Capitalizing on people's concerns about weight, and fitting in with our high-speed lifestyles, new fad diets seem to be created almost every week. While many of these do contain a few elements of truth, they usually contain good marketing more than anything else.

One 3-day diet advocates eating little more than fruit for three days and then recommends vegetables, meat, or grains on the other days. There are many variations to this basic fad diet. Although it is certainly true that including fruit in your diet is a key element to good health eating only fruit for three days leads to a large imbalance in your body. Fruit contains needed carbohydrates, vitamins, and fiber but cannot provide you with the correct amount of carbohydrates, fiber, protein, and otherwise healthy components. Your body needs these other components to function. To an extent, your body will equalize and store what it needs over the various periods of eating different foodstuffs, but there are limits to what it can do.

Similarly, the “low carb, high protein” diets, such as Atkins, recommend severely limiting your intake of carbohydrates and eating substantial amounts of high protein foods. Here again, the protein is vital to proper nutrition but so are carbohydrates. Putting too much emphasis on the first over the second leads to rapid temporary weight loss and the cost for your body is high. Carbohydrates supply energy for all biochemical processes. When the body needs to it will turn to other sources such as fat and protein but too great an emphasis on protein reduces the body's ability to store and regulate the appropriate amount of water. Carbohydrates help with this regulation process.

Very attractive sounding options such as the “chocolate diet” exist. Almost everyone loves the taste of chocolate and it is in fact healthy, but only in moderation. Chocolate contains anti-oxidants and other compounds that are helpful. However, as with anything, too much of a good thing is bad for you. Even too much water is bad for the body! Additionally, since many will seek chocolate in forms that come with high fat and high sugar content, some not-so-helpful elements come along with those elements that are good for you.

Ultra-low fat diets are also dangerous. Once again the problem is not with reducing fat but rather with going to extremes. A certain amount of fat is healthy.

Any diet which makes miraculous promises about radical and rapid weight loss- or in fact any other extreme claim- is almost guaranteed to be more harmful than helpful. The human body has evolved over millions of years and decades of good nutritional research still confirms the common sense truth: balance is good, moderation is healthy.