Food24
  • Recipes
    • New recipes
    • Recipe round-ups
    • Easy weekday meals
    • Cooking with lamb
    • Delicious pork recipes
    • Braai recipes
    • Chicken recipes
    • Vegetarian recipes
    • Baking
    • Low carb recipes
    • Gluten-free recipes
    • Dairy-free recipes
    • Pasta recipes
    • South African recipes
  • News
    • Food news
  • Videos
  • Drinks
    • Non-alcoholic drinks
    • Wine
    • Beer
    • Cocktails
    • Coffee
  • Newsletters
  • More
    • Cooking guides and tips
    • Baking tips and tricks
    • Food24 taste tests
    • Eat for good
    • Win
No Result
View All Result
Food24
  • Recipes
    • New recipes
    • Recipe round-ups
    • Easy weekday meals
    • Cooking with lamb
    • Delicious pork recipes
    • Braai recipes
    • Chicken recipes
    • Vegetarian recipes
    • Baking
    • Low carb recipes
    • Gluten-free recipes
    • Dairy-free recipes
    • Pasta recipes
    • South African recipes
  • News
    • Food news
  • Videos
  • Drinks
    • Non-alcoholic drinks
    • Wine
    • Beer
    • Cocktails
    • Coffee
  • Newsletters
  • More
    • Cooking guides and tips
    • Baking tips and tricks
    • Food24 taste tests
    • Eat for good
    • Win
No Result
View All Result
Food24
No Result
View All Result

Mad, bad food fads

Jeanne Horak-Druiff by Jeanne Horak-Druiff
July 20, 2009
in Food News
0
Mad, bad food fads
0
SHARES
141
VIEWS
FacebookTwitterPinterestWhatsapp

You’re sitting in a restaurant with a group of your friends and the waitress comes to take your order. One orders French onion soup without the crouton and wants to check whether there is flour in the sauces because of her no-carb regime. Another wants apple cider vinegar because she can’t eat till she’s had her warm apple cider vinegar. And a third wants a salad but is interrogating the waitress about whether there is any dairy in the dressing because of his recently self-diagnosed lactose intolerance.


Fair enough, I understand if people are vegetarian/vegan for personal reasons. I fully appreciate that there are people with nut or seafood allergies so severe that they can go into anaphylactic shock and die before the ambulance gets here.


And I have the utmost sympathy for people with a genuine wheat allergy who suffer from coeliac disease. But seriously, people, enough already with the fad diets and the fashionable intolerances!


Let’s start at the very beginning
Amazingly, fad diets are a trend that’s been going on for centuries: only the ingredients in favour or disfavour change.


The late 18th century gave birth to a fad known as the chewing movement. British Prime Minister William Gladstone pioneered the idea of chewing food 32 times to aid digestion, but it was taken to its logical extreme by an American businessman Horace Fletcher who chewed food until it dissolved in his mouth (720 chews for one shallot!).


As “proof” of his extreme chewing theory, Fletcher was happy to send his “remarkably odour-free stools” by mail to anybody who asked. Nice.


Although fasting for religious reasons has been around for centuries, the idea of fasting for health reasons is a more modern one. Who among us has not contemplated a “juice detox”? But in 1911 Upton Sinclair wrote that long periods of starvation could cure TB, syphilis, asthma and cancer.


Although he admitted that he had heard of people dying while fasting, he was sure that it was the underlying diseases that had caused their deaths, not the fasting. Which must have been a great comfort to their relatives…


As early as 1958, one Dr Jarvis proposed that the biggest danger to our health was an “excess of alkalinity”. To combat this and to create a more acidic environment in the body, he proposed that people should avoid meat, wheat, citrus fruits and sugar, and dose themselves with two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar before each meal.


This is, of course, diametrically opposed the alkaline diet, which advocates keeping the body in a slightly alkaline state by avoiding acid-forming foods altogether, and in so doing allegedly preventing a host of degenerative and autoimmune diseases. Confused, anyone?

And how can we forget good old Dr Atkins and his famous low-carb, high fat and high protein diet that came on the scene in the early 1980s? You know the one where you could have bacon and eggs for breakfast while your friend glumly chewed on bran flakes?


