How Popular Diets Impact Your Heart
When the American Heart Association (AHA) speaks, news organizations tend to report what they say and people tend to listen. It’s doubly true when they rank all the popular diets according to how they relate to heart health. Because we seem to live in a society based on the “see food, eat food” diet, that can be meaningful. Here’s what a group of experts did to evaluate popular dietary approaches to diet and rank them according to AHA guidelines for a heart-healthy diet.
The AHA has ten dietary guidelines for eating a heart-healthy diet, such as “Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits” and “Choose healthy sources of proteins.” For the complete list, click on this link to the article; the scientific statement is open access on the AHA website.
Then the panel selected the most popular diets in the U.S. such as the Mediterranean diet, the DASH diet, several versions of a vegetarian diet, low-fat, paleo, and ketogenic diet. They gave each diet a full point for following each of the AHA guidelines or partial points depending how closely they followed the guidelines.
This was not an arbitrary assignment by a panel of experts; they used the best information available to determine the best heart-healthy diet. Who got the highest score? Mediterranean? Vegan? Ketogenic? I’ll let you know on Saturday along with my thoughts on the diets. One thing’s for certain: eat your fruits and vegetables. You may as well start with that right now.
What are you prepared to do today?
