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Mar 16

Which Diets Are Most Effective According to Science? – Huffington Post

Which diets are most effective, according to science? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

The obvious question about what diets work best, is are theyeffective for what? Im going to assume we mean most effective at helping us achieve and/or maintain a healthy weight and maximize our health in doing so.

I think diets that make us leaner and healthier are the diets that remove those components of the diet that cause us to get fat and cause the chronic diseases that associate with obesity and diabetes. As I clearly believe the worst offenders there are added sugars (sucrose and HFCS) and then refined, easily digestible carbohydrates, then the most effective diets are the ones that remove the sugars and high-GI carbs. And diets that work, regardless of the fat content, do so because they remove these carbohydrates. Indeed, by merely trying to avoid added sugars as part of a healthy diet, that means well have to avoid virtually all of the processed foods in the grocery stores, which means well be avoiding a significant amount of the other processed carbs, virtually all of the vegetable oils, etc. Well be healthier and we wont even know why or whether I was right that the sugar was the problem.

The flip side of that is my believe that if a diet like Dean Ornishs very low-fat diet works, its primarily because it, too, removes the sugars and white flour (for the same reason I think any diet should). If vegan and vegetarian diets work, or when they work, its for this reason as well.

That said. my reading of the existing clinical trial on diets is that the ideal diets for most of us (who arent necessarily world class athletes trying to enhance their performance) are indeed low-carb, high-fat or at least some variation like the paleo diet. I recognize that these diets will raise LDL cholesterol or LDL particle number in some proportion of the people who eat them, but because they seem to do such an effective job at resolving insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, I would bet that theyre more than worth the trade-off. (Again, if Im wrong, I apologize.)

Ketogenic diets, in which carbs are restricted almost entirely and replaced by fat, clearly have remarkable clinical efficacy in resolving a host of disease states, from obesity and diabetes to epilepsy and perhaps other neurological problems as well. I expect theyd even go a long way to preventing cancer and dementia, but thats speculation and has yet to be rigorously tested in any meaningful way.

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Which Diets Are Most Effective According to Science? - Huffington Post

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