Clean and fast diet fads have plagued the media outlets of America for years, filling people’s minds with misinformation and goals unattainable through any diet alone. Juice cleanses and extreme versions of environmentally friendly food sourcing are this generation’s response to the decline of crash dieting.

Health conscious individuals believe that these products they are using to replace at least one meal per day are nothing but healthy. This is not always the case.

These ‘clean and fast’ food trends are marketed as these magical detoxifying supplements that will inherently improve your overall health without a minuscule of change in any other aspect of your life. No exercise, no extra trips to organic grocers or farmer’s markets.

In reality, it is more often that these cleanses are not only doing anything for you, but they can actually be extremely detrimental to overall health and lead to a multitude of deficiencies or malnutrition. People are becoming more and more health conscious as growth in information about what we are eating and where it comes from continues to make its way across our computer screens.

If ‘GMO’ or ‘synthetic’ does not come up on my Facebook feed at least once within five minutes of logging on something is wrong. People are making more conscious decisions about what kinds of foods they expose themselves to daily and are always looking for easy and fast ways to achieve this

Juice Cleanse

One of the most popularly presented diets in media outlets today, fresh pressed juice cleanses, is said to completely flush your body of all their toxins if used in place of a standard meal or meals. Detoxifying is a natural process. In no way does drinking fresh fruit juice and starving yourself speed up this process. At all. And since so much of the nutritional benefits that come from fruits are in the peels, they are often removed through the juicing process.

So, you’re just drinking a cup of natural sugar with some vitamins while starving yourself. Although fresh juices are a healthy alternative to sodas and snack food the diet-fad industry is capitalizing on the public desire for a fast and healthy lifestyle by promising benefits that are too good to be true. These juices obviously have nutritional benefits when incorporated into a balanced diet alongside daily exercise. It’s so much healthier than grabbing some fried food or processed snack, but in and of itself, and when used as a detox, they will not benefit your health.

“Marketers who peddle goods that promise to detox your body, especially in a limited amount of time, are usually fear-mongering and playing on our vulnerabilities to sell products” – (Washington Post)

Vegetarianism/Veganism

So, this kind of diet can be totally healthy if you do it right but it can be really dangerous if nutritional needs are not being met. Cutting milk out of your diet? Healthy. Consuming nutrient rich naturally grown substances? Healthy. Supplementing your cravings through processed foods and chemically based meat imitations? Not so much. There is also a huge risk of malnutrition. B12 is a vitamin that is super hard to get from a plant-based diet, and monitoring protein intake along with almost every other vitamin humans need from food is something you should not take lightly. For vitamins like B12, once you become deficient the side effects are permanent. On the other hand, if you’re eating a balanced diet of natural ingredients, it’s not only much better for the environment but also beneficial to your health. Especially if you cut out milk products and monitor vitamins.

“Milk can, if consumed in absurdly excessive quantities, lead to a condition called milk-alkali syndrome — but this is more commonly caused by over-consumption of calcium supplements than by guzzling milk. More common is calcium deficiency, which the NHS says can be caused by cutting out dairy products.” – (spectator)

Fruitarianism

Defined by its participants as a “way of life” this diet is extremely dangerous. Those who follow this diet to the extreme can only eat the fruits that fall from plants to the ground naturally, as it is what is given to them by the earth. Rachel Hosie with The Independent wrote that “people do it to different degrees, but the general rule is that your diet should consist of at least 75% raw fruit (by weight), and 25% nuts and seeds.” If this diet is followed for an extended period of time you can, and will, end up in the hospital. Dietician Lisa DeFazio said that “fruitarians often have low levels of vitamin B12, calcium, vitamin D, iodine, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can lead to anemia, fatigue, and a weak immune system.”

It’s like a juice cleanse in solid form with the peels, except for every meal forever.

The Sleeping Beauty Diet

You get put into a medically induced sleep so that you don’t eat, and then wake up to eat, and then get put back to sleep. It’s not a long-term diet, but the participant is willingly risking death, brain damage, and muscle deterioration for the possibility of losing a few extra pounds. This is obviously marketed to very vulnerable individuals and should either be made illegal and discontinued or face the same sort of restrictions as any other dangerous medical procedure.

The Cotton Ball Diet

Yup. Literally eating cotton balls instead of food. Do I even need to explain the negative effects of this one? The cotton balls are soaked in juice and then eaten. It doesn’t seem to be popular, but it exists. That’s a real problem

Many clean eating trends can be mutually beneficial for both the environment and the participant but can potentially be extremely detrimental to your health dependent on a variety of factors (age, diet, exercise) and benefits are often exaggerated through social media and marketing. Clean eating will likely remain a rapidly growing industry until people find the best cost effective, quick, health beneficial alternative through research and nutritional studies so that they are not dependent on the marketing of chain-restaurants and social media spokespeople to tell them their dietary needs. Individuals focused on health or the environment can be misled by false promise of supernatural benefits and the ever evolving “chain food” market will benefit from the inflated prices and demand.