The 90’s gave us many things: dial-up internet, Tamagotchis, butterfly clips, and some seriously memorable diet trends.

From celebrity-endorsed fitness DVDs to branded diet programmes, the decade was full of promises that the latest diet could help you become thinner or ‘healthier’. For Scroll Safe, we’re taking a nostalgic trip back to the ’90s to look at some of the diet trends that shaped diet culture and the messages behind them that are still showing up on our feeds today.

Remember the Special K diet? The idea was simple: replace meals with bowls of Special K cereal to lose weight. It was heavily marketed and became part of mainstream diet culture, helping to normalise the idea that eating less or replacing meals could be a quick route to changing your body. Then there was the Cabbage Soup Diet, a short-term, highly restrictive diet centred around, you guessed it, cabbage soup. The reality is there is no magic food or branded programme that can transform your body or determine your worth, and restrictive diets can make food and eating feel stressful and complicated. The Grapefruit Diet was another, built around the idea that grapefruit can “burn fat” or ‘unlock’ weight loss, when no single food is a magic solution for changing your body.

The Atkins Diet became hugely popular around the turn of the millennium, building on the idea that carbohydrates were something to fear or avoid. Carbohydrates are an important source of energy and can absolutely be part of a balanced diet. And then there was the obsession with “low-fat” and “fat-free” everything. Supermarket shelves were packed with products promising to help people make “healthier” choices simply by cutting out fat. Dietary fat is an essential part of a balanced diet. Food isn’t automatically unhealthy because it contains fat.

So, what’s the problem with these old diet trends?

On their own, they might seem like harmless pieces of ’90s nostalgia. But these diets helped reinforce some powerful ideas:

That food needs to be controlled.
That certain foods are “good” and others are “bad”.
That being thinner means being healthier.

Sound familiar?

That’s because diet culture didn’t disappear when the ’90s ended. It simply moved platforms.

Today, instead of seeing the latest diet on the cover of a magazine, we might see a TikTok promising a “7-day reset,” an Instagram post telling us which foods to cut out, or an influencer sharing their “what I eat in a day”.

The packaging has changed. The message hasn’t always changed with it. The next time a diet trend lands on your feed, question the message behind it. Is it really about health, or is it selling the idea that you need to change your body to be good enough?

Diet culture may look different today, but we don’t have to follow every trend that comes our way.