Beware bad diets: Here are some health regimens to watch out for

Be careful, there’s a lot of bad diets out there!

Not that this is necessarily a new phenomenon. Fad diets are likely as old as dieting itself which, it’s worth pointing out, is a relatively recent human endeavour. For much of the history of humanity, the problem was getting enough to eat — not looking for ways to take off the pounds.

But for the past 200-ish years, we’ve embraced everything from excessive chewing regimens to vinegar and water cleanses, as well as diets revolving around grapefruits, cabbage soup and lemonade. British American Tobacco even promoted a cigarette diet in the 1920s with its “For a Slender Figure — Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet” campaign.

That last one, thankfully, is no longer with us, but there are still plenty of diets out there that are either basically unsustainable or potentially dangerous. Or both.

The HCG Diet

This nearly 70-year-old weight loss plan involves daily doses of human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), a hormone that naturally increases during pregnancy, as well as severe calorie restriction — sometimes as few as 500 calories per day.

“This is a very well-known fake diet,” says Dr. Sean Wharton, adjunct professor at McMaster and York University, and medical director of the GTA’s Wharton Medical Clinic. “We call these diets ‘deprivation diets’ or ‘starvation diets.’ Anything that deprives somebody of the appropriate number of calories is going to be unsustainable and unhealthy.”

The Lectin-Free Diet

This diet is rooted in the idea that lectins, proteins that are found at varying levels in different foods, cause inflammation, which could lead to “leaky gut.” Foods that are high in lectins include soybeans, chickpeas, lentils, peas, many whole grains, peppers, eggplants and tomatoes, all of which are off the menu for people eating lectin-free.

“The idea is that lectins in plants are a defence mechanism against bacteria,” explains Amanda Lapidus, a registered dietitian with a practice in Toronto, “But that doesn’t mean that when we consume plants the lectins are going to operate in the same way and give us a toxic reaction. There’s a cost to avoiding high-lectin foods, since many of them are associated with positive health outcomes and, if anything, the Western diet is low on foods like this, many of which are the staples of the Mediterranean diet.”

Lapidus also says that cooking plants denatures the lectins and you’d have to eat a lot to consume a dangerous level of lectins.

The Blood Type Diet

Do you know your blood type? Yeah, me neither. Apparently, though, it’s the key to knowing what sort of food you should be eating.

Said Wharton: “No, your blood type cannot tell you what to eat. That is also fake. Unless it tells you to just eat healthy food, whether it’s A, B, AB or O.

“Are we ever going to have a genetic way of thinking about eating where we’re able to look at our DNA and say this may be better for your metabolic health?” he continued. “There’s a possibility, but I think we’re decades away from really doing that — if it ever happens at all.”

The Alkaline Diet

The premise here is that most people’s pH levels are off (we’re too acidic) and we need to fix this by eating more alkaline foods.

“The idea behind it is completely not science-based and doesn’t make sense at all since, the same way a healthy functioning body controls your blood pressure and heart rate, so too does it regulate our pH levels,” said Lapidus. “Still, I wouldn’t be overly concerned if a client was following this diet, because it gets people to eat some pretty healthy food.”

The Zero-Sugar Diet

As the name suggests, the idea is to cut sugar out altogether.

“The average North American adult eats an excessive amount of sugar and we know that high intakes of sugar are associated with all-cause mortality, so I’m always going to encourage people to limit their added sugar,” said Lapidus. “But you have to distinguish between natural sugars that you get from things like fruits and added sugars.”

With both the alkaline diet and the zero-sugar diet, Lapidus worries that “rigid” diets that are designed with an “all or nothing” mentality might backfire, since people might not be able to stick to it and become discouraged about weight loss altogether.

Single-Food Diets

Speaking of rigid, there are a lot of diets that are centred around a single food, be it brown rice, cabbage soup, grapefruits or meat. Sometimes these diets allow a little augmentation. My favourite is the Wine and Egg Diet from a 1977 issue of Vogue, which claims you can lose five pounds in three days by starting the day with a hard-boiled egg, black coffee and a glass of Chablis. Same for lunch, only twice as much of everything. By dinner, presumably, you forget to eat and just finish the bottle.

“The worst diets are the ones that tell you to only eat tomatoes or celery or something like that,” Wharton said. “Something like the cabbage soup diet is much more challenging to maintain than healthier elimination diets, such as a vegetarian diet or a low-carb diet.”

Lapidus agreed: “There are rare exceptions where you find people who’ve been on these diets for decades, but studies show it’s almost impossible. And when you go on and off these diets, that’s where you see the yo-yo dieting, which has been shown to be associated with an increased risk of long-term obesity.”

Every time we lose weight, our metabolism slows down and works to become more energy efficient, which means going forward we’ll burn calories more slowly. So why do we keep falling for fad diets?

“They’re always introduced as ‘the last diet you’re ever going to need’ but, in the end, you pretty much always rebound back — or higher — and then you’re looking for the next fix,” said Lapidus. “And if we didn’t start with a fad diet we wouldn’t need the next fad one.”

She also said that, although the drive to be thin predates the digital era, social media has made things worse, since more people are getting information online than from experts.

“People buy ‘skinny’ teas because the Kardashians drink them or go on the banana diet because a pop star is on it,” said Lapidus. “I don’t think people would have known about some of them and a lot of them are really just facades for eating disorders.”