Yet another expert opinion…
Today as I was reading through various conflicting research studies and opinion pieces – I like to torture myself this way pretending that I’m “learning” and not just further confusing myself – I came across an interesting, if unwitting, social study playing out in real time. A few weeks ago US News & World Report came out with a ranking of the top 20 “best overall diets.” To wit, “U.S. News evaluated and ranked the 20 diets below with input from a panel of health experts. To be top-rated, a diet had to be relatively easy to follow, nutritious, safe, and effective for weight loss and against diabetes and heart disease.”
I didn’t blog it at the time because frankly their rationale had more holes in it than a bucket of Life Savers. Their “experts” ignored a lot of very important research in favor of maintaining the conventional wisdom which made their rankings essentially meaningless in my opinion. What is worth reading in the report, however, are the little numbers below each diet. These numbers weren’t there the first time I looked at the report but some of them have grown quite large in the interim. What are they? There’s a button underneath each diet that says “Did this diet work for you?” and you can click “yes” or “no.”
Holy buckets of anecdotal evidence, Batman! Obviously it’s not rigorous, nor even very scientific but there’s something very compelling about just asking one simple question and seeing how anonymous people answer it. No qualifications, no explanations, no prevarications: either it worked for you or it didn’t. It’s the equivalent of listening in on random diet chatter in every locker room, coffee house and book club in the country. Here’s what I found:
– The #1 ranked DASH diet (essentially every piece of conventional wisdom that we’ve been told and that has been discredited over the past 30 years – bah, US News “experts”) shows that it worked for 177 people and didn’t work for 713. The #1 diet recommended by nutrition experts failed for a whopping 80% of people who tried it.
Okay so obviously I’d expect most diets to not work since most people have a hard time on any type of restriction – which every single diet entails regardless of what they tell you – and when they do lose weight, they quite often gain it back. But in the rankings not every diet was topsy turvy like this.
– Weight Watchers (#2) had more respondents with 4,085 people clicking the yes or no button. 61% said it worked for them. Not that this is scientific either but this lines up pretty well with the people I personally know who have done or are doing WW so I find this believable.
– Vegetarianism (#9) had even more respondents with 18,395. (As a former researcher, let me tell you it is nearly impossible to get this many people to fill out a survey without some kind of bribery or coercion.) The verdict? 95% of respondents said it worked for them! Huh.
– Veganism (#12) came in just behind vegetarianism with 15,987 respondents and 94% said it worked for them.
– So if you put vegetarianism (#9) and veganism (#12) together (which I’m not sure you can actually do since the same people could have answered both) that’s (possibly) 34,382 respondents! That is definitely a sample size large enough to draw some conclusions from. And they’ve concluded they’re pretty darn happy with it.
– Which diet came in dead last on the list? Paleo/Primal. Of course the experts hated it, that’s no surprise (that also doesn’t mean much to me either) but what did surprise me was the results. Out of a staggering 28,710 respondents (!!!), 83% said it did not work for them.
This last point really shook me – you should have seen me, jaw dropped just like in the cartoons and everything! – because, as you all well know (especially if you’ve read my book, holla!), I failed spectacularly at the Primal/Paleo diet. What I haven’t really blogged about is that in the ensuing years I’ve tried it two more times – I’m that swayed by their reasoning – both times for the full 30 days with no cheating. Both times I gained weight and felt awful. It doesn’t work for me. Period. Yet, I’d come to conclude that the fault was with me and not the diet. Maybe my body’s just weird? Maybe it’s messed up from so many years of psycho eating? Primal works and works very well for a lot of people, many of whom I deeply respect and are much smarter than I am (Mark Sisson, Rob Wolff, Gary Taubes etc.) and I’ve read so much about it that I kinda figured I was the only one it didn’t work for. But apparently I’m in good company! I’m not the only one who failed at Primal! For some reason that makes me feel so much better! (For the record, vegetarian/veganism didn’t work for me either.)
