Tag: fad diets

Ditch the ‘detox’: don’t let the diet myth cleanse your wallet

Lemon teaLady Macbeth kept scrubbing but she couldn’t get the marks out. Shakespeare’s character was so wracked with guilt that imaginary blood stains appeared on her hands and, try as she may, she couldn’t get herself clean. It’s not just fiction: research shows that all of us have a powerful urge to wash, bathe, shower, or purge whenever we feel we may have wronged. In the 21st Century, however, we are more likely to feel guilty about a weekend of overindulgences than we are for religious transgressions; but instead of washing our hands we go for a dietary ‘detox’ – the modern day body cleansing craze. In fact, detoxing has now become so widely believed that it is difficult to convince most people that it is utter hocus-pocus – even though the British Dietetic Association, NHS and British Nutrition Foundation all agree that it is just marketing mythology. Read more

Isn’t it time that fad diets went out of fashion?

Family Plates by Mountainbread, on FlickrChannel 4’s Supersize vs Superskinny is back on the telly. The long-running health show, which challenges two ‘extreme eaters’ to swap diets for a week, used to be my TV-watching guilty pleasure. Previous series’ were known for the infamous ‘feeding tube’ – a huge Perspex cylinder into which a week’s worth of food is emptied. It was a startling and vulgar visual representation of how much (and how little) some people can eat. And while Supersize vs Superskinny has been widely criticised for trivialising serious eating issues, it nevertheless reveals just how topsy-turvy attitudes to food have become. We now live in a world of extremes – and extreme times call for extreme weight loss diets. Read more