Newsflash: What we eat can play a central role in preventing – or treating – disease and improving quality of life. You may already believe it, and certainly growing evidence supports this idea. But among the crowded shelf of diets claiming the best health benefits, which one ranks as the absolute best?
This is a trick question. In fact, there is no ideal diet. A good diet for me may be different from what is best for you. And for each of us, there may be several good choices with no clear winner.
How to choose the diet that suits you?
When considering which diet might be best for you, ask yourself the following questions:
- Which goals are most important? A goal might be weight loss, improved health, disease prevention, or something else.
- How do you define “best”? For some people, the best means the diet with the greatest number of health benefits. For others, it may focus on a specific health benefit, such as lowering cholesterol. Still others may prefer a plan that provides the greatest benefit at the lowest cost. Or a healthy, easy-to-follow diet.
- What health problems do you have? One diet may have an advantage over another depending on whether you have cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or none of these.
- What foods do you prefer? Your tastes, culture, and geographic location can shape your food preferences and significantly affect your likelihood of following a specific diet.
Which diets are rich in health benefits?
Two very well-studied diets demonstrate clear benefits, including reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke and reducing high blood pressure: Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet.
But the portfolio plan may be as effective or better than these plans, at least in combating cardiovascular diseases that contribute to blocked blood vessels, heart attacks and strokes. What? Have you never heard of the portfolio diet? You are not alone.
What is the portfolio plan?
Just as a financial advisor may recommend having a diversified investment portfolio – not just stocks, not just bonds – the portfolio diet follows suit. This largely plant-based diet focuses on various foods and food groups. proven to reduce harmful blood lipidsincluding LDL (what we call bad cholesterol) and triglycerides.
If you choose to follow this dietary pattern, you just need to know which foods have a healthy effect on blood lipids and choose them over other foods. For some people, it only requires small adjustments to embrace certain foods while minimizing other choices. Or, it might require a bigger shake-up of long-standing eating habits.
What foods are encouraged in the portfolio diet?
Here are the basics. Eating more of these foods regularly can help reduce levels of harmful blood lipids:
- plant-based proteins like soy, beans, tofu, peas, nuts and seeds
- fiber-rich foods like oats, barley, berries, apples and citrus fruits; other examples include bran, berries, okra, and eggplant
- phytosterols, which are a natural compound found in plant-based foods such as whole grains, fruits, vegetables and nuts (other sources are phytosterol-fortified foods or dietary supplements)
- vegetable oils high in monounsaturated fats such as olive oil, avocado oil, safflower oil and peanut oil.
See? Some of your favorite foods are remembered. This is one of the strong points of this approach: the list of recommended foods is long. So it’s likely that you are already eating and enjoying some of the recommended foods.
What foods are not part of the portfolio diet?
It is worth highlighting the foods that are not on this list, like
- red meat
- highly processed foods
- refined grains and added sugar, which can contribute to chronic inflammation
- butter, cream and other dairy products high in saturated fat and cholesterol.
What can the portfolio diet do for you?
Researchers have shown that the portfolio diet can improve blood lipids. But can it also reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular problems?
Yes, according to a 2023 study published in Traffic. More than 17,000 people have kept a careful food diary for 30 years. Those who followed the portfolio diet the most, compared to those who followed it the least, were more likely to have favorable lipids and inflammation. They were also 14% less likely to have a heart attack and 14% less likely to have a stroke.
This was true even after accounting for factors that might affect cardiovascular disease risk, such as taking cholesterol-lowering medications, exercise, smoking, diabetes, or a family history of cardiovascular disease.
Because it was an observational studyit cannot conclusively prove that portfolio diet, rather than some other factor, was responsible for the observed cardiovascular benefits. And we don’t know what benefit results from reducing or eliminating certain types of foods, rather than eating certain foods.
Does the Portfolio Diet help people lose weight or provide other health benefits?
What about the portfolio diet for weight loss? Although some people lose weight on the wallet diet, it is not advertised as a weight loss diet. Understanding its potential benefits for other conditions such as obesity, cognitive decline, diabetes and cancer awaits further research.
Go beyond diet to improve health
Of course, diet isn’t the only way to improve cardiovascular health and your overall health. You will stay healthier by
- NO SMOKING
- exercise regularly
- maintain healthy blood pressure and weight
- prevent diabetes when possible, or get good medical care to treat it if necessary
- taking prescription medications such as cholesterol-lowering medications.
The essentials
It’s probably best to abandon the idea that there is one best diet. The whole model of your diet and your portion sizes are probably more important. For most people, it’s also a good idea to move away from restrictive, almost impossible-to-follow diets and adopt healthier overall eating habits. The portfolio plan ticks both of these boxes.
There is a lot of overlap between the Portfolio Diet and other healthy diets. So no one should suggest that this is the best diet out there. But if you’re trying to eat healthier, this is a good place to start.