Sunday, November 6, 2011

Which diet is healthiest? Here's a new ranking

U.S. News & World Report has come up with "Best Diets for Healthy Eating," ranking 20 diets for their nutritional value and safeness. The highest score is 5, down to the worst at 1. The scores give safety double the weight of nutrition because  "while you can modify a diet to some degree to adjust for nutritional imbalances or deficiencies, mere tweaking won't make an unsafe diet safe," according to the magazine.
Here are the top 5 best diets:
1. DASH diet -- low in saturated fat and salt, very heart-healthy
2. Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC) diet -- almost as good as the DASH diet, according to the panel of experts that came up with the ratings. Good fiber and calcium content and also low in sat-fat.
3. Mediterranean diet -- also very healthy, with the added bonus of encouraging regular wine consumption (three cheers for that).
4. Mayo Clinic Diet -- interesting in that it promotes eating plenty of low-density foods, where you feel full for longer on less.
5. Volumetrics Diet -- similar to Mayo Clinic in its emphasis on low-density foods.

Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig come next, by the way, at #6 and #7.

To read details about how the rankings were done, and more about the diets themselves, click here.

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