Mono Diet Trend: Is Restricting Your Meals to One Food Healthy?

As a registered dietitian, I am always being asked about the latest diet trend. Usually, fad diets involve eliminating one or more foods from your diet to try to achieve a specific health benefit (typically weight loss). But one of the latest trends, called the Monotrophic Diet or Mono Diet, takes the food elimination trend to a whole new level. 

What is the Mono Diet and should you try eating mono meals? What are the potential pros and cons of this restrictive eating pattern? 

What are Mono Meals? 

The Mono Meals or Mono Diet trend involves eating only one food at a meal or type of food, like fruit, all day. How the diet is followed can vary, as there are no hard and fast rules. For some, following the Mono Diet means you ONLY eat one food, like bananas or potatoes, for a meal or even the entire day. Or it can mean eating only one type of food, like green vegetables, for a meal and then choosing a different type of food, like fruit, for your next meal. 

How often you eat a Mono Meal can vary as well. Some followers choose to eat just one Mono Meal per day and then eat normally at other meals. Whereas others choose to eat one type of food for the entire day. How strict you want to be with mono eating is up to you. 

While most Mono Dieters do choose to eat healthier foods like fruit, vegetables, nuts, or seeds, technically you could decide to eat a Mono Meal of whatever you wanted. If your goal is weight loss, eating a Mono Diet of calorie-dense foods like chocolate will likely not help you lose weight. 

Like many diet trends, the Mono Diet was started by YouTube influencers who personally eat a diet of 15+ bananas per day with the goal of losing weight.  

The bottom line is that sticking with just one food all of the time is an unhealthy way to eat. Mono Meals or Mono Diets go against one of the main principles of good nutrition: the importance of variety.  

Pros and Cons of Mono Meals 

It’s difficult to find a lot of pros when it comes to this diet trend. The only upside is when you reduce the variety of foods in your diet, you do tend to eat less out of boredom. Consuming fewer calories is the way to lose weight. But you can achieve a calorie deficit without restricting yourself to just one food. 

There are many more cons than there are upsides to the Mono Diet. First, the body needs the right amount of the three macronutrients (carbs, protein, fat), 13 vitamins, and 21 minerals to be healthy. No one food can provide all of those nutrients.  

When you eat just one food, this means you are limiting yourself to only the nutrients found in that particular food, missing out on all the others. If you choose to eat only fruit, you may be getting a lot of vitamin C and potassium, but you are missing protein, fat, many of the B vitamins, iron, and more. This puts you at risk for vitamin and mineral deficiencies and malnutrition. 

This eating pattern is also not sustainable long-term and could lead to disordered eating. It would be difficult to get enough calories or feel full eating just fruit, which could cause you to break your diet and binge eat. Additionally, such a restrictive diet can cause feelings of guilt and shame when you inevitably fail, which could lead down a path to an eating disorder. 

The bottom line with the Mono Diet is that anything extreme is not good for you. If you occasionally want to eat a meal consisting of only fruit or only vegetables, there isn’t much harm in doing so if you are eating a balanced diet otherwise. But consistently eating meals with only one individual food or type of food can result in nutrient deficiencies, health problems, and disordered eating patterns. 

References: 

1. Raynor, H. A. (2012). Can limiting dietary variety assist with reducing energy intake and weight loss? Physiology & Behavior, 106(3), 356–361. 

2. Vitamins and Minerals. (n.d.). NCCIH. Retrieved May 23, 2023, from https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/vitamins-and-minerals 

3. Kiani, A. K., Dhuli, K., Donato, K., Aquilanti, B., Velluti, V., Matera, G., Iaconelli, A., Connelly, S. T., Bellinato, F., Gisondi, P., & Bertelli, M. (2022). Main nutritional deficiencies. Journal of Preventive Medicine and Hygiene, 63(2 Suppl 3), E93–E101.