What Was The '80s Fad Beverly Hills Diet, And Why Was It Controversial?

If there's one constant in the nutrition world, it's change. It seems every year, there's a new food or diet fad, from the Atkins Diet to avocado toast, keto-friendly foods, juice cleanses, and Erewhon's $22 smoothies. And like many trends, many of them fade into obscurity when new health information is discovered or folks simply get tired of restrictive eating. Such was the case for one major diet fad from the 1980s, the Beverly Hills Diet. It was developed in 1981 by a woman named Judy Mazel who, in fact, had no professional nutrition or health experience at all, which is one of several reasons why the diet became controversial and was eventually widely criticized.

Mazel had struggled to lose weight for most of her life, and after breaking her leg in a skiing accident caused her to be stuck at home, she dove into researching methods, which were described in her book, "The Beverly Hills Diet." It became a bestseller, hailed by such celebrities as Linda Gray of "Dallas" TV show fame. Almost immediately after the book's publication, health experts came forward to condemn the diet. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published an article titled "The Beverly Hills Diet: Dangers of the Newest Weight Loss Fad" in November 1981, calling it "the latest, and perhaps the worst, entry in the diet-fad derby." The article also cited numerous falsehoods regarding the digestive process contained in the book.

The diet Mazel proposes is based on the idea that when we eat several types of foods from a variety of categories — for example, a dinner consisting of meat, grains, and fresh fruits or vegetables — the body is unable to properly digest these foods. Mazel says that this undigested food stuck in the body contributes to weight gain, and that the best way to lose weight is to eat only one food at a time, following a carefully prescribed order of food categories and never combining them into one meal. Another claim, which doctors debunked, was that the enzymes in fruits, particularly pineapple (the "golden pineapple" emblem features heavily in the book), help in breaking down other foods, so they should be the first foods eaten every day.

However, as the JAMA paper explains, there is no medical basis for this claim; undigested food, they say, can't simply get stuck in the body — rather, it's expelled from the body when we go to the bathroom. The diet was also criticized for claiming that fruit enzymes somehow help other foods to digest in the body; this simply is not true, doctors said. Also damning for the diet was its rigidity. Simply put, eating nothing but fruit for 10 days (among other recommendations made by Mazel) without getting bored or feeling miserable may be unsustainable for the average person, not to mention the diarrhea and other symptoms it often could cause. Mazel eventually released an updated edition of the book, "The New Beverly Hills Diet," in 1996, which offers a 35-day menu with recipes as well as daily support for dieters. However, the basic premises Mazel originally proposed remain in the newer version.