200 Years of Diet Fads That Fooled Us — and Somehow Still Changed the World

Before we start, a quick disclaimer: this article is a historical and cultural look at dieting trends, not a medical guide. Some of the diets below caused real harm to the people who tried them, and none of them should be seen as a recommendation. If you're looking to change how you eat, a registered dietitian or your doctor is a much safer place to start than a 200-year-old fad.

It started with a poet who was terrified of getting fat

Depending on the source, one of the biggest names in poetry may also have been one of history's first diet influencers. According to reporting on his life, Lord Byron reportedly reduced his body mass index from roughly 29.7 to 22.1 twice in his lifetime through extreme restriction — and some historians believe he battled what we would now recognize as disordered eating. He is said to have dined on little more than biscuits and soda water as a student, and in his later years turned to sipping apple cider vinegar mixed with water and rice, believing it would suppress his appetite. It reportedly worked — but it also came with dental damage, vomiting, and chronic stomach trouble. Byron's vinegar habit is widely credited as one of the first celebrity-driven diet crazes, and historian Louise Foxcroft has said he essentially helped kick off the public's ongoing obsession with how celebrities lose weight.

How to lose weight? How to shrink your waistline? How to get rid of cellulite? How to get a slimmer figure? People have been (unsuccessfully) asking themselves these same questions for thousands of years. And every so often, a piece of advice really does go viral — probably because, for a little while at least, it actually seems to work.

1820: The Vinegar and Water Diet

This was the diet made famous by the celebrated British poet Lord Byron, who would occasionally spend days eating nothing but potatoes and vinegar, all while smoking cigars in enormous quantities. It's generally regarded as the first truly "modern" diet — the ancestor of every celebrity weight-loss fad that followed. If you want the fuller, stranger story of Byron's lifelong struggle with food, Food that makes you fat, even if it does not fatten looks at how certain "healthy" foods can quietly sabotage a diet the same way Byron's habits did two centuries ago.

1830: Graham's Diet

American minister Sylvester Graham is remembered as one of the great American food reformers — a man who championed vegetarianism and regular exercise while treating bread, of all things, as public enemy number one. He didn't invent the Graham cracker himself, but it was created in his name and following his teachings. Today's graham crackers are still made with coarse, less-refined flour. Graham also argued that flour milling should retain the whole grain rather than stripping it down — in a sense, he was an early champion of what we would now call whole-grain flour and the products made from it. According to Britannica's biography of Graham, his advocacy for coarsely ground wheat flour is considered the origin of the modern breakfast-cereal industry, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute notes he is considered the de facto founder of the American diet reform movement of the 1830s and 1840s.

1903: Fletcherism

Horace Fletcher was a passionate believer in healthy eating, but he thought the real secret was hiding in how long you chewed. He claimed that holding each bite in your mouth for at least 32 seconds — chewing it roughly 32 times, once for every tooth — made it almost impossible to gain weight, since he believed enzymes released during chewing prevented fat storage. According to accounts of his life, Fletcher himself reportedly lost more than 65 pounds using the method, and it attracted an impressive list of followers, including Thomas Edison, Franz Kafka, and John D. Rockefeller. Even Mark Twain is said to have given it a try. Modern "mindful eating" advice — slow down, chew thoroughly, notice when you're full — actually shares some common ground with Fletcher's century-old obsession, even if the "32 seconds" rule itself has no real scientific backing.

1923: The Cigarette Diet

This was the era when women were fighting for emancipation — and, unfortunately, also came to believe that a cigarette was a perfectly good substitute for dessert. Some even believed smoking was actually healthier than eating sweets. It's hard to imagine anyone agreeing with that today, even though there was a grain of truth buried in the marketing: nicotine genuinely does suppress appetite. In the late 1920s, Lucky Strike ran one of advertising history's most notorious campaigns around the slogan "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet," which reportedly helped boost the brand's sales by more than 300% in a single year. The ads deliberately targeted women's insecurities about weight, and by some estimates the percentage of American women who smoked nearly tripled over the following decade.

1950: The Grapefruit Diet

This diet keeps resurfacing every few years, built on the idea that enzymes in grapefruit are able to dissolve fat. The basic rule: eat half a grapefruit before every meal, which is supposed to curb your appetite and "wash away" fat. According to historical accounts, the diet actually dates back to the 1930s Hollywood scene and was originally known as the "eighteen-day diet." While the fat-dissolving enzyme claim doesn't hold up scientifically, grapefruit itself isn't a bad addition to a balanced plate — it's genuinely rich in fiber and vitamin C, both of which support a feeling of fullness. If citrus fruit is your thing, this recipe using lemon, grapefruit, and parsley is a much gentler modern take on the same idea.

