I retired after spending 25 years working for a large urban fire department. Nearly 90% of our calls were Emergency Medical. A lot of the food fads are stupid but relatively harmless because most people have short attention spans and do not stick with them for very long.
When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s we had neighbors who were vegetarians. After a while their hair started falling out and they began losing teeth... They were both college professors (liberal idiots according to my father) and they still could not figure out how to get enough essential nutrients in their diets to keep them healthy. They both had to eventually give up on vegetarianism.
Ironically, the people who I saw while working as a Firefighter who were most damaged by diet fads were my co-workers many of whom constantly were on various low carb, high protein, high fat unbalanced diets. As a supervisor it puts one in a very difficult position when you witness someone making bad nutrition choices that are affecting both their job performance and their physical well being, yet when you try to bring it up you get served a major ration of crap. We literally had people collapsing on the job when they would have to perform strenuous duties. It put us all at risk. My subordinate who was the most knowledgeable person on the hazmat team had to be transferred to communications because after years of following the “Atkins diet” he became morbidly obese and could no longer walk up a flight of stairs without getting out of breath.
One would think that in a profession where you are performing CPR almost daily on dead middle aged men who have not taken good care of themselves, that one would be more cognitive of the risks involved in choosing a poor diet. But it seems that most of us prefer to find excuses to continue behaving and eating the way we like. And their is nothing that a group of firefighters enjoy more than eating large quantities of meat and saturated fat at nearly every meal. I believe that this along with a lack of sleep more than working in hazardous atmospheres explains why professional firefighters have a shorter life expectancy than the general public.
Protein powder, high protein snacks, high protein frozen dinners and high protein nutritional supplements are found in abundance at pretty much any fire station in the country. We had all sorts of guys in their 30s, 40s and 50s that were overweight and having all sorts of health related problems that were related to their diets. I am skeptical of high protein, high fat, low carb diets because I have seen the toll it took on my friends who I lived with 24 hours a day year after year, some of whom went to an early grave because of poor dietary choices.
All of those packaged foods contain flavor enhancing chemicals (MSG etc.) to make you think that it is really food and to get you to eat it.
I would have died young if that is what I ate.
Read the labels and Google the ingredients.