Now to the caveats: Obviously there is very little control with respect to the respondents. We don’t know gender, socioeconomic status or education level (all factors shown to greatly influence success in weight loss). But moreover, we don’t know if certain answers were stuffed like the proverbial ballot box. The site allows you to answer “yes” or “no” to each diet once and then any other time you click it, nothing happens but that doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t clear their cookies and re-vote. (It would take a lot of time and effort – more than I’d be willing to make but you never know what some people will do, I guess.)
Could there have been a push on some vegan/vegetarian sites telling all their readers to go vote? Yeah. Are veggies more militant than Paleos? (They’re both neck-and-neck in my experience.) Could there have been some Paleo haters trying to torpedo the results? I suppose. Did the respondents even really know what the Paleo diet is? Dunno, there’s a lot of conflicting information out there. And of course there isn’t any definition of what “yes” or “no” means. Did they self-report that it worked because they initially lost some weight/felt better but it changed later? Did they perceive it to work because they’d been told by prominent celebs and media figures that it would? Maybe they didn’t lose any weight/get healthier but just felt positively about their experience? Anything’s possible. But I don’t think these limitations mean the results are meaningless.
What we can conclude is that there is a HUGE difference between what “experts” say will help people lose weight and what real people are saying actually works for them. This ranked diets list is bunk for what it’s meant for but as a survey of what people have tried and whether or not they think it works for them, it’s very valuable. The tricky part for me now is to stay consistent with my Intuitive Eating as I read stuff like this and it makes me want to overhaul my entire diet. In the past I would have totally switched overnight but thankfully I’m (a little) more sane these days so while I maintain curiosity about it, I won’t make any drastic changes.
And because I know you’re curious: The Mayo Clinic, Volumetrics, Jenny Craig, Slimfast, Ornish, Nutrisystem, South Beach, medifast, raw foods, and The Zone diets all failed abysmally. And weirdly, Eco-Atkins had a large majority saying it worked while plain Atkins had a huge majority saying it didn’t.
Anything surprise you on this list or in the survey portion? Anyone else really interested in other people’s anecdotal reports of what worked for them and what didn’t? Anyone else easily swayed to completely change their diet based on a few limited reports?
The initial rankings definitely did not surprise me. No expert will go against the grain (hahaha!) and say that the standards they’ve recommended for years aren’t the best out there.
What does surprise me was the ancedotal evidence regarding Paelo, esp. when compared to Vegetarianism/Veganism, like you mentioned. However, then I got to thinking about it. . . a lot of people “dabble” around with a Paleo/Primal way of eating as part of a “diet” and don’t actually stick with it. Vegetairanism/Veganism, however, likely has people doing those for reasons beyond just losing weight. I’ve dabbled with Paleo/Primal and it always works. But it’s super hard to stick with it. So I always gain when I go “off.” Vegans/Vegetarians are much less likely to go “off” their diet due to the other reasons they eat like that (eco-friendly, animal rights, etc.). Just a thought on the comparison between those two. My other guess regarding low #s for Paleo/Primal is that most people end up sliding much easier on that, due to the tasty tasty bread and cakes and cookies available everywhere, which can be worked into Weight Watchers (lotsa points, true, but you can have the cake and eat it, regardless – just not much else!), etc. Anyway, that’s just my 2 cents.
Everything else aside, what works, doesnt work, different strokes for different folks type thing..we all must find our own path based on our bodies, lifestyle, etc but I always cringe when people look at vegetarianism and veganism as a weight loss plan.
It’s not a weight loss plan; it’s a lifestyle. Sure, you can loose weight on it, just like you can loose weight on any other diet if your caloric intake is less than your expenditure but I always wish that people wouldn’t just look to veg/veganism as a weight loss plan.
There are so many other things about a plant based lifestyle and dietary path that are good and have benefit which have nothing to do with weight loss. I wish those that did these studies would mention that too 🙂
heck yes on the anecdotal stuff .
It’s why we all flipped to the cast studies FIRST in our psych text books.
I love that you took the boring blah blah study with all it’s flawed logic and found the REAL story behind it!
