U.S. News & World Report Names Best Diet For 2012

January 2012 - The The top diet programs, according to the magazine, are: Weight Watchers, the DASH Diet, and The Biggest Loser. The list by the high profile news magazine started last year, with Weight Watchers taking the top spot. 

The US News and World Report Best Diets 2012 also breaks the diets down in to multiple categories, naming the best diets for weight loss, heart health, diabetes, and even the easiest to follow.

The DASH diet consists of lowering sodium intake to less than 2400 mg per day, eating fresh fruits and vegetables and carbohydrate sources coming from whole grains. It also includes proteins coming from lean meats, fish and chicken, and moderate amounts of fats such as olive oil and nuts. This plan also has endorsements from the diet from the American Heart Association, The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and the Mayo Clinic.

Also ranking highly was the TLC diet (The Low Cholesterol Diet), which was created by the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP). With the TLC diet, you create a mini profile of yourself by selecting your age, height, weight, gender and activity level. From this data, you are then given recommended levels of calories, saturated fat and cholesterol that you can consume each day. Then you create an online daily meal plan of what you are going to eat and how much you are going to eat. Based upon your selections for each meal, it gives you a report of how many calories, cholesterol, saturated fat, sodium, and total fat you will consume and how this compares to your recommended levels.

According to a release from US News, an impressive 22-person volunteer panel of industry experts work together using seven criteria, government reports, and data from scientific journals to rank the diets. Experts include Brian Wansink of the Cornell University Food and Brand lab and Dr. David Katz of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center. government reports and scientific journals.