Which Diet? Top Diets Ranked By Experts

A panel of 69 doctors and nutritionists examined the evidence for 38 diets, and scored them in 21 categories (e.g. best for weight loss, best for heart, best against diabetes, etc).

We’ll not keep it a mystery: the Mediterranean diet has been ranked as “best overall” for the 8th year in a row.

The Mediterranean (And Its Close Friends & Relations)

We’ve written before about the Mediterranean diet, here:

The Mediterranean Diet: What Is It Good For? ← What isn’t it good for?

👆 the above article also delineates what does and doesn’t go in a Mediterranean diet—hint, it’s not just any food from the Mediterranean region!

The Mediterranean diet’s strengths come from various factors including its good plant:animal ratio (leaning heavily on the plants), colorful fruit and veg minimally processed, and the fact that olive oil is the main source of fat:

All About Olive Oil ← pretty much one of the healthiest fats we can consume, if not healthiest all-rounder fat

The Mediterranean diet also won 1st place in various more specific categories, including:

• Best against arthritis (followed by Dr. Weil’s Anti-inflammatory, MIND, DASH)
• Best for mental health (followed by MIND, Flexitarian, DASH)
• Best against diabetes (followed by Flexitarian, DASH, MIND)
• best for liver regeneration (followed by Flexitarian, Vegan, DASH, MIND)
• Best for gut heath (followed by Vegan, DASH, Flexitarian, MIND)

If you’re not familiar with DASH and MIND, there are clues in their full names: Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension and Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, and as you might well suspect, they are simply tweaked variations of the Mediterranean diet:

Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean ← DASH and MIND are the heart-healthiest and brain-healthiest versions of the Mediterranean; this article also includes a gut-healthiest version and a most anti-inflammatory version

What aren’t those best for?

The Mediterranean diet scored 1st or 2nd in most of the 21 categories, and usually had the other above-named diets keeping it company in the top few.

When it comes to weight loss, the Mediterranean scored 2nd place and wasn’t flanked by its usual friends and relations; instead in first place was commercial diet WeightWatchers (likely helped a lot by being also a peer support group), and in third place was the Volumetrics diet, which we wrote about here:

Some Surprising Truths About Hunger And Satiety

And when it comes to rapid weight loss specifically, the Mediterranean didn’t even feature in the top spots at all, because it’s simply not an extreme diet and it prioritizes health over shedding the pounds at any cost. The top in that category were mostly commercial diets:

1. Jenny Craig
2. Slimfast
3. Keto
4. Nutrisystem
5. WeightWatchers

We’ve not as yet written about any of those commercial diets, but we have written about keto here:

Ketogenic Diet: Burning Fat Or Burning Out?

Want to know more?

You can click around, exploring by diet or by health category, here 😎

Enjoy!