Gluten-free bakery
Will gluten-free diet go the way of other fads?
The gluten-free fad isn’t the first trend to take the dieting world by storm. In fact, it’s merely the latest in a long line of diet frenzies that has created buzz among those desperate to lose weight.
“I’ve tried every diet imaginable,” admited Carla Prepon, a resident of Eastpointe who has embraced buying gluten-free products in an effort to lose weight. “This isn’t the first time, I guess you can say, I’ve jumped on a bandwagon. I’m willing to try anything.”
Since it’s so new, it’s hard to say if the gluten-free craze will last, but Yvonne Thigpen, a registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator at Mount Clemens Regional Medical Center, doesn’t believe the diet will last.
“If someone is just doing the diet to lose weight, I don’t think it will last because it’s really hard to follow,” she said. “If someone has to follow the gluten-free diet because of health concerns, that’s a different story, but just following the gluten-free diet to follow it I don’t think is going to work.”
Following is a list of other diet fads that were popular for a few months before fading away:
Low-carb diet: Whether it was Atkins, South Beach or the Zone, everyone was embracing the idea of eating a hamburger — minus the bun. Dieters were losing weight by eating all the steak and butter they wanted. The trend waned pretty quickly, though, when dieters got sick of eating the same hamburger and bowl of lettuce every night. In addition, most people acknowledge that embracing a diet that requires participants to eat foods high in fat isn’t conducive to long-term health.
The cabbage soup diet: This diet is a radical weight loss diet that is designed around consuming a lot of low-calorie cabbage soup. It first gained popularity in the 1980s and has popped up periodically since then. The problem with this diet is that while participants did lose a lot of weight — it was mostly water weight and not fat. Plus, who wants to eat cabbage soup every day for an extended period of time?
The blood type diet: Developed by naturopathic physician Dr. Peter D’Adamo, this diet is based on the theory that protein-like compounds in food called lectins react with different blood types to cause a wide variety of health complaints. The blood type diet was aimed at helping people avoid eating lectins that are incompatible with their blood type. Examples would be that Type A blood did well on a vegetarian diet while patients with Type O did well on a high-protein diet. While some people swear by the diet, others claim that meal plans that restrict whole categories of food never work.
The macrobiotic diet: A macrobiotic diet involves eating grains as a staple food supplemented with other foods such as vegetables while avoiding the use of highly processed or refined foods and most animal products. The diet also stresses that food be chewed thoroughly before swallowing as a way to stem overeating. Macrobiotics is actually mentioned in the writing of Hippocrates — so it has been around a long time. A macrobiotic diet is extremely hard to maintain and some followers of the diet have been diagnosed with malnutrition because of severe nutritional deficiencies.
Despite the easy fixes dieters have strived for throughout the years, most dietitians and nutrition experts agree that the only diet that truly works over the long haul is a lifestyle change that involves less calories and more exercise.
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