An extensive nutritional comparison of the currently reigning popular diets concludes that, as a strict regimen, not a single one of them is best. The conclusion of this scientific study is as follows: You shouldn’t be an ovine, diet-deranged lemming, but rather the intelligent, food-eating person you know you can be.
Scientific publisher Annual Reviews asked Dr. David Katz and Stephanie Meller, both from Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, to compare medical evidence for each major mainstream diet du jour. The pair rigorously compared low-carb, low-fat, low-glycemic, Mediterranean, mixed/balanced (DASH), Paleolithic, and vegan diets — and write-in vote Michael Pollan won!
Pollan’s seven-word diet of “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” was the only conclusion from this extensive comparison. Dr. Katz literally describes diet developers as classic evil villains, rubbing their hands together to create a best-selling food fad and peddling empty promises. Just read ingredients and use diets as helpful guidelines. You don’t need to get your information from the mustache-twirling snake-oil salesmen of our time: diet-book writers.
The best part is the takedown of Paleo, where Katz and Meller wrote:
Many of the plant foods and nearly all of the animal foods consumed during the remote Stone Age are now extinct. Whereas the composition of some animals’ flesh may mimic that of mammoths, the composition of the flesh of animals most often appearing in the food supply does not. If Paleolithic eating is loosely interpreted to mean a diet based mostly on meat, no meaningful interpretation of health effects is possible.
As an allegorical illustration of all the dubious promises of fad diets, that is a wonderful paragraph.
