Many diet trends have come and gone but none of them were healthy. Every once a while new rage emerges and people go crazy over them, without even bothering to research first how healthy or harmful this would be for their body. These diet trends even go mainstream with food chains coming up in their menus.
Here are five diet trends which nourish your body and not drain them out.
Souping
Souping is the new juicing and is definitely not referring to bone broth diets that encourage you to sip on soup before a meal to tame your appetite. It is rather to exclusive souping meal plans that include desserts also. Exclusive juice diets are labeled as ‘cleanses’ or ‘detoxes’. In these diets or cleanses a very important detoxifying ingredient is wasted, that one is fiber. Not so with soups, which often contain whole vegetables and, in the case of breakfast soups, fruit.
The soups keep the fiber, seeds, rind, and pulp that juicing often discards. There are breakfast soups, known as smoothie bowls, and even dessert soups.
Sprouted Grains
While sprouted grains have been around for a while, they have become more mainstream. Sprouting of grains provides increased vitamins and minerals, antioxidants, increased digestibility, and nutrient absorption. Sprouting creates enzymes that make plant proteins, essential fatty acids, starches, and vitamins more available for absorption.
Some research also suggests that sprouted grains can decrease blood pressure and help protect against fatty liver, and sprouted brown rice can help reduce blood glucose levels and improve immune function in breastfeeding mothers.
These sprouted grains can be consumed in the form of chips and crackers, thanks to innovative ideas of the diet food industry.
Sugar-Free Products
Food companies nowadays are under increasing pressure to reduce the added sugar content of their products. This has resulted in the inclusion of more of the so-called ‘natural sweeteners,’ like stevia, maple syrup, agave syrup, monk fruit, date sugar, and coconut palm sugar.
Some are as good as table sugar, others contain fewer calories, and some, like stevia, are calorie-free. While certain natural sweeteners, like date sugar, provide nutrients absent from table sugar, there’s little or no research to suggest that alternative natural sweeteners provide any health benefits.
There is a great demand and increased offerings of products containing reduced amounts of sugar, replaced with one or more of these natural sweeteners, many of which are metabolized by the body no differently than sucrose.
Probiotic Push
The “good bacteria,” like L Acidophilus, L Plantarum, L-rhamnose, and L-reuteri, have been found in yogurts and yogurt-like products for a long time. However this year it won’t be uncommon to find probiotic bacteria in foods and beverages, such as orange juice, cereals, and waters. Food items vegan butter made from virgin coconut oil with probiotics added; microwaveable, high-protein muffins with probiotics; and organic fruit and vegetable juices, sweetened with maple syrup and with probiotics added are quite in demand.
And it’s not just about improving intestinal health but probiotics may be helpful in treating symptoms of depression. Whether or not there are enough live, active good bacteria in these new products to improve health is another question.
Full-Fat Dairy Items
Now that people are starting to embrace more fat in their diets, there are more full-fat and reduced-fat (as opposed to fat-free) dairy products being used. Consumption of whole-milk dairy products is on the rise as there’s a growing understanding that milk fat isn’t bad for you and may actually be good for you.
In 2013, three comprehensive, independent reviews, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the Journal of the American Heart Association, and the European Journal of Nutrition, had concluded that there’s no association between dairy fat or high-fat dairy foods and obesity, type 2 diabetes, or cardiometabolic risk, and they may be inversely associated with obesity risk.