Nutrition explained digesting fad diets

For New Year's resolution-ists, new eating and exercise plans have either proven their worth or fizzled out by now. The desperate search for the perfect path to health continues for many, be they a competitive athlete reaching for a personal record, or just someone looking to cut back on their daily frappuccinos from Starbucks.Unfortunately, magazine and book publishers, authors, health clubs, food marketing agencies, and personal trainers have figured out how to turn the public's hyper-focus on health into a pretty penny.

As a result, supermarket stocks of high-priced "health food" items have multiplied, virtually every magazine in the checkout aisles makes some claim about weight-loss magic and bookstores give best-selling diet books a special table all to themselves.The definitions of popular diets are easily digestible: vegetarians avoid meat, vegans avoid all animal products —including eggs, milk, cheese and even honey for the hard-core—, raw-ists can't eat anything that has been heated above about 115 degrees Fahrenheit, and people following the Paleolithic diet avoid anything that presumably wasn't available to members of a hunter-gatherer society.

Inundated with all of these different options, what's a health-conscious but critically-minded Hopkins student to do? Credible, data-driven information about any of these highly-advertised diets is usually difficult to find; even for those who do have access to academic research in health and nutrition, the science can be difficult to interpret. Ann McDermott, an associate professor of human nutrition at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, encounters this issue on a daily basis.