My gut feeling is that primal works better for guys than gals, but whatever–I know it wouldn’t work for me. On the other hand, I’m surprised that nixing meat and dairy works so well for so many, as that also wouldn’t work for me.
Bottom line, I think everyone has to experiment on themselves a bit to find the diet/lifestyle that works best and is easiest to maintain, as we all seem to be different. Fascinating though, that the experts are so off base.
I’d love to have seen a “didn’t try it” option. I wonder how many people clicked “no” when they really hadn’t done it?
I’m interested too in knowing WHY the diets didn’t work. Is it because the people were unable to maintain the diet? Ate too many off-diet foods? Ate too much quantity?
I’ll stick to IE 🙂
In our diet/celebrity/looks-obsessed culture, it doesn’t surprise me that most of us are still looking for THE answer: the ONE thing that will make us thin, hot, and happy. And, of course, there is no ONE thing. I recently came across a (relatively inexpensive) program that focuses on digestive health. Since I was tired of popping antacids, I figured I’d give it a try. And y’know what? It’s working! I haven’t had to pop a pill in two weeks! But does that mean everyone should follow the program? No! It works for me, and it helps me stay more aware of what I eat and how I feel, but it might not work (or be necessary) for someone else.
I, too, was drawn right away to the numbers at the bottom of each paragraph.
(I must admit I’m surprised that the Slim Fast plan came in at number 10. Or at all, really. That kinda blew the survey for me.)
What is the program for digestive health, if you don’t mind sharing? My husband lives on OTC Prevacid and I’m always curious for something that might help him wean himself from the pills.
Don’t mind at all! It’s called
B\Great Taste, No Pain” by Sherry Brescia. You can find it online. Good luck!
I immediately clicked on the link to read the study before your post (sorry! I too am swayed by opinions, and didn’t want to have that happen) and those little numbers were the first thing to catch my eye too!
Sure, they may have been artifically inflated, but still…they are most interesting part of the study by far. I have read a ton about paleo/primal and think about it as somethign that sounds scienticfically legit for sure, but could I do it? No. I like cookies too much and those cookies made with almond flour or coconut flour just don’t do it for me.
Yes, I base my dietary choices on whether I can eat cookies or not. 😀
Dude – me too. Cookies are a gift to mankind :).
I recently had my LAST primal/paleo fail, last in that I finally admitted to myself that even if I made it through a 30 day challenge – get real there is no longevity to the lifestyle for me. Even thinking about never (or rarely) eating cookies again made me want to stuff my face with desserts.
Maybe it depends on where they are in the diet, too. Ten years ago, I would have said “YES” to WW working for me, but now I’d say “NO.” It worked, and then it didn’t. You just can’t do these diets long term. It took me a ridiculous amount of time to realize that. I’m on the Intuitive Eating bandwagon now – I have gone 4 whole months without tracking calories!!
I really think there is something weird going on with the vegetarian/vegan/eco-Atkins diet results on this website. (Eco-Atkins is vegetarian Atkins diet. So what do they eat? Just vegetables I guess…) There is no way the other diets all failed and all the vegetarian diets had a 90% success rate. So Weight Watchers was the only diet that worked for people. I think it works for a lot of people because of the community support. It’s kind of depressing to see how many of the diets fail people. Maybe losing weight starts with exercise for most people. It would be very interesting to see a similar website for exercise programs.
For me, it doesn’t matter what worked for everyone else. It just matter what works for ME. And what works for me right NOW. At least in my current surroundings, I can see it would be much EASIER to be veg/vegan, or simply do portion control rather than paleo (there’s no paleo section of the menu :P). Also, yes, a lot of vegetarians I know do so because of either digestive issues or morals, not because of weight loss issues. Never have I known someone who felt sorry for the poor adorable carbs and didn’t want to see them subjected to the cruelty of hostess and nabisco, heh. 🙂
I hated that study when it came out. My mom brought it up to me on the phone and I had to hit the mute button so I wouldn’t start yelling 😉 haha. I am surprised by the Paleo results! Seems that every crossfitter I know views Paleo basically as a religion 😉 Maybe none of them care about what studies like this say? I kinda doubt that though. They’re a little…uhh…fanatic. Interesting though!
