(#1) Lord Byron's All Vinegar Diet That Nearly Killed A Generation Of Artists
Here's a shocker - Lord Byron was someone Carly Simon might call "vain." He had a big fear of gaining weight, and he went to great lengths to keep that from happening. At Cambridge, he limited himself to biscuits and soda water or simply potatoes soaked in vinegar. He kept up punishing and restrictive diets throughout his life and maintained a special taste for water with vinegar. To supplement this (lack of intake), he also wore lots of wooly layers to sweat off those extra pounds throughout the day. Not only were these aspects of his diet dangerous - to deal with the hunger pains - he also smoked cigars, a lose-lose for his health.
But it wasn't just him. Because Byron was so influential, others followed his vinegar-drenched ways, and there was widespread concern about the "impressionable Romantics were restricting themselves to vinegar and rice to get the fashionably thin and pale look."
(#3) The Great Masticator's Diet That Nearly Destroyed Everyone's Jaws
How much do you chew your food? Well, Horace Fletcher, AKA the Great Masticator, started suggesting in 1895 that everyone should chew more. A lot more. His belief was that “the most important part of nutrition is the right preparation of food in the mouth for future digestion." This basically meant chewing food up to 100 times a minute, until it was a liquid so gross you no longer actually wanted to swallow it. The practice earned the moniker "Fletcherism," and under this diet regime you could eat anything you wanted as long as you chewed it until it turned fluid. Fletcherism became so popular, in fact, that people would time each other at dinner parties in order to make sure everyone at the gathering was getting enough chews in. Sounds like a lot of tired jaws.
(#12) The Banana And Skim Milk Diet That Was Basically A Science-Backed Publicity Scam
The public loves it a good super food. But before chia, kale, and goji berries, the masses lauded a much more humble fruit. The banana was once considered the most super of foods, in part thanks to a Johns Hopkins study released by Dr. George Harrop in 1934. Harrop came to this conclusion after he tested a diet mostly of bananas and skim milk on diabetics who, unsurprisingly, still had diabetes but lost weight.
Enter the banana and skim milk diet, which took the country by storm. United Fruit pushed its popularity, and people gobbled it up. It's another (very weird) diet that manages to reemerge every now and then.
(#7) The Inuit Diet That Helped You Prevent Scurvy With All-You-Can-Eat Whale Blubber
Take all the misery of a low-carb diet and add a bunch of whale blubber, and you'll have the wonder that is the Inuit diet. The explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson was impressed with the diets he saw on Arctic explorations between 1908 and 1918 and decided to adopt them himself. The diet consisted almost solely of fish and meat, sometimes with nothing else for months at a time. For example, "stinkfish," a particular Inuit favorite, is made of "fish buried in seal bags or cans in the tundra and left to ferment." Amazed at the Inuits' ability to avoid scurvy without eating fruits and vegetables, Stefansson brought the diet back to the United States and demonstrated an American-ized version that involved eating lots of meat, poultry, fish, and organs like brain. Astoundingly, considering how unappetizing it sounds, the diet still has an occasional resurgence in the US.
(#10) The "La Mar Reducing Soap" That Let You Wash The Fat Right Off
There's a long history of gimmicks that have promised to help you lose weight without changing your diet. Or doing any exercise. Or really doing anything at all. In the 1920s and '30s, women reached for "La Mar Reducing Soap" and other products that promised to wash the pounds away in the bath. The reality? It was basically just hand soap, and no amount of scrubbing would do the trick. It there did exist a product that had the ability to wash the fat right off of your body, it would probably be a little more well known.
(#14) The "Prolinn Diet" That Was Full Of Animal Hooves And Heart Attacks
So many diet trends haven't been very healthy, but this one has the added benefit of being actively dangerous and disgusting. In the 1970s, a doctor called Roger Linn started marketing a supplement called Prolinn. Not only was the drink made from basically any and all animal slaughterhouse leftovers (like animal hooves and horns), but it had an unfortunate side effect. Allegedly, 58 people on the Prolinn diet had heart attacks. Not exactly the healthy drink supplement they were marketing.
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Obesity is not praising in our culture now. Dieting has become a way of life, and more and more people are following the trend of fashion. Weight loss information has been bombarded frequently, fast food restaurants have developed, and the eating environment has undergone drastic changes in a century. Looking back on the food history of the past few centuries, people will find that most of the dieting today is stupid, which is a myth shaped by modern media and capitalist interest chains.
Are you on a diet now? You would better learn more about a healthy diet now. Our random tool contains some stupid dieting ways that fad away from the food history, you could find random 14 items here, and welcome to search for other topics with the tool.
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