10 Nutrition, Health & Fitness Trends for 2015

With gluten-free water and kale chips on the way out, it’s hard to know what to expect from nutrition, health, and fitness trends for 2015. But we gave it our best shot anyway. Here are ten to beware.

1. Fitness clothes are on their way to replacing denim. Don’t get the wrong idea here. People just want to look like they’re engaged in fitness. Actual physical activity is not really the point. The trend for yoga pants is much stronger than it is for yoga. Not even skinny jeans seem capable of saving denim from also-ran status.
    
2. Pistachios are riding atop the wave of a more generalized trend favoring nuts and seeds. Maybe it was all those ads featuring Stephen Colbert.
    
3. Fats are coming out of hiding. People never really stopped eating them during the low-fat obsession that started in the 1980s. They just loaded up on carbs. Now they’re putting carbs in the back seat and loading up on fats. (sigh)
    
4. Radishes and kale sprouts are poised to duke it out for the darling veggies of 2015. By this time next year, maybe we’ll tire of talking about kalettes.
    
5. Digital engagement has come a long way since aliens put a collar on Captain Kirk in the 1960s-era Star Trek to control him. Now we pay to do it to ourselves with the hottest technology from Fitbit and connect it to everything.
    
6. Trading up on fast food is the art of Chipotle, repackaging the calorie-dense fast food of Taco Bell, making people feel good about it, and ringing up $10 for each happy customer instead of just $5. They don’t even have to claim it’s healthier for you to make you think it’s so. More and more competitors are following this model as McDonald’s languishes.
    
7. Sugar rage will continue for the foreseeable future. Folks who think it should be classified as a toxic, controlled substance may butt heads with a growing number of folks favoring an alternative to single-nutrient dietary obsession. Don’t expect consensus in 2015.
    
8. New guidelines to hate will emerge in the second half of the year. Folks who signed up for the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee will be released from an addendum to Dante’s circles of hell. Despite their best efforts, and evidence-based rigor, you can be sure that folks will find issues with the details of these guidelines.
    
9. Cherry-picked statistics will continue to float out of nutrition and epidemiology studies and continue to confuse the public. University press offices and health media will continue to prosper by inflating the significance of exploratory studies and then debunking the myths they create.
    
10. Outcomes will get increasing attention, perhaps because of fatigue with the aforementioned cherry-picked statistics. As folks get increasingly frustrated by half-baked nutrition claims, they get more savvy about demanding evidence of an end benefit.

 
For another perspective on nutrition trends for 2015, click here for the latest annual survey of dietitians from Pollock Communications and Today’s Dietitian.

Three Trends, photograph © Pulpolux !!! / flickr

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