These days, it seems like there is an eating program, food planning, calorie checking and special diets galore. My current personal vegan challenge, has gotten me thinking a lot about just how many different eating styles are out there. Whether it’s allergies to certain foods, trying a new way of eating and thinking, or just because something sounds interesting, there are endless reasons for trying/following/exploring these food programs.
Paleo — Gluten Free — Atkins — Weight Watchers — Vegetarian — Vegan — Pescatarian – Dairy Free — Grain Free — Organic — Whole30 — Zone Diet — Liquid Diet — Mediterranean Diet — Jenny Craig — Raw Food Diet — South Beach Diet — Macrobiotic Diet
And there are so many more, and in any given combination. I am currently a gluten-free, organic food vegan….for the time being.
It seems like these days, nobody just ‘eats.’ There are restrictions and regulations guiding what gets put in our bodies every single day. It makes me wonder just how we got by before all of these modern ways of eating and thinking about food.
U.S. News and World Report reviewed and ranked 32 different types of diets for 2014. They then categorized the ‘Best Diets’ with a panel of national experts. This is how:
Many of the diets, like Weight Watchers, are household names, while others, such as the DASH(Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, should be. To create the fourth annual rankings, U.S. News editors and reporters spent months winnowing potential additions to our diet roster and then mining medical journals, government reports and other resources to create in-depth profiles for those that made the cut. This year, we added the Acid Alkaline Diet, Spark Solution Diet and Fast Diet to the rankings and produced in-depth profiles about the gluten-free diet and Low FODMAP diet.
Each profile explains how the diet works, determines whether its claims add up or fall short, scrutinizes it for possible health risks – and reveals what it’s like to live on the diet, not just read about it.
A panel of nationally recognized experts in diet, nutrition, obesity, food psychology, diabetes and heart disease reviewed our profiles, added their own fact-finding and rated each diet in seven categories: how easy it is to follow, its ability to produce short-term and long-term weight loss, its nutritional completeness, its safety and its potential for preventing and managing diabetes and heart disease. We also asked the panelists to let us know about aspects of each diet they particularly liked or disliked and to weigh in with tidbits of advice that someone considering a particular diet should know.
After every diet received robust scrutiny, we converted the experts’ ratings to scores and stars from 5 (highest) to 1 (lowest). We then used those scores to construct eight sets of Best Diets rankings, which have been refreshed to add the three diets new to the 2014 rankings.
And this is what they found:
The full story and diet rankings can be found here.
All of that being said, I want to hear about what you think, what you eat and why. Questions and additional comments are welcome, as always.
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