If you go to the library or watch television, read the paper, go online, or walk down the street, you will be bombarded from every angle and every form of media by the word “diet”. There are literally millions of people starting a diet at any given time with the diet industry bringing in billions and billions of dollars. While there are certainly good, nutritious diet plans that will help you accomplish your weight loss goals, there are countless others that will do little more than lighten your wallet.
Not only are there expensive and mostly ineffective diet plans on the market, there are some that can be potentially harmful to your health including those that can totally stall weight loss by destroying your metabolism and those that can increase your risk for diseases such as osteoporosis, kidney stones, and gall stones or other gall bladder related diseases.
What Makes a Healthy Diet?
The human body is a complex collection of systems and organs that all run on chemical processes that run on the fuel we get from the foods that we eat. Our body converts some foods to sugars, which are then burned immediately for fuel or stored for energy for later. If there is too much stored energy, the body converts that to fat for longer term storage. In most people it is a fairly simple and straightforward process of food in, energy out, but there are many factors that can disrupt the process.
Certain foods, particularly proteins, are converted to other chemicals in the body after they are digested. A protein is made of branches of compounds called amino acids, each working toward a different end result in the body. The body can synthesize some of these on its own, however the essential amino acids are those that the body needs but cannot make. For these, the body must be given a fresh supply every day from protein sources that include plant-based and animal-based proteins. All animal proteins including non-meat animal products are complete, meaning they have all the essential amino acids, while all plant-based proteins but soy are incomplete.
In addition to these amino acids, the body needs particular vitamins and minerals. Some of these can be stored in the body to protect against deficiency while others, such as Vitamin C cannot and must be renewed every day for optimal health.
Because no one food can be deemed perfect at all, it is important that the diet be balanced and varied to include every food group. It is also important that fruits and vegetables from every color category be included for the widest range of vitamins and minerals. Any diet that suggests eliminating entire food groups is not healthy and, in the long run, may not be achievable, sustainable, or healthy.
Popular Fad Diets that Eliminated Food Groups
Fad diets are exactly what their name implies – here one day, the very latest thing, and then gone again. They are usually dangerous and not at all effective and while some of them can give you some initial weight loss, you might be doing so at the detriment to your own health. Some of these have included Fat Busters, which had people avoiding fat like the plague and Sugar Busters, which had people avoiding sugar the same way.
Perhaps one of the best known of these fad diets was the Atkins Diet, which had everyone eating incredible amounts of proteins with very limited carbohydrates, even the healthy complex carbs that we actually do need to eat. The diet plan suggested that you could eat a hamburger with cheese as long as you did not put ketchup on it or serve it on a bun (even a whole wheat bun). Bacon was fine, broccoli was limited. Certain dieters found the diet very appealing and they did lose weight, at first, but after a few weeks for some and a shorter period for others, they found themselves overwhelmed by the negative side effects of the diet including intense cravings, moodiness and irritability, and stalled weight loss. The weight that was practically flying off at first soon completely refused to budge.
The long term effects of the Atkins diet are just now starting to be seen, although considering some of the menus, some of them were fairly obvious from the very beginning.
There have been other diets that did the same thing: don’t drink milk or eat cheese, don’t eat anything white, the list goes on and on.
Popular Fad Diets that Limited Your Foods or Food Groups
There is no doubt that there is an overabundance in food choices these days. Where our ancestors could eat what they found, or later could grow, we can go to the local grocery store and find aisle after aisle of local and exotic foods, some that we may never have even heard of. This dizzying array of foods can leave even the most sensible shopper overwhelmed; after all, how do you choose when it all looks so delicious?
The diet industry knows how to get to people, knows exactly which buttons to push- hence the single ingredient diets that are meant to simply limit your eating and allow you to “effortlessly” lose the weight without having to worry about what you are going to eat any longer. Think of these: the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Rice Diet, the Juice Diet. They all have several things in common: they are all fad diets, they do not work long term, and they may all be unhealthy to long term health.
The problem with fad diets is that they do not have to be backed by science or even tested very thoroughly at all before they catch on. It only takes the mere suggestion of a celebrity losing five pounds with this plan and the fad is off and running no matter how ludicrous or unsafe it sounds.
Back to Reality
Thankfully, most people will actually figure out that the fad diet is not the way to get better health and to lose weight and will return to a more balanced eating plan. A diet must include complex carbohydrates, healthy fats, and lean proteins in the right amount not only to keep the body working correctly but for energy as well. A diet should only drop the calorie count by a relatively small amount but not eliminate an entire food group nor should it make entire categories off limits. A small treat every now and then is fine- as long as it is in moderation and the rest of the diet is made of healthy and nutritious foods. That being said, there is a way to include candy and other treats in the diet but still have them play a vital role in nutrition. Protica offers two lines of protein-based candy called Protein Twist and Protein Taffy, which is a good way to get the protein that you need every day and still feel like you are having a delicious candy treat at the same time.
Protica Research (Protica, Inc.) specializes in the development of Capsulized Foods. Protica manufactures Profect, IsoMetric, Pediagro, Fruitasia and over 100 other brands, including Medicare-approved, whey protein drinks for diabetic patients. You can learn more at Protica Research – Copyright