Fad diets are popular because they offer practitioners immediate results. The promoters of regimens such as Paleo, Atkins and “keto” all promise that you’ll lose weight, feel great and still be able to eat all the meat and fat that you like. Bacon is back on the menu!

Unfortunately, while fad diets promise much, they deliver comparatively little. Worse still, they could have a damaging impact on your long-term health, as pointed out by the following infographic.

When it comes to health, weight maintenance, and longevity, science already has a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't. When you look at the healthiest communities of people in the world - those who live the longest without frailty or disease - you find a recurring pattern. All these people base their diets around whole, unprocessed plant food and barely consume any processed fats or animal products. They live off the plants that they can grow in soil, basing their calories around healthy, starches in whole food form. Their longevity isn’t the result of eating a high-fat, high-meat diet.

Fad diets, however, promise to give you results fast. They focus on the immediate issue that you might want to tackle - usually weight loss. But they are unproven long term, with many short term studies showing that they have adverse effects on health, even as you lose weight on them. 

If you’d like to know more about the dangers of fad diets, check out the following infographic. Don’t be fooled by clever marketing. 

by Contributing Author