Veganism by far sparks the most conversation, and although mentions peaked in early 2020, they’ve been rising again in recent months. We could do a whole bulletin on this topic (and maybe we will one day), but for now we’ll parse out the main conversations drivers:

• Vegan diets and alternatives
• Environmental and political discussions
• Comments on the vegan “identity”

Veganism sparks a lot of debate across all three of these areas, from the more mundane arguments over the best vegan cheese, up to vitriolic insults towards vegans as a group. A recent action by activists brought all these angles sharply together.

This protest got a lot of people talking about vegan alternatives to milk, environmental impacts, and whether the protest was an effective one. Let’s just say things got very emotional all round and caused a significant bump in mentions of veganism.

Going back to our chart, vegetarianism looks to be gaining traction again, and while it has its fair share of debates, it’s a far calmer affair.

The keto diet, where you severely cut down your carbohydrate intake to achieve a state of “ketosis” to encourage weight loss, looks to be on the way out. At its peak, 170k users a month talked about the diet. Now that number is 98k with no signs yet that the decrease is slowing.

If that keeps up, it could soon join paleo, which has been in decline since 2015, at the bottom of the pile.

Finally, we turn to intermittent fasting. Simply put, this is a diet where you restrict your food intake to a certain number of hours a day. For example, you might only eat during an 8 hour period in the day, and fast for the rest. Basically you can set whatever time limits you like.

The aim here is to get your body burning fat reserves for energy rather than from the food you’ve just eaten. Just like keto, it’s about losing weight, although other health benefits have been claimed.

The comeback kid

Whatever your view on intermittent fasting, this year it’s gaining attention at an astonishing rate. Since January, mentions have increased by 44% with no signs of things slowing.

Often trends, whatever their nature, peak and then collapse as people move onto something else. But that’s not the case here. In fact, this is the second time intermittent fasting has caught on.

From 2017 interest in the topic was growing at a steady rate. We can see seasonality in the data too, with mentions jumping in the new year and then steadily falling in the following months.

The conversation saw strong growth from there, eventually jumping half-way through 2019, only to spike in January of 2020. While it survived an initial pandemic knock, the trend couldn’t hold onto its popularity and it steadily declined until the end of 2021.

But then it came back. And, more interestingly, the seasonality went out the window. We see the January jump in 2022, but the usual fall that follows never came.

The reason why is a fad-within-a-fad. There’s also an important lesson here to ensure your Brandwatch queries cover all terms associated with a topic, or you might miss what’s really going on.

The “one meal a day” (OMAD) diet is exactly what it sounds like: you eat one meal a day and that’s it. It’s a form of intermittent fasting, although a fairly extreme one, and so we included it in our query.

As you’ll see below, it’s lucky we did.

Since September, there have been more OMAD mentions than non-OMAD intermittent fasting ones. It’s nearly taken over the entire concept online. If we hadn’t added OMAD terms to our query, it would have looked as though interest in intermittent fasting had plateaued since the end of last year.

Instead it’s bigger than ever.

A note for Brandwatch Consumer Research users: Let this be a reminder to review your queries and look out for blind spots. You can do this by adding trending terms that pop up in the conversations you’re collecting to the query itself so you capture what’s said about them independent of your original keywords.

You can thank us later.

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The Brandwatch Bulletin team