40 Fun Facts About Fad Diets

Which snack is named after a 19th-century Presbyterian minister who preached vegetarianism and temperance?

The Graham cracker was inspired by Sylvester Graham, whose followers, the Grahamites, gave up meat and alcohol and championed bran bread.

Which talk show host wheeled a wagon of fat on stage in 1988 after losing 67 pounds on the Optifast diet?

Oprah Winfrey showed off size 10 jeans on that episode, but she quickly regained much of the weight once she returned to real food.

Which actor landed in hospital after copying the all-fruit diet of Steve Jobs to play him in a 2013 film?

Ashton Kutcher said his pancreas levels went haywire on the fruitarian regime he adopted for the film Jobs; the Apple co-founder had practiced it since college.

Which breakfast cereal was created to ease indigestion among patients at the Battle Creek Sanitarium?

Corn flakes grew out of experiments by brothers John and Will Kellogg while John ran the sanitarium, and a former patient, C. W. Post, was soon selling rival products.

The paleo diet, popularized by Loren Cordain's books, claims to copy what humans ate in which period?

Stone Age eating got a 1975 book of its own from gastroenterologist Walter Voegtlin, who declared that humans ate only flesh until 10,000 years ago.

The ketogenic diet was first tried at the Mayo Clinic in the 1920s as a treatment for which condition?

Epilepsy in children was the target, and the diet fell out of use once effective anticonvulsant drugs arrived, decades before slimmers rediscovered it.

Which cigarette brand was pitched to 1920s women as a way to stay thin, lighting up rather than snacking?

Lucky Strike sales climbed from 14 billion cigarettes in 1925 to 40 billion in 1930 as the campaign presented smoking as an avenue to thinness.

Which parasites did some fad dieters supposedly swallow on purpose, hoping the creatures would absorb food?

Tapeworms were meant to mature in the intestines until the dieter reached a target, then be killed with an anti-parasitic pill, a scheme counted among diet hoaxes.

Which snack cakes headlined the convenience store diet on which professor Mark Haub lost 27 pounds in 2010?

Twinkies, Oreos or Doritos every three hours still brought Haub's body mass index back to normal, his lesson to students that calorie counts drive weight loss.

Which toy gives its name to the cycle of losing weight on a strict diet and then putting it all back on?

Yo-yo dieting, known to researchers as weight cycling, often begins with a low-calorie plan too extreme to keep up.

Which citrus fruit anchored the 1930s Hollywood diet, on the claim that it holds a fat-burning enzyme?

Grapefruit has no such power, biochemists say; the plan's menu of fruit, toast and eggs simply added up to about 500 calories a day.

Which vegetable is the base of the soup in a seven-day crash diet also sold as the Russian Peasant Diet?

Cabbage soup dieters are promised a 10-pound loss in a week, but nutritionists say most of what goes is water rather than fat, so it soon returns.

Which low-carb diet, launched by a New York cardiologist in 1972, once claimed one in eleven North American adults?

Atkins, the cardiologist, died in 2003, and two years later the company selling his branded products filed for bankruptcy as demand for them fell.

Which place-named diet did cardiologist Arthur Agatston devise for his patients before it became a bestseller?

South Beach was a rebrand: the plan was first called the Modified Carbohydrate Diet, then renamed after the Miami Beach district near Agatston's practice.

A lifelong gluten-free diet, adopted by many as a fad, is the only treatment for which autoimmune condition?

Celiac disease is an abnormal immune reaction to gluten, a protein in wheat, barley and rye, that mainly harms the small intestine.

Which slimming company grew out of weekly meetings that Jean Nidetch hosted in her Queens apartment?

Weight Watchers began with six overweight friends in that apartment, and within two months 40 women were turning up each week.

Which singer set off a craze for the Master Cleanse lemonade fast by promoting it on television in 2006?

Beyoncé's endorsement revived a regime first sold in the 1940s by Stanley Burroughs, which bans solid food and adds a saltwater flush every morning.

Fen-phen, a diet pill pairing that cost over $13 billion in damages, was withdrawn for harming which organ?

Heart valve problems surfaced in a 1997 Mayo Clinic paper on 24 fen-phen users, and regulators then received over a hundred further reports.

Which vegetable is the best-known negative-calorie food, said to take more energy to digest than it holds?

Celery uses only about 8% of its energy in digestion, far short of the 100% a truly negative-calorie food would need.

Which TV doctor was told at a 2014 Senate hearing that scientists were almost united against his diet claims?

Mehmet Oz heard from Senator Claire McCaskill that products praised on his show were later cited in adverts, giving him a role in spreading scams.

