There Is No Better Diet
The US News once again evaluated all diets with a groundbreaking result: they all represent different ways of eating. Amazing. Their website does provide a good comparison of the pros and cons of different diets, but the whole concept of advertising one diet better than another is inherently broken.
As we saw in the Dirty Dozen ranking example , ranking assumes that each item competes with the other, and that those at the top of the list are better than those at the bottom. With vegetables as diets, there are a whole bunch of them that are just fine, and you don’t have to push them against each other any more than you have to choose which of your kids is your favorite.
Then the question arises, what is “diet” really; The word ” diet” in English can mean many different things. If someone is “dieting,” we understand that they are trying to create a calorie deficit in order to lose weight. If, instead, we read that “the diet of wild lemurs is different for different species,” we understand that this word means a description of everything that the lemur usually eats.
The 51 diet in the US News database is a fancy concoction. Some of these are vague approaches to food, such as volumetry; some are commercial products designed to help people lose weight, such as Noom or Weight Watchers; still others are accelerated diets that are not scientifically proven. Putting these disparate items together into a lineup doesn’t really help anyone. The US News seemed to understand this at some level, as they rated only the “best” 35, leaving a number of particularly bad options – for example, Master Cleanse, which, to be honest, I’m not sure what fits any the definition of diet is out of the main list.
I could puzzle over the ratings themselves for several days. For example, Atkins and keto are listed as two different things (perhaps not), and both are below the raw food diet, which the list describes as “almost impossible to follow.” Like the wildly popular university rankings, diet rankings seem to exist to give us something new to worry about and argue about , not to help people eat healthier or lose weight.
How to actually choose a diet
First, if you want to lose weight, know that all weight loss diets work the same way: they give you a foundation to eat fewer calories than you burn . The “best” diet for this is the one that is easiest for you to follow.
Some people thrive on the keto diet; some are more comfortable with intermittent fasting; some prefer lean and vegan options. It doesn’t really matter as long as the calorie deficit isn’t too big and you’re not depriving yourself of important nutrients like fiber, vitamins, or protein.
Whether you’re trying to change body weight or not, the basics of a healthy diet are pretty simple: lots of fruits and vegetables, enough protein, but not too much sugar. If you have specific health concerns that you discussed with your doctor, be sure to consider them. (For example, the DASH “diet” is a list of recommendations you can follow if you need to lower your blood pressure. It includes, among other things, consuming less sodium and more potassium.) If you are willing to pay for help, you it is better to consult a dietitian than buying the latest expensive weight loss products.
So, do you want to eat healthier foods, lose weight, or both? Find a nutritional approach that suits your goals and can be followed. If you want some kind of structure, you can buy a book with recipes and a fancy name for the diet. A higher diet, Mediterranean diet, will do. But the paleo diet, which ranked 29th, despite its silly premise (that the cavemen made a lot of fake pizzas with almond flour and coconut oil, if I’m getting it right) could help as well.