I remember tucking into a baked potato with tuna at my desk back in 2000. A passing colleague enquired in horror whether I was really going to eat that, because as every schoolboy knows, the combination of carbohydrate and protein will fail to digest together, putrefy in my stomach and make me obese. Mmmm. Yes, it’s the Fit For Life diet, which was all about the combinations of food that you could eat and, mysteriously, never drinking water with meals.


I could continue (the list is long – and we didn’t even touch on the caveman diet!) – But why bother? All we know for sure is that by this time next year there will be half a dozen new dietary fads, and dining out with friends will be even more annoying than it already is.


So what’s the craziest food fad or diet you’ve ever tried?


Jeanne Horak-Druiff is the face behind the multi-award winning blog www.cooksister.com. This ex-lawyer based in London now spends all her free-time cooking, photographing and eating good food.



Related Posts

brownie-taste-test
Featured

Food24 put 5 brownie recipes to the ultimate taste test for World Chocolate Day

July 7, 2022
What’s in the Food24 team’s shopping basket?
Features

What’s in the Food24 team’s shopping basket?

July 6, 2022
pork ribs
Cooking Guides and Tips

From shanks to sausages, here’s how to cook different pork cuts

July 5, 2022
Next Post
All in a day’s work

All in a day's work

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Food24 Team Loves

grocery store

5 new things we’ve spotted in supermarkets

June 29, 2022
We tried 6 different cooking methods for lamb chops and found the best

We tried 6 different cooking methods for lamb chops and found the best

May 19, 2022
rusks

We tasted store-bought buttermilk rusks and found the best one – just in time for winter

May 18, 2022
mielie rice

Whatever happened to mielie rice?

March 18, 2022
Khayelitsha’s Finest Wines goes global

Khayelitsha’s Finest Wines goes global

March 17, 2022

Recent favourites

  • grocery store

    5 new things we’ve spotted in supermarkets

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • What is the healthiest way to prepare pork?

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Sifo the Cooking Husband on his new cookbook – and pro tips for getting your family more involved in the kitchen

    1 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • We tasted store-bought buttermilk rusks and found the best one – just in time for winter

    2 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • When cooking goes horribly wrong: The Food24 team shares their tips and tricks to fix common issues

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0

Newsletter

Get weekly access to our best recipes, tips and tricks

Sign Up
Footer

Quick links

  • Home
  • News
  • Videos
  • Win

Collections

  • New Recipes
  • Festive
  • Baking
  • Dessert Recipes
  • Braai Recipes
  • Lunchbox
  • South African Recipes
  • Pasta Recipes

Other links

  • Advertise with Food24
  • Editorial Policy
  • How to Pitch
  • Contact us

Not in the mood to cook?

Visit eatout.co.za to find the perfect restaurant near you.

eatout.co.za

© 2020 Food24.com. All rights reserved.

  • About us
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • New Media
IAB
No Result
View All Result
  • Recipes
    • New recipes
    • Recipe round-ups
    • Easy weekday meals
    • Cooking with lamb
    • Delicious pork recipes
    • Braai recipes
    • Chicken recipes
    • Vegetarian recipes
    • Baking
    • Low carb recipes
    • Gluten-free recipes
    • Dairy-free recipes
    • Pasta recipes
    • South African recipes
  • News
    • Food news
  • Videos
  • Drinks
    • Non-alcoholic drinks
    • Wine
    • Beer
    • Cocktails
    • Coffee
  • Newsletters
  • More
    • Cooking guides and tips
    • Baking tips and tricks
    • Food24 taste tests
    • Eat for good
    • Win

© 2019 Food24.com. All rights reserved.

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Fill the forms below to register

Subscribe to Newsletter

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
Close
Food24
Recipe Disclaimer

All recipe content is the responsibility of the party from whom such content originated. You agree that you use the content on Food24 at your own risk. Please read our editorial policy.
Close
Food24
Get the latest recipes delivered to your inbox weekly
Promotional Newsletter

Be the first to receive information about competitions and special offers from Food24 and it's partners.

You have successfully been subscribed!
Something went wrong. Please try again.
Make sure you have completed all required fields.
I don't want to see this again