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Every decade seems to bring diet fads that eventually become outdated, and while some of these\u00a0diet trends deserve a comeback<\/a>, the ’90s were certainly chock full of weight-loss trends that may leave modern consumers scratching (and shaking) their heads. Why did the 1990s include a constant barrage of “healthy” dieting beliefs and hype? For one, being thin became somewhat of an obsession and expectation, potentially exacerbated by the popularity of the body mass index (BMI). By the ’90s, doctors and patients were using the index to assess overall healthiness. Today, we’ve discovered that your BMI doesn’t tell the whole story. As dietitian Tim Crowe told\u00a0ABC<\/a>\u00a0in 2022, “A better focus is to be as healthy as you can be at whatever weight you are.”<\/p>\n Another 1990s trend was the popularity\u00a0of “heroin chic.” The idea was that if you lost enough weight to seem almost frail (as if you had been taking drugs), you were in style. In reality, though, denying yourself food can be detrimental to your overall physical health and mental well-being. According to health expert Dr. Fiona Willer, “Restriction will always backfire, whatever we tell ourselves we can’t eat is what our brain presents to us as [the thing] we want to eat” (via ABC<\/a>). Nonetheless, restriction and denial were goals for many in the 1990s and may have helped spur the following outdated diet foods.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n You can certainly find low-fat and fat-free foods in any grocery store. However, those types of “dieting” items were practically everywhere in the 1990s, following a notable surge in low-fat eating in the 1980s. It seemed like just about every brand in nearly every food category wanted to remove as much fat from its products as possible.<\/p>\n For example, when Nabisco introduced SnackWell’s, a collection of reduced-fat or no-fat sweet treats in the early 1990s, people clamored for them. Were they healthy? You be the judge. An evaluation from the Environmental Working Group<\/a> said they were ultra-processed and contained nearly half their weight in sugar.<\/p>\n Arguably, one of the biggest fat-bashing food fails was the introduction of fat-free potato chips. They were marketed as chips you could eat without guilt because they used a chemical-based alternative fat instead of real oils. Unfortunately, the miracle non-oil, called Olestra, encouraged a nasty gut side effect: watery and greasy diarrhea. Over time, the stomach-churning chips disappeared from shelves.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n Piggybacking on the meal replacement shakes of the 1980s that jumpstarted Oprah Winfrey’s weight-loss transformation<\/a>, various meal replacement options became big business for food brands in the 1990s. At first, most meal replacements were liquid in nature, which wasn’t a great solution.\u00a0<\/p>\nLow-fat and fat-free items were in nearly every grocery aisle<\/h2>\n
<\/source><\/source><\/picture>didinj\/Shutterstock<\/span>\n <\/div>\n
Meal replacements provided limited nutrition and satisfaction<\/h2>\n
<\/source><\/source><\/picture>Fractal Pictures\/Shutterstock<\/span>\n <\/div>\n