Last year, a documentary called “What the Health” was released on Netflix and almost instantly became the face of the vegan movement. The documentary stars Kip Andersen, who throughout the film, periodically equates eating meat with smoking cigarettes, links milk with cancer and claims that up to 95% of cancer diagnoses are caused by what we eat.

The documentary is gripping, trendy and easily lures in viewers already skeptical of meat and the agriculture industry. Unfortunately, it gets a lot of things wrong, including its entire premise that the only truly healthy diet is one free of animal products. But looking at diet trends in this country and the rise of gluten-free and dairy-free foods as well as veganism, it’s unsurprising that such a misleading documentary could ensnare so many viewers.

The truth is that, like almost all foods, meat is good for you — with caveats. Eating chicken and fish is better than eating red meat; eating a few servings of meat a week is better than eating it every day. Of course, eating a steak every day would be terrible for your health and such heavy meat consumption is linked to high blood pressure and chronic disease. But just because that is true doesn’t mean we all should jump headfirst into vegetarianism without properly planning or deciding how to make up for the nutritional deficit.

And that certainly doesn’t mean that eating one egg a day is equivalent to smoking five cigarettes, as Andersen claims. Nor does it mean that dairy is equally as bad.

Like meat, dairy can be healthy or hazardous depending on what kind of dairy is consumed. For example, one strawberry Yoplait contains 26g of sugar, which is more than women are supposed to consume in an entire day. Eating a low-sugar Greek yogurt every other morning instead is a great way to get calcium and protein. The general consensus among medical studies is that if you are not lactose intolerant, dairy provides more health benefits than detriments.

The trend in all these conclusions, as it seems to be with most conclusions drawn about the American public these days, is that people are looking for a quick-fix solution without really digging into the facts and proven information about healthy eating. There are plenty of ethical and legitimate reasons to go vegan or vegetarian, but if your reasoning is simply that you want to eat healthier or lose weight, a moderate diet focused on whole foods is best. And apologies to all those “influencers” and vloggers from LA, but unless you have an allergy, there are approximately zero health benefits to going gluten-free.

What you eat can have an outstanding impact on your energy levels, mood and health, and is especially important in college as we near the end of our bone and brain growth. Don’t sell yourself short with extreme diets that will ultimately be detrimental to your health.

Detox diets promote an unhealthy relationship with food; veganism is not the only healthy diet to exist, and for most people, giving up dairy and gluten doesn’t even make sense. Instead of pushing diets on the extreme end of the nutrition spectrum, we should be encouraging people to do research for themselves and make informed decisions on what foods are best for their well-being.