To be honest, those results don’t surprise me at all, as they are right in line with my own personal experience. When my husband and I have done a Greek Orthodox-style Lenten fast (which is basically vegan for six weeks), we lose weight. When I was vegetarian, I easily maintained my weight without actively dieting. I know that the Primal/Paleo people and Gary Taubes are very influential right now, but I’m not going to believe them over my own experience. Healthy carbs and veggies keep me thin and eating meat, sadly, makes me tend to put on the pounds. I have no idea what this is, just that it is. For the record, right now I am not vegetarian…so this is not an ideological rant, just my what’s been true for me.
sometimes(ok…most of the time) i laugh at these studies and hate that inexperienced ‘lifestyle changers” could be swayed by their findings. Everyone is different and for one group of people to think they have a better way of eating and that everyone should eat their way really perturbs me. Our bodies are so smart if we will just listen to them. And yet that is the ‘diet’ that doesn’t get attention and one of the hardest to figure out.
I think every diet works for somebody at some time. Maybe we plateau with diets, just like exercise. I know that Veganism totally worked for me ONCE, but now it doesn’t, just like the ton of other diets I did. I’m still working on Intuitive Eating mixed with low carb/high protein. My only problem is sugar. I can only stay away from it for a short period of time. I think that’s why Veganism worked the longest…I had my sugar and ate it too (until I got so good at making vegan desserts, I started gaining weight again). Yeah, diets are like roaches and roach spray…once you’ve done a diet, your body becomes immune.
I’ve tried paleo a couple times and felt really awful on it. I didn’t gain weight, but I didn’t lose it either. I gave it a couple weeks and it made my digestive system really screwed up. So, I’m back to eating carbs/fat/protein intuitively and always come out about 50/30/20 ratio, give or take. I’m healthy and fit.
I’m always interested to hear what works for people…but at the same time I know that because something works for one person that does not mean it will work for everyone. Just the though of Paleo/Primal gives me stomach ache.
The voting results are interesting, but the vegetarian/vegan results do look suspicious…
Any article that cites experts who call the Slim-Fast plan “a reasonable approach to dieting” immediately loses all credibility in my mind. I’m sorry, but a shake for breakfast and a shake for lunch is not reasonable, and will instead screw up your metabolism AND your perception of healthy eating.
I’m a big fan of the Paleo/Primal plan because it makes sense to me, and it makes me feel good. I like the focus on whole foods and minimizing refined carbs. Personally, I feel great when I don’t eat carbs, and based on how I feel when I eat foods with wheat in them after not eating them for awhile, think I might have a mild gluten allergy.
That said, I’m currently on a 3-year plateau, and can’t seem to budge. Despite being “obese” per the BMI, my resting heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol and other indicators are all stellar and I swim laps 4 times a week. So I’m healthy, I just can’t seem to lose fat. I have a sneaking suspicion that I really messed up my metabolism during all my years of “dieting” per the conventional wisdom. Currently I generally eat Paleo and I feel great.
Finally, given the stories I’ve heard about militant vegans/vegetarians (pelting Lierre Keith, the author of The Vegetarian Myth, with a pie being one of the least crazy stories) I would not be surprised at all if the message boards and blogs went crazy with this article and a large number of militant people came to the site to support vegetarianism/veganism and to diss Paleo.
apparently the brain will eat itself
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8677200/Dieting-forces-brain-to-eat-itself-scientists-claim.html
I don’t even think these diets should be compared to each other. Slimfast and Paleo? What? Is there any comparison and by “work” did they mean lose weight? There is SO SO SO SO MUCH MORE to a diet than lose weight. I will say I’ve noticed that most of the fittest lean people I know online and off eat more in line with Zone or Paleo. I’ve recently reduced (not eliminated) grain intake and I lost 3 pounds in a week without any calorie counting or added exercise. Even better I feel amazing. Less bloated and more clarity of mind.
