Can We Say What Diet Is Best for Health?

Abstract

Diet is established among the most important influences on health in modern societies. Injudicious diet figures among the leading causes of premature death and chronic disease. Optimal eating is associated with increased life expectancy, dramatic reduction in lifetime risk of all chronic disease, and amelioration of gene expression. In this context, claims abound for the competitive merits of various diets relative to one another. Whereas such claims, particularly when attached to commercial interests, emphasize distinctions, the fundamentals of virtually all eating patterns associated with meaningful evidence of health benefit overlap substantially. There have been no rigorous, long-term studies comparing contenders for best diet laurels using methodology that precludes bias and confounding, and for many reasons such studies are unlikely. In the absence of such direct comparisons, claims for the established superiority of any one specific diet over others are exaggerated. The weight of evidence strongly supports a theme of healthful eating while allowing for variations on that theme. A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention and is consistent with the salient components of seemingly distinct dietary approaches. Efforts to improve public health through diet are forestalled not for want of knowledge about the optimal feeding of Homo sapiens but for distractions associated with exaggerated claims, and our failure to convert what we reliably know into what we routinely do. Knowledge in this case is not, as of yet, power; would that it were so.

Dietary guidelines to nourish humanity and the planet in the twenty-first century. A blueprint from Brazil

“…They also entail and imply food systems and supplies that are relatively equitable, and less stressful to the physical environment, for animals and biodiversity in general (30) . Different varieties of plant foods such as grains, legumes, roots and tubers, vegetables and fruits, when consumed as natural or minimally processed foods, are mostly produced by family farmers in Brazil (31) and in most countries (32) .…”

Sustainable diets within sustainable food systems

“…Simple messages about healthy diets can be obscured by communication on various diets and products advocated by numerous participants (30) . Trends on dietary patterns towards more healthy items and towards more unhealthy items (see earlier) are not correlated which makes one wonder if it is not because these trends are driven by different policies and incentives, tendencies for increase of unhealthy items being driven by marketing and promotion of more healthy items by government policies (19) .…”

Med Diet 4.0: the Mediterranean diet with four sustainable benefits

“…From the early 1990s, taking into account increasing concerns regarding environmental sustainability, the Mediterranean diet as a plant-centred diet began to be researched as a sustainable dietary pattern (35) , with lower environmental impacts (25)(26)(27)(28)(29) . Despite the fact that the Mediterranean diet is well documented and acknowledged as a healthy diet (38) , paradoxically, it is being abandoned, mainly by the young generations in most Mediterranean countries (33) . Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries are passing through a 'nutritional transition' in which problems of undernutrition coexist with overweight, obesity and diet-related chronic diseases (39) .…”