Food faddism, the desire to experiment and express novel views, may lead to bizarre eating practices or the adoption of cult diets particularly common with adolescents. Factors such as morality and religious beliefs may lead to inappropriate food choice.

Because adolescence is a time of rapid growth, the requirement for nutrients is relatively high. Therefore misconceptions about food may led to an inadequate nutritional intake.

Misconceptions about food, such as honey and raw sugar being healthier than sugar and grapefruit believing to burn up fat can affect weight loss in weight control programmes.

Fad Diets
A fad diet is a new diet which receives publicity via books, magazines or the broadcasting media, which is supposed to improve health, aid slimming or cure illness. The success of these diets depends on people’s hopes, fears and ignorance. Most of these diets are nutritionally unbalanced and are forgotten fairly quickly, but others persist for longer and may cause nutritional problems long term.

Examples of Fad Diets

Bristol Diet
Is a cleansing diet supposedly to help cancer sufferers. There is no scientific evidence to support this diet, but it may provide hope for terminally ill cancer patients. The diet needs to be assessed for nutritional adequacy.

Fat Reducing Diets
These are diets that claim to be of benefit for weight reduction. These fall in to two categories:

Distorted Nutrient Composition - e.g., ‘Mayo Clinic’ diet, ‘Chicago’ diet, ‘Beverley Hills’ diet
These diets claim to have found ways to speed up metabolism or ‘burn fat’ by distorting the nutrient composition of the diet, eg: restricting carbohydrate intake with a concurrent increase in protein intake. Weight loss in these diets will depend on if an individual’s energy intake is less than energy expended. Long term, these diets are not well tolerated and are nutritionally unbalanced.

Restricted Food Group Diets
These are based on the recommendations of a few foods, eg: ‘grapefruit’ diet, ‘cabbage soup’ diet. These diets are nutritionally unsound and is of no use long term in the treatment of obesity.