Dash Diet is number one
The DASH diet recently received kudos from the US News & World Report expert panel as a balanced dietary plan for everyone in the family to improve their overall health.
Pop diets come and go but it seems the DASH diet is here to stay. DASH stands for “Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension.” Beside lowering blood pressure and cholesterol, the DASH diet is associated with a lower risk of kidney stones, cancer, stroke, heart failure, heart disease and developing diabetes. On Nov. 1, 2011, US News and World Report ranked it one of the healthiest diets for the entire family.
US News and World Report reported David Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said: “Most diets aren’t about the family, and that really is a fundamental flaw. It is typically an every-man-for-himself scenario, and inevitably, people leave their families behind.”
The DASH diet is family-friendly, making it a top choice for all kinds of people. While it deflates blood pressure, it also keeps weight in check. The DASH diet is easily tailored for everyone from children to seniors. Meals include vegetables, fruits, fat-free or low-fat dairy, lean meant, poultry and fish and grains. Included in the diet are buckwheat pancakes, fruit smoothies and southwestern-style potato skins.
Teresa Fung, a nutritionist at Simmons College in Boston, said: “I don’t think the typical American diet looks anything like DASH or Mediterranean. Most families get pizza or go out to eat twice a week.” She stated moving a step closer would be an improvement for families.
According to the DASH diet website, the diet is recommended by physicians for people with hypertension or pre-hypertension. The National Institute of Health sponsored studies and found the diet plan has been proven to lower blood pressure.
Dash Diet.
Two thirds of the U.S. population is now overweight and a third are considered obese. Excessive weight carried for many years is an independent risk factor for all-cause mortality and is associated with an increased risk of a variety of ailments, including coronary artery disease, diabetes, and a wide variety of cancers. Additional health requirements associated with overweight employees cost U.S. businesses an additional 73 billion dollars each year, including lost productivity.
The Federal Trade Commission has announced a “call to action” to promote healthy eating habits and adequate physical activity in response to weight loss marketing that proclaims fast, miraculous, or effortless results.
Despite hundreds of millions of dollars having been spent on dietary research, many overweight Americans are unaware of – or disregard – these findings and instead decide to practice fad diets that often compound their weight problems.
If you are overweight and are looking to lose some of it and keep it off, here is what you need to know.
Weight loss is a complex interplay of habit and human physiology that is often counterintuitive. About 80 percent of dieters regain their weight or more at two years because they fail to appreciate a variety of pitfalls. Most commonly, they try to lose weight too quickly. They don’t begin, or fail to continue exercising. They eat inappropriate diets and practice poor eating habits such as skipping meals. They watch too much television. They also eat out too often, frequently buying fast food for breakfast or lunch as a convenience.
It becomes harder to lose weight as we get older because we lose much lean body mass that is highly metabolically active. Simple weight training with modified or regular pushups, pull-ups, or light dumbbells becomes an important addition to aerobic activity.
US News has released their Best Diets list for 2011 and the winners might surprise you. We were also surprised a little considering the diets in best diets aren’t actually in order of the ones that worked or not. There were multiple categories for US News Rankings of Best Diets but we’ll be covering their Best Diets Overall category for this piece.
In order of their ranking the Top 10 US News Best Diets Overall are:
1 – DASH Diet
2 – Mediterranean Diet
3 – TLC Diet
4 – Weight Watchers Diet
5 – Mayo Clinic Diet
6 – Volumetrics Diet
7 – Jenny Craig Diet
8 – Ornish Diet
9 – Vegetarian Diet
10 – Slim-Fast Diet
11 – Nutrisystem Diet
12 – Vegan Diet
13 – South Beach Diet
14 – Eco-Atkins Diet
15 – Zone Diet
16 – Glycemic-Index Diet
17 – Medifast Diet
18 – Raw Food Diet
19 – Atkins Diet
20 – Paleo Diet
You are probably wondering how these diets were chosen and why some are listed above the others. The data was collected on these diets by 22 recognized experts that were selected by US News to provide solid data on diets, how they work and who they work for. For over 6 months the diet data was collected and analyzed.
There was one diet that was spoken so highly of that they ranked it number one, the DASH Diet. US News experts feels this diet should become a diet household name. The main focus of this diet is to prevent and lower high blood pressure which is also called hypertension. One benefit about the DASH Diet is just about anyone can take part by grabbing the free PDF made by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Those free DASH Diet guides will get you up and running.
The diet that US News ranked at №9 seemed to have the most success for people that actually did the diet. The Vegetarian Diet was rated was working for 17.596 people and not working for 1.237 people. That is the biggest difference and largest success we could see from all the diet taking data providing by actual dieters. Vegetarianism gets a bad rap for not being the healthiest way to lose weight but it has great nutrition and is a safe diet to be on. For people that are in love with meat though, this diet will be hard to keep up.