Is a "real food diet" the answer you're looking for?
Like fitness gadgets and prancing workouts, different kinds of diets had their one-hit-wonder moment over the last few decades in the health and fitness industry. These diets tend to promise quick results by following a strict set of cookie-cutter rules that tends to fall short on science-based evidence. If science were to pick which diet would get the gold medal for the best results, then there would be no real winners because most diets tend to cherry-pick information on food science.
Yale University’s Dr. David Katz, who is a practicing physician and researcher at the campus’s Prevention Research Center, has become one of the leading spokesperson for debunking diets and raising public awareness of the truth about dieting. He is not interested in diets; he’s only interested in the truth, he claimed.Katz and his colleague, Stephanie Meller, compared eight diets: Low-fat, low-carb, low-glycemic, Paleolithic, Mediterranean, mixed/balanced (DASH), vegan, and others (e.g. juicing, raw foods). Overall, low-carb and any type diets that emphasize heavily on meats and animal fats were the least promising in long-term health or weight loss. However, diets that promote longevity and disease prevention consist of “minimally processed foods close to nature — predominantly plants,” according to Katz. The Mediterranean diet falls closely to Katz’s simple idea since it is rich in dietary fiber and antioxidants with moderate consumption of meats, fish, and alcohols.
Compared to low-fat diets and the average American dinner plate, the Mediterranean diet is also high in the “good” fats, such as omega-3 unsaturated fats.Even though the Paleo Diet walks in sync with the minimally processed food mantra, Katz criticized a few things regarding its interpretations on what early humans ate. Katz and Meller noted that if Paleolithic eating habits are based mostly on meat, then there is “no meaningful interpretation of health effects is possible.” Unless Paleo devotees can clone real mammoths, Irish elks, or extinct plants that thrived in Stone Age, there is no best way they could imitate close to what early humans ate with modern food sources.
By Nick Ng from Guardianlv.com