1964: The Drinking Man's Diet

This one is exactly what it sounds like: a diet built around protein, meat, and — quite literally — alcohol. Despite widespread disapproval at the time, it had no shortage of devoted followers, who technically stayed within the diet's rules while, in practice, staying fairly tipsy throughout. The plan was the creation of San Francisco photographer Robert Cameron, whose 1964 pamphlet reportedly sold more than 2.4 million copies in 13 languages and has since been described as an early ancestor of low-carb diets like Atkins and paleo. At the time, Harvard nutrition researcher Frederick Stare was scathing, reportedly calling it, in an account of the diet's history, "the most recent version of nutritional nonsense sweeping this country."

1976: The Sleeping Beauty Diet

The main champion of this one was Elvis Presley, who — according to multiple accounts of his life — was drawn to the idea that if you're asleep, you can't be eating. The so-called "Sleeping Beauty Diet" involved heavy sedation to sleep for extended stretches instead of eating, and Presley reportedly went so far as to consult a doctor about being placed in a medically induced sleep to shed weight before he fell out of his hospital bed and abandoned the idea. His struggles with prescription medication in his later years are widely documented as a contributing factor in his declining health, and he died in 1977 at the age of 42. It's a sobering reminder that some diet trends have carried real, serious risks — a pattern that runs through much of the history in this article.

1981: The Beverly Hills Diet

On this one, you eat nothing but fruit for 10 days, then slowly reintroduce bread, butter, and corn. The full program runs 35 days, and it's often cited as one of the first diets to explode thanks to television and celebrity culture — not coincidentally the same period when the glossy nighttime soap Beverly Hills-style glamour was dominating American screens. The diet was created by Judy Mazel, a former aspiring actress with no formal training in nutrition, whose 1981 book became a nationwide bestseller and diet craze. It wasn't well received by the medical community — the Journal of the American Medical Association reportedly called it "the latest, and perhaps the worst, entry in the diet-fad derby" shortly after its release, largely because the food-combining theory behind it has no real scientific support.

2008: The Morning Banana Diet

Eat bananas for breakfast. Eat bananas for a mid-morning snack if you like. Dinner is whatever was left over from breakfast and lunch — so, more bananas. The diet also encouraged drinking plenty of room-temperature water between meals (the water had to match room temperature, that part mattered) and going to sleep before midnight, which honestly isn't bad advice on its own. The diet was created in Osaka by pharmacist Sumiko Watanabe to help her husband Hitoshi manage his weight; he reportedly lost around 17 kilograms and shared the approach online, where it went viral and reportedly sold more than 730,000 books in Japan alone, at one point triggering a nationwide banana shortage. For a closer look at how fruit-based eating habits can genuinely support metabolism when done sensibly, see how kiwi, apples, and grapefruit can support healthy weight management.

2010: The Baby Food Diet

The core idea here is simply eating baby food — as strange as that sounds. What made it appealing to some was that commercial baby food is genuinely free of added sugar and most other additives. This was one of the first diets built explicitly around cutting out a single category — added sugar — years before "sugar-free" became a mainstream nutrition buzzword. The diet was created by celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson and became widely known after being linked to actress Jennifer Aniston, who was reported to have lost around 7 pounds in a single week on the plan, though she later publicly downplayed the reports. If cutting back on added sugar is genuinely your goal, Carbohydrates that need to be limited after the age of 40 covers the same territory with a far more balanced, sustainable approach.

2012: LCHF

This is the diet that cuts out simple, industrially processed carbohydrates entirely. It's grounded in genuine scientific and medical research, and counting calories is no longer the focus — the emphasis instead is on the body shifting to fat as its primary fuel source rather than storing it. There's real research behind this shift: studies on athletes have found that after several weeks of adaptation to a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, the body can roughly double its rate of fat oxidation during exercise compared with a standard higher-carbohydrate diet. That said, the picture is nuanced — some of that same research has also found that a strict ketogenic approach can reduce exercise efficiency in elite endurance athletes, so LCHF isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. As always, it's worth discussing bigger dietary changes like this with a healthcare professional before diving in, especially if you have any underlying health conditions. For a broader look at how cutting carbohydrates affects the body, Why You Should Avoid Diets That Exclude Carbohydrates makes the case for balance rather than extremes.

What two centuries of fad diets actually teach us

Looking back at 200 years of dieting, a pattern emerges: almost every fad promised a shortcut, and almost every one of them eventually gave way to something more grounded in actual science. Byron's vinegar became modern research into how acetic acid affects blood sugar. Graham's whole-grain crusade became today's fiber-rich, whole-food movement. Even LCHF, one of the more recent entries on this list, is still being actively studied and refined by researchers rather than taken purely on faith. If there's one lesson worth taking from this stranger-than-fiction history, it's that sustainable, moderate, evidence-based habits tend to outlast every fad — even the ones that seemed absolutely unstoppable at the time.