A Newcomer Cracks the Top Three Diet List but Mediterranean Diet Still #1!

It’s the new year, so what better time to look at the annual rating of top diets on the influential US News & World Report’s rating of eating patterns which this year features a surprising newcomer called MIND in third place.

Number One as usual among the 38 diets surveyed in the annual compilations is the long running favorite: the Mediterranean Diet. It’s an honor based on the expert advice of a panel comprising 69 doctors, registered dietitians, nutritional epidemiologists, chefs, and weight loss researchers.

In second place: DASH. Coming on strong: the newcomer called “MIND” although it not yet ready to dethrone the longtime champion of diets.

The Mediterranean Diet. Given the fact that human life is believed to have originated in the Mideast, it’s no surprise that around the globe our shared chromosomes, genes, and body parts respond well to the same kinds of food and drink. That includes this diet plan endorsed by the American Heart Association which which emphasizes plant-based foods, moderate consumption of fish and dairy products (mostly cheese and yogurt); and low amounts of red meat, refined grains, and sugar.

“With the exception of some people with very specific medical conditions or allergies, almost anyone can follow a Mediterranean diet and adapt it to their personal and cultural food preferences.” says Maya Vadiveloo, a professor of nutrition and food sciences at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston.

The DASH Diet. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute’s DASH diet’s initials stand for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, reveals definite clues to its being promoted for folks concerned about their blood pressure. As a prescription for that the flexible and balanced eating plan, like the Mediterranean Diet, it emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean protein and low-fat dairy while limiting foods with added sugar or that are high in saturated fat. As expected, it caps sodium at 2,300 milligrams daily–the equivalent of a single teaspoon of salt–which some lower further to about 1,500 milligrams–or just over 60 percent of a single teaspoonful.

The MIND diet. The MIND diet melds the first and second most popular plans as evidence by the initials which, this time, spell out Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay. A nine-year study of nearly 1,000 older adults, funded by the National Institute on Aging at Rush University in Chicago found that volunteers who stuck to its high plant food/low sat fat menu had slower cognitive decline plus about a 53 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Jennifer Ventrelle, assistant professor of family and preventive medicine and clinical nutrition at Rush University Medical Center and co-founder of the official MIND Diet calls the program a “non- diet approach” whose goal is “to form overall healthy eating habits within a set of guidelines general enough to allow followers to integrate some new habits into an existing lifestyle.” In fact, she concludes, the motto could be: “neverMIND the diet.”

Former Assembly Member Dick Gottfried agrees, noting that it works well for pescatarians (vegetarians who eat fish).

“Years ago,” he says, “our then-14-year-old son came home from summer camp having been converted by a counselor to being a vegetarian. We wondered whether this was healthy for a growing teenager. We consulted our family doctor and nutritionist Marion Nestle, who I had gotten to know at a conference. They both said: “He’ll be eating healthier than you are. We thought, why should he eat healthier than we are? So, we became vegetarians. A couple of years later, Nestle said we ought to add fish and seafood to our diet, so we did, although our son did not.”

In the end, Melanie Jay, a professor and the director of the obesity research program at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, concludes that the Mediterranean diet has a lot more options and may be the easiest out of all to follow, but each one of these diets would be much better than the typical American diet.”