New diets used to just help you lose pounds. Now they promise to transform your very being. One of the newest ones has been spreading across social networks faster than you can share a Paleo bone broth recipe. It’s totally simple, too. No counting of calories or grams or points, no weighing portions or yourself, just eating simple wholesome foods that harken back to our hunter-gatherer days. After a few short weeks, according to Dallas and Melissa Hartwig, the husband-and-wife team who created this diet—he’s a physical therapist, she’s a certified sports nutritionist—your life will change.

But will it really? And for the better?

Let’s see.

FOR THE NEXT 30 DAYS, NO ICE CREAM…AND NO TOFU FOR YOU EITHER!

Like the popular Paleo diet, which it resembles in some ways, the Whole30 diet program emphasizes “real” food inspired by the hunter-gatherer life that existed before agriculture. The program, which you are supposed to follow for 30 days, includes two food categories:

• Foods You Can Eat: Seafood, poultry, red meat, eggs, oils, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds

• Foods You Can’t Eat: Dairy, grains, legumes, alcohol, added sugar, additives (MSG, sulfites, corn starch, lecithin, carrageenan)

So…no yogurt or peanut butter (peanuts are legumes, not nuts) or bread or gluten-free quinoa (technically a seed but not allowed anyway) or soymilk or commercial ketchup (added sugar). Almond milk? Probably not…it likely contains carrageenan. Canned tuna? Check the label—the broth may be made with soy. There are a few exceptions to the rules…

• No dairy but clarified butter (ghee) is allowed.

• No added sugar, and fruit juice (often high in sugar) is “not recommended”—but you can buy foods that use fruit juice as a sweetener.

• Green beans, although technically legumes, squeak through.

Otherwise, the diet stresses complete elimination of foods on the “no” list for the full 30 days. If you slip and have a sip of coffee lightened with milk or sweetened with stevia, the timer resets and you’re sent back to day one.

Why so strict about slipping up? The Hartwigs claim that dairy, legumes and grains (not to mention sugar and additives) are psychologically unhealthy, hormone-unbalancing, gut-disrupting and inflammatory. After 30 days of strict abstention from these classes of foods, they claim, you’ll have “reset” your body so that your metabolism works better and you are no longer subject to systemic inflammation. Testimonials on the site, including those from health professionals, state that the program helps with conditions as varied as asthma, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, insomnia…and, of course, weight loss.

After 30 days, you can let a few eliminated foods back into your life, but if you find yourself eating more “dirty” than “clean,” according to the website, go back to the Whole30…even if only for a week.

DON’T BE SURPRISED IF THIS UNBALANCED DIET MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER

To get an independent view of this program, we went to our own source, Katherine Zeratsky, RD, LD, a registered dietician and nutrition educator at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Here’s what we found:

• Whole30 is scientifically unsubstantiated. There simply are no studies in published journals on this particular diet. None.

• You might well feel better on it. “If people who weren’t eating well started eating more nutritious foods, like more fruits and vegetables, and less processed foods, they would start feeling better,” said Zeratsky.

• But if you did feel better on it, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. That pep in your step wouldn’t necessarily mean that your body reacts badly to beans…or grains…or dairy. “You shouldn’t be quick to assume that you had an allergy or sensitivity to those eliminated foods,” she said. You may feel better because you’re taking in, say, less sugar…or carbs…or salt or fat…or because you lost weight.

• Your blood pressure might go down. All those fresh fruits and vegetables, and no processed and packaged foods, means a lot less sodium and plenty of potassium. That plus weight loss is a good formula for lowering blood pressure.

• It might be nutritionally unbalanced. Without dairy or fortified foods like tofu, calcium intake will likely be low. If you’re a vegetarian or a vegan, you’ll need to avoid meat/poultry/seafood and beans and lentils, which makes it hard to get enough iron.

• It’s probably safe for healthy people—for 30 days. “A generally well-nourished person is probably not going to become malnourished in that period of time,” said Zeratsky. “Everybody doesn’t need to have 100% of each nutrient every day.”

The real question is what happens next. If you really think you have a sensitivity or allergy to a food or food group, work with a health professional, who may put you on a carefully monitored, more comprehensive food-elimination diet—in which case, you might discover that you have trouble with some food that is on the Whole30 “yes” list! You’d never learn that from the Whole30 diet.

Finally, there’s that pesky problem of eating healthfully as a sustainable lifestyle. Any highly restrictive diet will likely help you shed pounds (including this one, although it makes no specific weight-loss claims). But a healthy diet is one that you can stick with…forever. If this diet helps you discover that you can live without, say, a nightly dessert or afternoon vending machine temptation, wonderful. But the big test comes when you take off the training wheels and have to ride the bicycle on your own.