Are you still searching for the best diet to go along with your New Year's resolutions? U.S. News and World Report recently released its rankings for the best diet plans, and the winner may surprise you. Honors for the Best Overall Diet went to the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, which was originally developed by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to lower blood pressure.
The DASH diet beat out well-known commercial diet plans such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig but, unlike those plans, access to the DASH diet is available for free online.
The DASH diet places a major emphasis on vegetables and fruits, as well as on whole grains and moderate amounts of protein. “I would say the most important thing in the DASH plan is that you are eliminating or decreasing your sodium intake,” says Shayna Komar, a registered dietitian at Cancer Wellness at Piedmont. “It’s keeping your sodium very low – under 2,300 mg per day, which means not eating a lot of canned or processed foods and salad dressing, which can be very high in sodium.”
The DASH diet is essentially the same as the diet that has often been referred to as “eating clean.” “Eating clean means eliminating all those extras – the preservatives, chemicals and dyes,” Komar explains. “It means becoming more aware of what you are eating, getting back to whole foods and looking at food labels and ingredients.” The rankings were based on reviews of 29 diets by a panel of experts in diet, nutrition, obesity, food psychology, diabetes, and heart disease.
The panel rated each diet’s effectiveness in seven categories:
- how easy it is to follow
- short-term weight loss
- long-term weight loss
- diabetes prevention and management
- heart disease prevention
- nutritional completeness and safety.
The cost of the diet was not considered in the rankings. Researchers then converted the panel’s ratings to scores from 5 (highest) to 1 (lowest). The rankings also listed the Best Weight-Loss Diets.
Here are the top winners (with several ties) in both categories:
Best Overall Diets
1. DASH Diet (4.1 stars)
2. TLC (Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes) Diet (4.0 stars)
3. Mayo Clinic Diet (3.9 stars) - tie / 3. Mediterranean Diet (3.9 stars) - tie / 3. Weight Watchers (3.9 stars) - tie
Best Weight-Loss Diets
1. Weight Watchers (3.8 stars)
2. The Biggest Loser Diet (3.5 stars) - tie / 2. Jenny Craig (3.5 stars) - tie / 2. Raw Food Diet (3.5 stars) - tie
3. Volumetrics (3.4 stars)
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