, and querying whether it really can help you lose 12 stone a week. It can't. In fact, of course, all fad diets promise the impossible. The mixture of outlandish methodology ('only eat pumpkin seeds, except on Thursday afternoons, when it's Tofu and cassava half-hour!'), outlandish concepts ('we'll show you how to select the exact meats to put in your Astral Grill, based on your star sign') and outlandish claims ('lose 20lb in just eight days!') should start alarm bells ringing. Weight gain doesn't happen overnight - ask bodybuilders, who incessantly struggle to achieve it - and weight loss doesn't either. Fad diets will always fail you because they're wishful thinking, not a plan for a healthy future.

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Photo courtesy of Nina Hale by Flickr : www.flickr.com/photos/94693506@N00/2464981107/
www.toptenz.net/top-10-unhealthy-fad-diets.php
http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/skinny-on-diet-scams
http://diet.lovetoknow.com/wiki/Unhealthy_Fad_Diets
http://likes.com/misc/the-15-worst-unhealthy-fad-diets?page=4

The Herbal Weight Loss Tea Diet - Can Herbs Help You Lose Weight?

The profusion of herbal weight-loss materials is based on one simple fact: herbal supplements aren't regulated by the FDA, so their claims of efficacy don;t have to be backed up. There's also the psychology - we all know herbs are natural, astringent, calorie free and if they weren't good for you they wouldn't put them in shampoo. But no herbal tea or other herbal remedy of any kind can really help you lose weight. Any tea or soup based diet relies on using water and dietary fiber to make you feel fuller for longer and reduce your caloric intake - a fine idea as far as it goes, but some of these diets, followed to the letter, result in dangerously low caloric intakes.

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Is The Blood Type Diet Your Type? Don't Bet on It

Blood type diets are based on the ideas of Dr. Peter d'Adamo, whose website claims that it offers the 'first science that understands you as a biochemical individual.' Dr. d'Adamo's New York Times bestseller book, 'Eat Right for Your Type,' popularised the idea of eating foods whose chemical balance matches your own blood type. However, this three point checklist - outlandish methodology, outlandish concepts and outlandish claims - should be familiar from our first slide. So it should come as no surprise to hear other nutrition professionals call the blood type diet 'blood type astrology.' Scientists have repeatedly called on Dr. d'Adamo to publish evidence for his claims that, for instance, beans and legumes make bodily tissues more alkaline. This idea that the pH of the body can be strongly affected by foods is a common thread through pseudoscientific nutritional advice. There's no evidence that the Blood Type Diet is anything more than a fad.

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veg.ca/2005/11/11/the-blood-type-diet/

Low Carbohydrate/High Protein Diets - Use With Care

Low carbohydrate diets have a place in body composition control. But when they're misunderstood or misapplied, they can lead to trouble. While the claims that the kidneys suffer from an excess of protein, or that the fat content of most high-protein foods will lead to health problems, can safely be discounted, people who are unfamiliar with ketogenic diets would be well advised to seek out some information before embarking on one. And while it is possible to lose weight relatively quickly eating a high protein, low carbohydrate diet, it isn't possible to lose more than a few pounds a week safely for most people, whatever the method.

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Liquid Diets - Cabbage Soup, Chicken Soup, and More

Liquid diets - whether the basis of the diet is chicken soup, cabbage soup or herbal teas, or anything similar - use a mixture of water and dietary fiber to make you feel fuller for longer and thus restrict your caloric intake. cabbage is certainly good for you; so is chicken soup. But it's the caloric restriction that makes the difference. And once again, these diets usually make outlandish claims about their miracle ingredients, but the celebrities on the magazine covers who endorse these diets often got their 'new bodies' by visiting a personal trainer, and the rate at which any of us can safely lose weight long term is fairly slow anyway.

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The Magnetic Diet - Not as Crazy as it Sounds, But It's Still a Fad

The magnetic diet is a weight loss program that isn't, as the name suggests, based around foods being somehow 'magnetic.' Instead, the man behind the magnetic diet, Nick Smith, uses the metaphor of magnetism to explain how some foods repulse health while others attract it. Some people also refer to this diet as the 'Popeye diet,' because of its requirement that you eat a lot of spinach. While there's nothing genuinely absurd about the magnetic diet, and its basis - maintaining gradual weight loss by staying in caloric deficit, eating healthily and exercising - is sound, the originator does make some peculiar claims and the grouping or arbitrary rules does put it under the 'fad diet' umbrella.

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The Grapefruit Juice Diet

The grapefruit juice diet has some basis in fact. Grapefruit can help repress appetite, control blood sugar and increase feelings of fullness. But, grapefruit doesn't have any magical qualities - but the 'grapefruit diet' appears to claim that it does. Dieters use the diet for 10 days at a time, and a 10lb weight loss is claimed during that time. Most of the weight lost that quickly will be from water, as the electrolyte balance in the body changes, and rapid weight loss doesn't equal radical fat loss - or sustainable slimming. Add grapefruit to a balanced, calorie-reduced diet, to improve your chances of weight loss - but don't bet on the grapefruit diet.

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The Pasta Chocolate Diet - Sweet, But Not That Smart

Moving on from diets that decry carbohydrates, here's one that offers nothing else. Chocolate, pasta and popcorn - and you'll lose weight too. How much truth is there in that? Well, not much, on two counts. For one thing, the pasta chocolate diet is incredibly proscriptive. Every day is planned out; the menu doesn't change much. But then, it doesn't include much chocolate either. Most of the diet is fruit smoothies, vegetables and, yes, pasta salad. In short, it's a typical low-fat, high-carb diet - like anything you'd have found in a magazine before Atkins came along and popularized low-carb weight loss.

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Zen Diet - Sound Advice in Faddish Cladding?

Martin Faulks, the originator of the 'Zen Diet,' says it's based on the Japanese principle of 'kenzai,' which he translates as 'small, permanent changes for the better.' The diet is supposed to be, not a diet, but 'a way of life,' and Mr. Faulks points out that many fad diets don't encourage a permanent change. However, what does the diet actually consist of? According to the jacket copy from Mr. Faulks' book, it's supposed to consist of 'making subtle adjustments to the way you eat so the nutrients feed your body while starving your fat stores.' While the book's claims to offer 'the first diet to work in harmony with how your body burns fat' point to faddishness, and the hard sell of oriental origins does too, the jury is still out on this one: after all, it's long-term sensible changes for permanent weight loss.