What Makes a Healthy Diet
Weight lost
doesn't always equal health gained. That new diet that took inches off your
waistline could be harming your health if it locks out or severely restricts
entire food groups, like carbs, or relies on supplements with little scientific
backing, or clamps down on calories to an extreme.
MR Diet
"People are
so desperate to lose weight that it's really weight loss at any cost,"
says Madelyn Fernstrom, founding director of the UPMC-University of Pittsburgh
Medical Center Weight Management Center and author of The Real You Diet. And
when that desperation sets in, says Fernstrom, "normal thinking goes out
the window." Who cares if the forbidden-foods list is longer than War and
Peace? Pounds are coming off. You're happy. But your body might not be.
MR Diet
You can check the
nutritional completeness and safety of 25 popular diets ranked by U.S. News,
from Atkins to Jenny Craig to Weight Watchers, in a detailed profile crafted of
each one. (The profiles also cover scientific evidence, typical meals, and much
more.) And U.S. News's Best Diets for Healthy Eating rankings give each diet a
"healthiness" score from 5 (best) to 1 (worst) for safety and
nutrition, with safety getting double weight; 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.
MR Diet
Behind the
healthiness scores are ratings by a U.S. News panel of 22 experts in nutrition
and diet. They assessed the 25 popular diets in seven categories, including the
safety and nutritional completeness categories, for a series of rankings
released last June.
MR Diet
The Best Diets for
Healthy Eating and Best Diets Overall rankings overlap significantly. Both give
especially high marks to DASH, TLC, Mediterranean, Mayo Clinic, and
Volumetrics. "The ones that get high scores in safety and in nutritional
value—they're very similar to each other," says Andrea Giancoli, a
registered dietitian who serves on U.S. News's expert panel. The recurring
theme across the diets that excelled in healthiness is adequate calories
supplied by a heavy load of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, a modest
amount of lean protein, nonfat dairy, healthy fats, and an occasional treat.
Plants are the foundation and the menu is always built around minimally
processed meals made from scratch.
MR Diet
Very few diets in
the Healthy Eating list are overtly unsafe or severely deficient nutritionally.
The only plans to receive healthiness scores of below 3 were the Paleo, Raw
Food, Macrobiotic, Dukan, and Atkins diets. They're simply too restrictive, say
our experts, which calls their nutritional qualities into question. The
meat-heavy Paleo diet bans grains and dairy, so getting adequate calcium and
vitamin D isn't easy. Atkins, by severely curbing carbs, blows past recommended
caps for total and saturated fat. Depending on your personal approach to the
Raw Food Diet, you may shortchange yourself on calcium, vitamin B-12, and
vitamin D; its restrictive cooking rules also could put you at risk for eating
raw or undercooked ingredients.
MR Diet
If you have
reservations about a diet's nutritional content or safety, listen to your body.
Fatigue, sleeplessness, dizziness, aches—they're all red flags. Says Fernstrom:
"Losing weight is for good health, so
you should feel more vital—not
bad."
MR Diet MR Diet MR Die tMR Diet MR Diet MR Diet MR Diet MR Diet MR Diet MR Diet