You're Doing it Wrong: a history of diet fads and fallacies

If history teaches us anything, it’s that fad diets are not in fact the invention of avocado-obsessed millennials, much as it might feel that way when you’re sobbing into your social media account scrolling through six-packs while simultaneously craving a Greggs iced bun.

If anything, the Edwardians had the edge on our cabbage soup/paleo/alkaline madness, according to You’re Doing it Wrong: Diet (Radio 4, 14 March, 9.30am). The ‘Great Masticator’ Horace Fletcher convinced hordes of them to chew mouthfuls of food 100 times, swallow the juice and spit out the residue to cure the bulge. Never mind that “they’d only need to defecate once every two weeks”, said author of ‘Calories and Corsets’ Louise Foxcroft. Then there was early fitness guru Sylvia of Hollywood, who weighed over 200Ib and revelled in pummelling people “to squeeze the fat out of their pores like mashed potato through a colander.”

Clearly the existence of diet charlatans ready to exploit our naiveties is nothing new. But equally clear is that the internet has handed them a horribly high platform from which to shout their lunatic ideas. From the “absolute garbage science” of the alkaline diet, to attempts to eat like cavemen with a life expectancy of 25, the web is full to bursting with diet fallacies and faux-experts getting rich off them.

As presenter Adam Buxton wryly pointed out, we all know, deep in our insecure hearts, exactly what a healthy diet looks like. Whenever and wherever pseudo-science has existed, it has never held a credible alternative.