Fad fury

Anthony Warner is angry. He’s angry about diets. He’s angry about detoxes. He’s angry about pseudoscience — and he has good reason. Fad diets are nothing new: for centuries, there have been charlatans whose dubious diets will help you lose weight, love life and beat cancer. But the rise of social media over the past 15 years has given such charlatans unprecedented reach. Their regimes and recipes, their coffee table books and Instagram posts suck in the young, the gullible and the vulnerable. Anthony Warner’s mission is to set the record straight.

Warner has been writing as ‘The Angry Chef’ on his blog and elsewhere for several years. As he himself states, this is a character he consciously developed to fight the falsehoods he finds everywhere in the food world. This character explores these issues in expletive-strewn diatribes, railing against those who sing the physiological virtues of tongue-scrapers and coffee enemas.

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Warner holds a degree in biochemistry, and has spent 25 years in the food business, moving from restaurants to food development. He knows his stuff — and he has roped in an anonymous scientist, ‘Captain Science’, for good measure. Though he isn’t the first to set about debunking bunkum, he does it with considerable flair.

Each diet undergoes a brutal and meticulous dissection. Undermining the diets’ flimsy foundations is easy enough, but Warner also shows how almost any restrictive diet is likely to result, at least initially, in weight loss. He deploys behavioural psychology to show why so many fall into the wellness web — why diets become lifestyles, and why some of those lifestyles become so popular. He shines a light on the darkest corners of fad diets, too, where autistic children are ‘treated’ via the GAPS diets, cancer patients abandon conventional treatments and eating disorders blossom.