Written by Joe Clark; SLU Dietetic Intern
As I progress further into my career path and the nutrition field, the more I gain an appreciation of the nutrition community and all the individuals that are part of it. I’ve realized a good majority of the community are so welcoming and truly want the best for the other professionals in the community and any clients/patients that are seeking out nutritional assistance. However, there are some companies/individuals that seek self-profit over the public’s wellbeing. This is more apparent in fields such as real-estate and property management where we can see individuals using the demand of shelter, a necessity to live, to gain a large profit. While nutrition doesn’t necessarily have the same problem to that extent, I have gained the opinion that some individuals have started to use the general public’s love of FAD diets as a profitable business.
While this sounds radical initially, I would like to share my thought of reasoning. These FAD diets are notorious for catching traction on social media and spreading like wildfire. When these FAD diets become popular, it’s almost inevitable that some individuals that have “success” from using the diet and claim its magical and everyone needs to try it. This is where the problem really begins. If these individuals have a strong platform, they can project the false message that the diet alone gave them the results that they are so proud of. Individuals who are not that knowledgeable on nutrition might have the compulsion to mimic the lifestyle and diet of that the individual that had success on the FAD diet. This leads to the possibility of individuals coaching the public on a diet that might not have a lack of evidence-based studies. Another profitable business opportunity that arises are products that go hand-and-hand with these FAD diets. Some of these diets can be very restrictive and take away a lot of the tasty foods that people hate to give up. So, some individuals create products that allow individuals to still “indulge” while staying on their diet. While this just seems like a normal business scheme, it still doesn’t sit right with me due to the lack of foundation of the diets these products were created for. These products were created by these companies to profit on their target audiences’ cravings and desires that are being restricted by their diet. It hurts as an individual in the nutrition field when I know that there is so many better solutions to their target audiences’ problems, but the misinformation of social media got to them first.
The one FAD diet that is really thriving right now is the keto diet. While not getting too into the history of the diet and why it became so popular, I can say that I’m not the biggest fan of it. The highly restrictive diet gives the perception of high initial weight loss in the form of fat but is mostly water weight. The diet doesn’t have any significant literature for long term weight loss for the public and creates a poor relationship with food by almost eliminating carbohydrates. I don’t recommend healthy individual goes on the keto diet for weight loss and I can say that a good amount of RDs would agree with me, but this doesn’t stop companies from using the keto diet as a business opportunity through product creation.
I wanted to go to the store and try out some of these keto products and see if there any good. I went to Walmart and bought any product that had “keto” on the front of the product. While I wanted to get 5+ items to try from, I realized quickly that these companies are really profiting off their target market group by almost doubling their non-keto competitor. So, I had to settle with only three products; Equate Fat Cups, Wonderworks Keto Friendly Cereal, and CanDo Keto Krisps. Just from these three products, I spent $24.79. To put that in perspective, that's half of my weekly grocery budget. I was hoping that with these price points, the taste of these products would be outstanding, but I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up. As shown in my Tik Tok, the only product I thought was okay was the Wonderworks Keto Friendly cereal. The taste was okay, but I mostly was impressed that it had 17 grams of protein for that quality of taste. The Keto Krisps was okay due to the strong peanut butter taste that I love, but still manage to ruin it a little by adding an artificial tasting chocolate taste and a very crumbly and dry texture. However, the Equate fat cups managed to take the award of being the worst tasting out of the three. When I say it tasted like a sad Reese’s cup, I really mean that it tastes so artificial and fake that I can barely tell what I’m eating. It leaves a fake aftertaste in my mouth that is so bad that I wanted to eat another so I could get rid of it. After tasting just three keto products, I realized that to an individual that eats a “normalish” diet these products taste terrible, but I can understand how they would taste good if I was deprived of sweets and sugar for a period. It hurts me to really understand how much these diets are restricting some people’s food choices and some people aren’t even getting closer to their nutrition/health related goals through it. This experience made me realize that future dieticians like me need have a lot of work to do by clearing up the misinformation on FAD diets and nutrition. It might be a lot of work ahead of me, but I’m excited to see change in the future.
