Science
- Google released its "Year in Search" trends for 2018 on Wednesday.
- The diets that Americans looked up the most fall into one of two camps: high-fat and low-carb, or calorie restriction, like fasting.
- Some options, though, were downright bizarre.
Even though research shows that adopting a healthy eating plan you can stick to for life is a better tactic than yo-yo dieting, people are always intrigued by the latest strategy for losing weight in a hurry.
Google has published its list of the trendiest, most searched diets of 2018. According to our Google searches, there seem to be two key strategies. Dieters seem to be curious about various kinds of high-fat, low carb plans like the keto diet, as well as schemes that ask people to restrict their eating to certain hours of the day or certain days of the week.
Given that more than 9 out of 10 internet searches in the world are performed on Google or its subsidiary YouTube, the search engine's list of trends is probably a decent gauge of what diets people were trying this year. But it's worth remembering that Google's annual trends are based on which search terms had the biggest spike in 2018 as compared to 2017. That means some oddball diets may have landed on this top 10 list simply because they're new and novel, so people were searching for information about how they work.
Perennial classic diets like Atkins and Weight Watchers didn't make this list, but here are the 10 eating plans that did.