Which diet is best for health?

Posted on Wed, 16 Apr 14

Claims that one diet is better than another are over exaggerated and misleading according to a new scientific review that distills popular diets down and answers the question, which diet is best for health?

Doctors David Katz and Stephanie Meller from Yale University School of Medicine recently published a review in the Annual Review of Public Health 2014 that sets out to critically examine claims around popular diets in the scientific literature and distil an answer to the question; can we say which diet is best for health?

The paper reviews diets such as; Low carbohydrate, including high protein, of either animal or plant origin, Low fat, including vegetarian and traditional Asian, Low glycemic, Mediterranean, Mixed, balanced, Paleolithic and Vegan diets.

“There have been no rigorous, long-term studies comparing contenders for best diet laurels using methodology that precludes bias and confounding, and for many reasons such studies are unlikely” write the authors. “In the absence of such direct comparisons, claims for the established superiority of any one specific diet over others are exaggerated.”

There is a common theme across all these diets that may be responsible fot their health benefits, however. “The weight of evidence strongly supports a theme of healthful eating while allowing for variations on that theme,” they write. “A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention and is consistent with the salient components of seemingly distinct dietary approaches.”

In conclusion, “the clutter of competing claims likely obscures the established body of knowledge and forestalls progress, much like the proverbial trees and forest. We need less debate about what diet is good for health, and much more attention directed at how best to move our cultures/societies in the direction of the well-established theme of optimal eating, for we remain mired a long way from it.”

Reference:

Katz DL, Meller S. Can we say what diet is best for health? Annu Rev Public Health. 2014 Mar 18;35:83-103. - link to abstract