Shocker: This Popular Diet Ranks Last on 2016 Best Diets List
The Whole30 Diet was to 2015 what Britney Spears was to 1998: It was everywhere and no matter how disinterested in it you were, some of its rules were bound to make their way into your brain — just like the lyrics to “…Baby One More Time” did back in the day. If you somehow managed to tune out the incessant Whole30 chatter, the idea of the diet is this: You cut out a long list of foods — sugar, alcohol, grains, legumes (including peanuts and soy) and dairy — for 30 days in an effort to identify food groups that disagree with you and to up your energy levels and give your overall relationship with food a makeover. And here’s where it gets nearly as painful as Britney’s 2007 breakdown: There are absolutely no cheats. If you dare drop a dash of cream into your coffee one morning in a pre-coffee daze, you have to start your 30 days over.
I know: It sounds awful, right? Which is why I feel like the bearer of good news telling you that Whole30 was ranked last, all the way down at number 38, on U.S. News & World Report’s 2016 Best Diets list, released today. Now, when your friends try to convince you of the wonders the diet works, you can refer them back to this post. And bad news for Paleo devotees: the Paleo Diet landed just a few spots up at number 36 on the list of best overall diets. Yikes.
Who took home the number one spot, you ask? That would be the DASH Diet, making it the sixth year the diet (which steers clear of salt, red meat and sugar) has taken the leading spot. Other diets high on the list include the MIND Diet, which is a combo of DASH and the Mediterranean Diet; the TLC Diet, which focuses on lowering cholesterol; and the Fertility Diet, which focuses on diet changes in order to increase fertility.
So, why’d Whole30 land so low on the list? Well, experts rank the diets based on things like weight loss — both short-term and long-term — how easy the diet is to follow and how healthy it actually is. The highest score the experts gave Whole30, out of five, was a 2.9 for short-term weight loss, but as U.S. News & World Reports says, the “experts worry that restrictive diets with no room for error can set followers up for failure and prompt them to put the pounds back on — and then some — once the diet is over.” Because when you haven’t been allowed the tiniest drop of sugar for a full month, overexcited Krispy Kreme runs are bound to happen, right? Right.
You can find the full rundown of 2016’s best diets (and figure out what you’ll be filling your shopping cart with this week) here.
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