Consumer Reports Tells Us, "What’s the best diet?"

It may be good for telling you which car is safest, or what high-end stereo gives you the best fidelity, but for diet advice, Consumer Reports gets a blank bubble (average score).

Recently, Consumer Reports ranked 8 clinically tested diet plans, with Barbara Rolls’ Volumetrics coming out on top. And as you may have guessed, Atkins came in last. Additionally, they ranked 7 diet books, and the winner was…Oprah’s trainer, Bob Greene.

Oh well.

So what metrics were they using? How closely the diet plans matched USDA guidelines and the results of published clincal trials (See Regina Wilshire on the wisdom of using current dietary guidelines as a basis for a so-called healthy diet). At first glance, they seem like good benchmarks, until one realizes that following USDA guidelines would eliminate low-carb approaches (like Atkins) from the top spot, since current advice includes eating several servings of whole grains daily. Indeed, the next highest-ranked approaches were Weight-Watchers, Jenny Craig, and Slim-Fast.

Slim-Fast? Consume this manufactured liquid shake for two of your “meals.” It’s a much better approach than eating real food.

Good.

Rolls’ Volumetrics approach is definitely a solid one. It’s based off the idea that people tend to eat the same volumes of food everyday, so to facilitate losing weight, substitute low-calorie selections for higher calorie ones (i.e., soup and salad vs. fried appetizer, etc.). She also conveys the importance of consuming fat for health and fat loss (something that Dr. Ornish still has yet to understand).

My favorite quote from Dr. Rolls: “We show that people who eat a high-fat diet — more than 30% of calories from fat — but who eat a high number of servings of fruits and vegetables, actually had a lower incidence of obesity than those eating a low-fat diet with few fruits and vegetables.”

Translation: Fat is not the enemy. I’m glad it only took 20 years of research for her to buck the status quo.

I’m surprised that given the clinical effectiveness of low-carb approaches that the Atkins plan and Mark Hyman’s book, Ultra-Metabolism, scored so low. Wait; no I’m not. Nowadays, science is cherry-picked depending on whether or not it advances the status quo, not based on clinical and biochemical reality.

Well, at least they knew that eating less than 10% of calories from fat is a bad thing.