I saw this article when it first appeared on Yahoo! and though I found it interesting, it didn’t make me want to change anything. I’m currently on Weight Watchers, but am working toward IE exclusively. Going completely IE all at once is scary, so I’m eating based on my body’s cues and counting the points AFTER I’ve consumed it. Right now, I’m looking at it as an experiment to find which dietary ratios work best for my body.
Pingback:Weekend Link Love - Edition 154 | Mark's Daily Apple
As a former vegan, I can tell you that it works because it is not a diet. I was a vegan because I didn’t want to eat animals, plain and simple. So there was no “cheating” or “falling off the wagon” like with the other diets. Also, as someone pointed out above, a lot of restaurants have distinct veggie-friendly menu options, whereas a strict paleo person is going to have do some creative ordering.
Also, eliminating dairy and eggs gets rid of a lot of crappy foods, which helps keep weight down naturally. Most processed foods are not vegan-friendly, so one tends to grab more whole foods.
I was vegetarian from April 2006 to late 2010. I did it because I was sick of hunting down meat that wasn’t full of hormones and anti-biotics, so I just boycotted it. I was thinner during that time, but I was also sick a lot. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas I caught whatever was going around and spent those winter months near a toilet. I started eating meat again bc I found a coop nearby that has local grass-fed beef without hormones and antibiotics. I gained 15 lbs, but that’s because not only was I now eating meat, but I was eating fast food again, too. It’s amazing how much I missed Jack in the Box’s Sourdough Jack. I’ve tried paleo before and did it for 11 days and felt amazing. I just started (Day 2) a 30-day challenge again to try and get rid of some of the extra fat I have along with exercise and get back to how amazing I felt eating paleo for that week and a half. I guess I’ll know in a year or so whether eating paleo (or even mostly paleo, as I can’t see myself not having beer ever again) will work for me.
Also: I was a part of online veggie/vegan communities and the vegan communities would link sites that had polls and surveys and literally thousands of their members would go vote up for the veg option and vote down the meat-eating option. I would not be surprised at all if they voted the paleo (aka “meat-centric”) diet down.
That’s not to say that there simply can’t be people out there – even a large number – for whom paleo didn’t work, but that high of a percentage makes me think it was the more militant vegans and vegetarians.
Well, if you believe the poll numbers, more people have “succeeded” on a Vegan Diet (14965) than even TRIED Slim Fast, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem COMBINED (7,620). I highly doubt this, because the last four are funded by major corporations who constantly advertise.
I’m betting the numbers were skewed by a vegetarian site of some sort, as the three vegetarian diets (including Eco-Atkins) had “yes” votes in the ten thousands, while the meat based diets (Atkins, Paleo, and to a lesser extent, Zone and South Beach) had a similar number of ‘no’ votes. When the article first came out, only Weight Watchers, Atkins and Paleo had more yes’s than no’s.
Pingback:Dont let go «
Ah, give me a break, the poll was obviously attacked by some vegetarian discussion group. It is easy to write a script that will automatically vote 100’s or 1000’s of times in a web site like that. Some vegetarians think they are saving the world with their diet and will attack any opposing view with the verve of a protest march. It has nothing to do with how the diet affects their health. They would rather be unhealthy with a clear conscience than healthy.
So, on the one hand you admit that the data could have been easily scuppered, then on the other you say that the data are valuable. Huh?
Pingback:CrossFit 312 » Blog Archive » 08.11.11
At least one person alluded to this, but the biggest problem I have with the survey is what constitutes whether something “works”. Is it just weight loss? Is it being healthier? Did the people even have a way of really knowing if they were healthier or not because of some diet? Is it being able to stick to the diet? As some people talk about here, they lost lots of weight on Paleo but they could never stick to it for very long. So did that work or not? Seems you could answer both ways.
I was keeping up with the results up until the vegans did their thing. Interesting note, the negative votes for paleo showed up at the same time as the positive votes for the veggie diets. Now I am technically biased as I lost 140lbs on paleo and kept it of for well over a year now. Still I think the fact that the paleo diet was the best ranked diet up to that point should count for something.
I think the admin of this web site is in fact working hard in support
of his web site, as here every information is quality based material.