What are recent diet trends? Which ones are the best and worst? A healthy and balanced diet is essential for your overall physical and mental wellbeing. When you consume a nutritious diet, you can protect your body against many acute and chronic conditions, including heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, metabolic disorders, mental illnesses, and even cancer.
Let us now discuss the recent diet trends and focus on the best and worst ones in 2021. That way, you can make an informed decision and choose the one that best fits your dietary and nutritional needs.
Recent Diet Trends – The Best Ones 2021
People follow recent diet trends to achieve their health goals, such as weight loss. Although combining exercise with a balanced diet is the key to success, following specific diet trends can cause harm to your body. Anyway, here are the best diet trends.
Vegetarian Diet
A vegetarian diet is a universal trend that always remains green and is followed by millions of people worldwide. As the name indicates, a vegetarian diet requires you to avoid consuming meat and animal-based products, such as dairy and eggs. You must also not eat poultry and seafood when following this recent diet trend.
You can choose from a wide range of healthy plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, and whole grains. When you follow this diet trend, make sure you cut back on sugar-sweetened drinks, refined grains, and fruit juices.
Mediterranean Diet
Although the Mediterranean diet varies from country to country, it is high in fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, fish, grains, cereals, and unsaturated fats, such as olive oil. You can also consume a small amount of meat and dairy products, such as milk and yogurt.
It is one of the recent diet trends that requires you to refrain from refined grains, such as white pasta, white bread, pizza dough, and refined oils, including soybean and canola oil. You must also avoid consuming food items with added sugars, such as candies, pastries, and sodas.
Research studies show that the Mediterranean diet offers many health benefits, such as the reduced risk of heart diseases, healthy aging, improved metabolism. When you combine it with caloric restriction, you can also lose weight healthily.
Low-Calorie Diet Using Air Fryers
A low-calorie diet is one of the most popular and recent diet trends worldwide. However, people follow this trend in a new way – i.e., they use air fryers to enjoy all kinds of food items without consuming fat content.
The purpose is to consume a balanced amount of calories to ensure optimal health and wellbeing. Air fryers have become more prevalent in recent years because people have realized the health benefits of the appliance, such as quick preparation of fried foods with less fat content.
Research shows that Americans consume potatoes more than any other vegetable. About 40% of potatoes are used in frozen products, such as French fries. An air fryer is an essential kitchen appliance that makes it easy to prepare fried food without adding a large quantity of oil to the basket. Air-fried food items have a lower fat content than food prepared with a deep fryer. Here is why you should follow this recent diet trend.
Weight Loss
If you want to lose weight effectively without restricting yourself from fried food, make sure you use an air fryer for cooking, baking, and fryer. Unlike deep-fried food, air-fried food items do not contain high levels of fat and calories. That way, you can achieve your weight loss goals.
Improved Safety
Using a deep-fryer requires you to heat a container full of oil to submerge the food, such as chicken, fries, meat, etc. Remember, this can cause a safety risk. On the other hand, air fryers use hot air circulation technology, but there is no or little involvement of oil. So, you can successfully reduce or mitigate the risk of spilling, which is pretty common with deep frying. For instance, if you touch the hot oil accidentally, it can cause serious personal injuries.
Prevent Acrylamide Formation
You can cook a wide range of food items from different categories, including vegetarian, non-vegetarian, vegan, desserts, snacks, etc., without the risk of acrylamide formation. Studies show that acrylamide formation is common with deep frying. It is a dangerous compound that poses a risk to your health and causes life-threatening diseases, such as cancer.
Recent Diet Trends – The Worst Ones 2021
There are dozens of recent diet trends advertised on food-related websites and social media. Millions of people follow these trends, but they don’t know such diets can harm their health. Some of the worst diet trends in 2021 are:
The Carnivore Diet
The carnivore diet is the worst recent diet trend because it restricts people from consuming plant-based foods. On the other hand, it requires consuming meat, fish, eggs, and certain dairy products.
You can’t consume anything else. Because this diet restricts or excludes healthy foods, such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, grains, and legumes, it is not healthy. Remember, fruits and veggies contain essential nutrients, such as vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, which play a crucial role in maintaining your body’s proper functioning.
Deficiency of essential nutrients can cause a wide range of health problems, including digestive diseases, skin disorders, dementia, defective bone growth, and poor muscle development. Likewise, if you follow this diet, you will experience weight gain due to poor metabolic functions.
Keto Diet
The ketogenic diet, also known as the keto diet, is not new but trending online. Although the keto diet offers numerous benefits, it usually contains high-fat content and low carb levels. People follow this diet to put their bodies into ketosis.
Research shows that the keto diet can cause kidney stones, low blood pressure, constipation, nutritional deficiencies, and an increased risk of cardiovascular conditions. Keto is a strict diet that can also cause disordered eating, increasing the risk of thyroid, liver, gallbladder, and pancreatic diseases.
Pegan Diet
The Pegan diet restricts common processed foods, such as cooking oils and fats. It also restricts milk, yogurt, cheese, and grains. Research highlights that the Pegan diet may cause low blood sugar, low-carb flu, bad breath, ineffective bowel movements, and lower energy levels in your body. That’s why we recommend avoiding the pegan diet and focus more on a low-caloric diet that allows for consuming food from all food groups.
Recent Diet Trends – Final Words
You will come across numerous diet trends on the internet. However, not all of them are healthy. Although vegetarian and Mediterranean diets are beneficial in some ways, the former restricts you from eating animal-based products, and the latter encourages you to consume more fats, such as olive oil, omega-3 fish oil, etc., leading to the risk of weight gain and other conditions, such as high cholesterol and heart diseases.
On the other hand, a low caloric but balanced diet is the key to promote your health holistically. Using an air fryer is an excellent way to cut on calories and fat content without compromising health. It enables you to eat food from all groups without worrying about your weight and health. That’s why air fryers have become extremely popular in recent years.
