Dietary Fads: A Century And A Half Of Futility And Other Loses Except Weight

The only thing that has not changed in the 150-year old battle against obesity is the quest to find an easy, painless, and miraculous formula for weight loss. Dieting has been around for a long time. In fact, it has been practiced for as long as way back in 1863 when William Banting stunned the obese world by losing close to 50 pounds through his special low-carb diet. It had indeed to be a special diet because one would wonder what else he subsisted on after he shunned meat, bread, milk, potatoes, and of course beer among many other staples of that time. He wrote absurdly pamphlet titled “Letter on Corpulence” whose popularity made his name Banting synonymous with dieting. That was a time when corpulence was a politically correct way of addressing obesity related matters.

The battle against obesity through dietary fads still continues today. In the twenty first century, dieting has taken every conceivable form and even become a way of life among the affluent who can afford to eat less or even skip meals by choice. Dieting has even been commercialized, and even permeated religious and spiritual realms, but has still to gain any meaningful ground against the overweight problem. If the current trends in dieting are anything to go by, the chances of dieting in the quest to tip the weighing scale are, indeed, slim.

The blame for the dismal results of dieting can not be attributed to the practices per se but on a variety of many factors. Let us not forget that we were begotten of ancestors who believed in the healthy benefits of being plump. Obesity was a desirable trait at one time when the size of a man’s girth and a woman’s belly was a measure of affluence. The rapid surge of obesity in recent years despite an even higher increase in all forms of diet techniques and nutritional discoveries can be attributed to our being a nation of on-and-off dieters. Our dieting habits have become a reflection of our personalities; uncommitted, dishonest, and unreliable.

Dietary fads have been in existence long before the calorie was in vogue. All along, unscrupulous individuals have always strived to fatten their wallets from the universal quest of slimming. A case in point is the La Parle soap that sold for an exorbitant price of $1 in 1903. The soap manufacturer guaranteed that it would not only wash away fat but reduce flesh too. There was also the Graybar Stimulator that many bought in an effort to jiggle away the pounds, not to mention the Bile Beans laxative approach to weight loss at approximately the same period.

The birth of nutrition science in 1916 brought about every conceivable experimentation and product in the battle against weight. Slimming has become a major industry today with revenues running into billions of dollars. In the health and beauty category, none has a higher amount of products and adverts both in the print and electronic media than weight loss. It is a multi billion dollar industry with tens of thousands of products, clinics, and weight loss programs. There are hundreds of websites online dedicated to slimming. Yet in the face of all these efforts, we are still grappling with the problem of obesity both nationally and internationally.

Many have admitted to have invested heavily on products and programs that promised to help them lose weight but the only thing they lost was money. Some of the dietary products have even been harmful to the health of their users. Implementation of government regulations on slimming diet products and programs is long overdue.