Which Diet is Best?

Updated 5.30.2014; Reformatted 8.10.2015
I don't know that there is a way to answer that question, but people do keep trying to do so.

Here is Dr. David Katz and coauthors' (relatively) recent effort. Always, I am delayed in writing these notes up.) The authors looked at most major types of diets and found all of them lacking. Low fat really meant eat less meat and cheese, and consume more vegetables— but rather than do that, people bought processed low fat crap, So low fat was never adopted by most as it was intended. It didn't mean low fat dairy, it meant LESS dairy, period.

The Atlantic also did an interview with Katz about the study. Per The Atlantic, Katz doesn't crown a winning diet, he basically agrees with Pollan: eat real food, not too much, mostly plants.

A nod to the fact that popular media is not totally lost, Katz borrows from the writer Michael Pollan, citing a seminal 2007 New York Times Magazine article on "nutritionism" in concluding that the mantra, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" is sound. "That's an excellent idea, and yet somehow it turns out to be extremely radical."

Also in The Atlantic's article, Katz points out that if you eat real food from nature, you don't have to worry about over doing it on most things. Most salt and sugar intake comes from processed foods not the salt shaker. Transfats are in processed foods, not real food.
I also liked this quote:

I think Bertrand Russell nailed it," Katz told me, "when he said that the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so sure, and wise people always have doubts. Something like that.

• I think Bertrand Russell nailed it," Katz told me, "when he said that the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so sure, and wise people always have doubts. Something like that.

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