Believe it or not, with all the nutrition research we do have, we don’t really have any one study that says ‘here’s the best diet!’ If you think about the details, you can understand why.
To demonstrate that one diet is truly “best” for diabetes, or weight loss, we would need to assign a large number of people to that diet, and all of the other diets that we think might be just as good. Then, we would need to follow all of these people for long enough to see meaningful differences in their health outcomes. This would be costly, lengthy, cumbersome- and would require participants willing to be randomly assigned to any one of several rather different diets for an extended period of time. No surprise it hasn’t been done!
But the research we do have is more than ample to highlight the important variations on the theme of healthful eating- for diabetes management, diabetes prevention, and weight loss/control- and to make the theme itself abundantly clear. Some of the variations include the DASH diet (that stands for ‘Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension’) which emphasizes vegetables and fruits, other plant foods, lean meats and non-fat or low-fat dairy; a vegetarian or vegan diet, which is all about healthful plant foods; the diet used in the Diabetes Prevention Program, which is a balance of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, fish, and lean meats; the Mediterranean diet, which again emphasizes plant foods, along with legumes (lentils), nuts, seeds, olives, avocado, healthful oils, fish and seafood, and moderate wine intake; and others.
If these sound more alike than different, that’s the good news- there is a theme here, and it’s not a great mystery. Eat real foods, close to nature. Emphasize plant foods. When eating meats, choose lean meats- and preferably fish. If eating dairy, choose low-fat or non-fat. Use beans and lentils as protein sources along with meat; eggs are a good option as well. Use healthful oils- olive and canola in particular. Make all grains whole grains. Keep ingredient lists as short as possible. The diet you wind up with is not a sacrifice; after all, Mediterranean cuisines are among the world’s favorites. You can love food that loves you back by helping to control your blood sugar, and your weight. And because foods of high overall nutritional quality help fill you up on fewer calories, you don’t have to choose between being heavy, or being hungry. You can lose weight by eating better, rather than eating less.
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