Naturopath Peter D'Adamo is the best-known promoter of diets that match meals to which inherited trait?

Blood type diets have no scientific backing: dietitians, physicians and scientists agree that groups O, A, B and AB do not each need a separate menu.

Which organs already filter out harmful substances, the job that juice cleanses and detox diets claim to do?

Liver and kidneys remove harmful substances without any help, and the British Dietetic Association has called the detox idea nonsense and a marketing myth.

Which dairy product goes into Bulletproof coffee, which Dave Asprey devised after drinking tea in Tibet?

Butter was Asprey's stand-in for the yak-butter tea he had tasted, and dietitians have dismissed the health claims for his wider regime as pseudoscientific.

What do followers of one dangerous fad diet dip in juice or smoothies and swallow whole to feel full?

Cotton balls cannot be broken down by the body, so swallowing them risks choking and blockages in the intestines.

The macrobiotic diet, popularized by George Ohsawa in the 1930s, tries to balance which pair of forces?

Yin and yang govern more than the plate in macrobiotics: the balancing extends to cookware, and its plans aim for a yin-to-yang ratio of five to one.

Which biblical prophet, who refused a Babylonian king's food, gives his name to a vegetables-and-water fast?

Daniel and his companions asked for a ten-day trial on vegetables and water, the passage behind a partial fast kept by many Christians.

Which spice is stirred into the Master Cleanse drink alongside lemon juice and maple syrup?

Cayenne pepper spikes a drink that replaces every meal on the plan, which its creator relaunched in a 1976 book called The Master Cleanser.

Which fruit starred in a breakfast fad diet that swept Japan in 2008 and sold over 730,000 books that year?

Bananas with room-temperature water made up breakfast on the plan, which an Osaka pharmacist devised for her husband before he spread it online.

Which dish is named after a Civil War physician who prescribed lean chopped beef and pints of hot water?

Salisbury steak honors James Salisbury, who blamed vegetables and starchy foods for producing poisons in the gut and wanted them cut to a third of the diet.

The hCG diet pairs fewer than 500 calories a day with a hormone that the human body produces during what?

Pregnancy tests detect the same hormone, and US regulators have called over-the-counter hCG slimming products fraudulent and ineffective.

Which herbal stimulant, known in Chinese medicine as ma huang, was banned from US diet supplements in 2004?

Ephedra was banned after reports of deaths, among them Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler, whose fatal 2003 heatstroke was partly blamed on it.

Fletcherism, an early 1900s craze led by American faddist Horace Fletcher, was built around which habit?

Chewing each mouthful until it turned to pulp, sometimes a hundred times, won Fletcher a nickname: the Great Masticator.

Which pantry staple did the poet Lord Byron mix with water in the 1820s as part of a popular slimming regime?

Vinegar and water was one of several diets tried by Byron, who dreaded growing fat and at times lived for days on biscuits and soda water.

Which wealthy suburb names the 1970s diet whose creator, Herman Tarnower, was murdered by a jilted lover?

Scarsdale, New York, was where Tarnower practiced cardiology, and the killing by Jean Harris gave his 1978 diet book an unexpected sales boost.

William Banting, whose 1863 pamphlet made cutting sugar and starch a Victorian craze, worked in which trade?

Undertaker to royalty, in fact: the Banting family firm buried George III and Queen Victoria, and his name became a verb, to bant, meaning to diet.

Which fashion designer shed about 90 pounds in 2001 in order to wear the slim suits of Hedi Slimane?

Karl Lagerfeld lost 42 kilograms on a regime created for him by Jean-Claude Houdret, and the plan then became a diet book carrying the designer's name.

Which French doctor's high-protein plan opens with phases called Attack and Cruise?

Dukan sold more than seven million copies of his diet book, yet in 2014 he was struck off the medical register for promoting the plan commercially.

Which British TV doctor made the 5:2 fasting plan a craze with a 2012 BBC documentary, Eat, Fast and Live Longer?

Michael Mosley's version limits two days a week to roughly 500 to 600 calories, about a quarter of normal intake, and leaves the other five alone.

What kind of product was Ayds, a slimming aid that thrived for decades until its name sank it in the 1980s?

Ayds sales fell by as much as half as awareness of AIDS grew, and renaming the candy Aydslim and then Diet Ayds could not rescue it.

Which Arctic explorer ate nothing but meat for a year in a study monitored at New York's Bellevue Hospital?

Vilhjalmur Stefansson and a fellow explorer showed no ill effects, the 1929 report found; he had argued that scurvy hit explorers who ignored the Arctic's native eating habits.