Every few months, a new fad diet enters the zeitgeist, employing heavily exaggerated promises of rapid, extreme weight loss and drastic health benefits to gain traction in the media. While many try to legitimize their eating habits with scientific jargon, such as the keto diet, or through an appeal to tradition, such as the carnivore diet, they are usually under-researched and unsustainable, a result of their rigidness and false promises.
In pop culture, diets are marketed as quick fixes. Even though a new fad diet seems to come and go every few months, nutritional skepticism is undoubtedly having a moment in American culture and politics: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement has waged a war on ultraprocessed foods, resonating with diners across the political spectrum, while major news outlets such as The New York Times have amplified their diet-related coverage in the last year.
Even before this boom, ineffective diets have plagued Americans for decades. The Boston Medical Center estimates that 45 million Americans go on a diet every year, but success rates dwindle in the single digits.
Fad diets sound attractive to the many Americans who have grown to believe that the more extreme and limiting a diet is, the quicker and more effective the results will be. Although I’ve been falling for fad diets’ lure of immediate fat loss since elementary school, which is a whole other problem in and of itself, I hadn’t successfully undergone a significant or long-lasting dietary change until I became vegetarian over the summer.
The process of swapping my diet was nearly a year-long process, with my first encounter with the ethical and unsustainable implications of our current food system back in October 2024 when a classroom educator from the New Roots Institute, a nonprofit organization that advocates against factory farming, led a presentation in my environmental studies class.
After the class, I was intrigued by the idea of not eating meat, slightly hesitating before taking a bite out of a fried chicken sandwich. While not ready to make the jump to fully fledged vegetarianism, I did apply to the New Roots Institute’s Leadership Academy, a program that provided hours of educational sessions about factory farming and advocacy. Eventually, the stockpile of information, a few traumatic documentaries and consistently being surrounded by the New Roots community allowed me to personally understand why I wanted to actively cease participating in this aspect of our food system — so much so that I decided to continue my work with the institute as a campus education fellow.
The transition to a plant-based diet helped me learn that the typical fad-diet approach of throwing all my groceries out one day and eating solely raw broccoli the next could not sustain such a substantial transformation. Even after the educational sessions, other members of the program reached out to me, offering their support by informing me of viable plant-based replacements for specific nutrients — like swapping white rice with quinoa for additional protein, or eating more leafy greens for calcium and iron — and recommending new recipes that would make my newly vegetarian diet fun and exciting, rather than overtly limiting.
The key to making my vegetarian diet stick with me was taking the time to research recipes and new ingredients that could seamlessly fit into my former repertoire of meals. Even as I steadily waned off a meat-based diet and ensured that I was rotating between a variety of plant proteins such as tofu, chickpea pastas and black beans and rice, there were still difficulties and setbacks when it came to certain cravings or when I attended catered events that lacked vegetarian options — so it’s no surprise that many fail to keep up with the abrupt, and often extreme, dietary changes that fad diets champion.
A defining pillar of fad diets is the attempt to ban or restrict certain food groups or products by scapegoating them as the root cause of every health problem under the sun. In a country where two-thirds of the population is overweight, it can feel easy to blame common denominators on the obesity epidemic — but cutting out entire food groups only leads to nutritional imbalance, not weight loss.
Researchers find that most who follow the typical Western diet — characterized by high consumption of pre-packaged foods, sugar, refined grains and processed meat — suffer from a plethora of nutritional deficiencies. This lack of essential nutrients can lead to conditions such as heart disease, cancer and strokes, three of the four leading causes of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Despite their health-focused messaging, fad diets only exacerbate these nutritional deficiencies, rather than encourage sustainable habits. For example, the keto diet’s popularization — which was spurred by celebrities like the Kardashians in the 2010s — came with the rejection of foods high in carbohydrates, a macronutrient that uniquely contains dietary fibers necessary for the digestive process, and instead emphasized the consumption of high-fat foods. However, researchers found that its weight loss effects waned at around two to six months, and that keto dieters were also more vulnerable to digestive issues, heightening their risk of high cholesterol and heart disease — making the diet a Band-Aid solution at best, and harmful at worst.
Another fad, popularized on TikTok this year, is the three-bite diet, which allows just three bites of indulgent foods before calling it quits. Although this trend aimed to emphasize portion control and a balance between healthy and unhealthy foods, researchers say that the diet’s unforgiving restrictions and blatant vilification of certain foods “ignores individual hunger cues, nutritional needs and the emotional context of eating.”
Diets shouldn’t be trends because eating isn’t one — it’s something we must partake in for the entirety of our lives. If the media — from mainstream news outlets to nutrition blogs — truly wants to help Americans improve their dietary habits for long-term wellbeing, it should encourage gradual implementation of healthier foods and realistic, sustainable eating patterns and goals rather than pushing consumers to dive straight into restrictive crazes overnight.