What do Americans find appealing about fad diets?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

With more than half of our nation’s adults overweight and many more concerned about their weight, the market for a weight-loss book, product, or program is huge (no pun intended). Americans spend an estimated $60 billion a year on weight-loss services and products. Even a plan that offers only minimal weight-loss success easily attracts a following.
Perhaps the greatest appeal of fad diets is that they tend to ignore dietary recommendations. Foods such as meats and milk products that need to be selected carefully to limit saturated fat can be eaten with abandon. Whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits that should be eaten in abundance can now be bypassed. For some people, this is a dream come true: steaks without the potatoes, ribs without the coleslaw, and meatballs without the pasta. Who can resist the promise of weight loss while eating freely from a list of favorite foods?
Dieters are also lured into fad diets by sophisticated—yet often erroneous—explanations of the metabolic consequences of eating certain foods. Terms such as eicosanoids and de novo lipogenesis are scattered about, often intimidating readers into believing that the authors must be right given their brilliance in understanding the body.
If fad diets were as successful as some people claim, then consumers who tried them would lose weight, and their obesity problems would be solved. But this is not the case. Similarly, if fad diets were as worthless as others claim, then consumers would eventually stop pursuing them. Clearly, this is not happening either. Most fad diets have enough going for them that they work for some people at least for a short time, but they fail to produce long-lasting results for most people.