NURHASHIMAH BINTI DAHLAN
Be a class of your own!
FAD DIETS AND NUTRITION QUACKERY
Food is fuel, not therapy. -Anonymous
FAD DIETS
Fad diet is a diet that restrict food consumption, usually prohibited to consume certain food group in order to maintain or to lose weight and usually targeted people with obesity. Fad diet usually unhealthy, unbalanced and produces notorious side effects towards the practitioners. However, due to the lack of nutrition educations and awareness and the promising results which are misleading, the fad diet keeps growing among drastically among the people, not only the one that wanted to lose weight, even a normal people being influenced by the claims.
Fad diet available in many categories. The most popular fad diets are a very low-calorie diet and a low-fat diet. A very low-calorie diet is defined as the diet containing less than 800 kcal/d. When energy intake is low, the body is forced to obtain the energy needs from fat stores which resulting in the deduction of the body metabolic rate. Same goes to the low-fat diet. Fat is good for our health but within the recommendation. The Avoidance of foods that are high in fat will lead to a reduction in total calorie intake which may lead to undesirable weight loss. Apart from that, a high fibre diet is also started getting attention. High fibre diet requires the practitioners to consume a large amount of fibre per day as a substitute to carbohydrate and fat since fibre provide a sensation of fullness. Yes, it is true it makes us full, but fibre does not provide energy, High intake of fibre may lead to diarrhoea and flatulence.
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Look at the picture below. EAT RIGHT NOT LESS!
QUACKERY NUTRITION
Nutrition quackery refers to the nutrition frauds especially food products with those untrue and misleading claims. The important elements in the nutrition quackery is the food labelling and its claims and its manufactures/food producers marketing. Why these products are easily marketed and succeed? It is because the manufactures registered and claimed their products as food or food supplement but not as drugs, where the FDA strictly regulates the terms, conditions and criteria. Since the products are easily enter the markets, the manufactures manipulated the labelling with all those promising and beneficial claims to deceive the people. And in addition, sad but true, in order to make increase the people’s confidence of buying those products, the manufactures paid celebrities to promote their products. Being an influencer with many followers are the easiest way to market their products. The people are easily interested with a anything about the celebrities, being easily influenced and deceived (sigh).
SO WHAT'S NOW?
As a nutritionist, it is challenging to educate people on what is right, what is wrong, what it should be, what it should not and many more. To all nutritionist out there, keep calms and fulfil your duty with faiths and courage. :)