Dopamine Fasting to Charcoal: Bid These Diet Trends Adieu in 2019!

From eating charcoal, to dopamine fasting, nutrition trends that made no sense and were pushed by celebrities on social media, just need to be left behind in 2019. A new decade calls for more sensible nutrition choices!Charcoal? Just NO!Keep charcoal out of food, please!Riding on the news that activated charcoal is a brilliant detoxing agent, and that it binds to certain poisons, heavy metals, and other toxins and flush them from your body, food companies and restaurants went on an overdrive and began adding it to every food - kitschy black bagels, pizza bases, lemonade, black burger buns - and marketing them as our health saviours.Doesn’t work: Not many know that large or repeated doses of activated charcoal can even lead to a blockage in the digestive tract. So be careful.Verdict: Eat these foods for the sake of experimentation, but don’t expect too many health benefits.Hydrogen Water?Just drink regular water and keep yourself hydrated. What’s that you ask? Well this is water to which hydrogen molecules have been added, apparently to increase the pH of the water and to create alkaline water in an attempt to cut acidity from the body.Doesn’t work: Our body knows how to regulate the pH intrinsically. Simply staying hydrated does the job effectively, these fancy waters only drain our wallets.Verdict: Not very effective, and ridiculously expensive.Also Read: FIT WebQoof: Should You Be Drinking Water While Standing?Dopamine Fasting - Techies on DopeBy reducing the brain’s feel-good chemical known as dopamine, followers believe that they can reset the brain.This is Silicon valley’s new productivity fad. Here practitioners abstain from any experience that brings them pleasure, including but not limited to sex, food, exercise, social media, video games and talking… and it is supposedly a way to fix your brain.Doesn’t work: If anything, we all need to boost our dopamine levels consciously to lead a happier, healthier life, not cut it out.Verdict: The very idea is BS, completely.Green PowdersDo you really want all this in a powder form? These were marketed heavily as a shortcut (to be able to skip eating green vegetables totally). Just have a teeny weeny bit of powder and you can get all the nutrients - antioxidants, fibre, vitamins, minerals etc, is the claim.Doesn’t work: They don’t even come close to the benefits that eating a real food provides. Just eat your greens!Verdict: Just eat your greens!Also Read: #FITRecipe: You Want to Give Our Mixed Greens Pesto Pasta a TryWeight Loss Apps for KidsNutritious food is enough. You don’t need to put your kids on a diet. These are apps designed for children, where they can track their weight and are advised on what to eat and what to skip.Doesn’t work: This is definitely not the right way to approach our children’s health and weight. The harmful effects dieting has on children at a young age are way too many, and way too terrible for this to encouraged. Restricting food intake of children or the type of foods they’re allowed to eat can mess up their relationship with food big time.Verdict: It’s important to draw the line on consumerism… at least where our children our concerned.Obsessive Eating Don’t be obsessive. Specially if you don’t have allergies.Becoming healthy somehow ceased to be a way of life, and became an obsession for many. From the simple advice of ‘eat a well rounded diet', it became a quest to try and follow a low carb, dairy free, meat free, gluten free, organic, non GMO, macro and micro calculated, properly planned diet. In other words it went a bit too far.Doesn’t work: Obsessive dieting actually back fires because it messes up with the hormones (imagine the stress (and guilt) these people put themselves through)… and that counters any goodness they were chasing.Verdict: Just follow the principal of moderation, and you’ll do just fine.Also Read: Beware, Indians, Gluten Sensitivity is a Desi Thing Too Cauliflower ManiaCauliflower soup is nice. But cauliflower pizza? From being among the more reviled vegetable with a reputation of being bland and boring, it somehow became omnipresent in 2019. Cauliflower rice to pizza bases, to chips and crackers… all became mainstream, thanks to the Keto diet fad.Doesn’t work: It has become an overkill now… too much of one thing is not good for us and that stands for cauliflower too.Verdict: It’s good for us so please continue eating cauliflower the way you did before. Make it part of a regular diet in moderate quantities.Collagen SupplementsKourtney Kardashian said that she starts her day with a hot collagen beverage and people thought they had found a solution to their coffee obsession. The claim was that drinking collagen, a protein found in the human body in the bones, muscles, skin and tendons, you could get rid of inflammation and get a radiant skin.Doesn’t work: Edible collagen - fruity chews, coffee creamers, easy-to-swallow capsules are all around us, but there is minuscule quality control, and even less research on them.Verdict: The science on edible collagen is truly in its infancy. Just stick to healthy food.Also Read: 9 Foods to Include in Your Diet to Boost Collagen in Your Skin

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Dopamine Fasting to Charcoal: Bid These Diet Trends Adieu in 2019!

Dopamine Fasting to Charcoal: Bid These Diet Trends Adieu in 2019!

Charcoal? Just NO!

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Topics: Quint Fit 2019 Flashback New Year 2020