SOME WELL KNOWN DIET PLANS
Diets in most books and magazines advocate energy restriction. Some, such as ‘The Complete F-Plan Diet’ and The Pritikin Program’, are based on credible information, incorporating a high-carbohydrate/fibre, low-fat eating plan, although they tend to be extreme and may be difficult to sustain for a lifetime. Less reasonable but readily available diets that either exclude foods or are based on unsupported claims include:
The Israeli Army diet. This is an eight-day cyclical diet (four by two days) of apples, cheese, chicken, then salad, that has nothing to do with the Israeli Army. It is low energy, nutritionally inadequate, unsound and boring.
The Mayo Clinic diet. This has occurred in various forms, all capitalising on the good name of the Mayo Medical Clinic in the United States. One of the many forms of this diet requires the dieter to eat lots of eggs, in the belief that the energy used to digest them is more than the energy provided. The Mayo Clinic has disowned this diet. Other diets have also used this premise that the energy used to digest and utilise a food will be greater than that provided by the food. This is NOT supported by research but has not stopped people creating many diets, inducting the celery diet and negative calories diet.
The Beverley Hills Diet’. The film stars in Hollywood who gave credence to this diet certainly had no idea of nutrition and neither did its author. It talked of fat-dissolving fruits, and how some other foods were not digested by the body but were trapped as fat. It is a dangerous diet: inadequate, unsound and contrary to any research.
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