Choosing Healthy Foods

With no shortage of diets to choose from, picking the best one can be difficult. US News and World Reports recently released their list of top diets as rated by health experts. The results may surprise you. How did they choose? US News consulted a panel of experts in the fields of diet, nutrition, obesity, food psychology, diabetes and heart disease and asked them what they thought of the most popular eating plans. The experts ranked each diet on a variety of factors including overall healthfulness, likelihood of helping you lose weight, how easy they are to follow and how beneficial they are for certain diseases like diabetes or heart disease. Which diets ranked highest? The DASH diet took the top spot for best overall diet followed by the Mediterranean Diet and the relatively new MIND diet. The MIND diet focuses on brain health and combines aspects of the Mediterranean and DASH diets. Plant-based diets scored well overall with the Flexitarian Diet taking the #4 spot overall and the V...

Does where you buy your food determine how healthy you are? A recent study suggests that there may be a link between the type of store where you do most of your food shopping and your weight and the health of your diet overall. Which stores were better? Some of the results were what you might expect. People who shopped often at convenience stores ate fewer fruits and vegetables. Convenience stores don’t tend to have large produce departments, so this makes sense. Fruits and vegetables were a bigger part of the diets of people who frequented supermarkets and specialty stores. Overall diet quality was highest in those who shopped at food co-ops. From a weight perspective, people who shopped at specialty stores and farmers markets tended to weigh less and people who shopped at food co-ops had smaller waists. Which comes first? Now the question is, do healthy people tend to shop at certain stores or do certain shopping habits make you healthier? This recent study isn’t able to say for sure...