These celebrity diets are the worst for your heart

But the Mediterranean, pescatarian and vegetarian diets adopted by Beyoncé, Selena Gomez and Harry Styles are much better for us.

A new report from the American Heart Association (AHA) has ranked popular diets as good or bad for heart health.

The resulting rankings placed popular selective diets such as Mediterranean, pescatarian and vegetarian diets at the top for heart health.

Just above these, at the top of a heart-healthy diet, are the DASH diets – subscribed to by American singers Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Hudson – which include foods high in potassium, calcium and magnesium and are designed to control blood pressure.

However, extreme fad diets such as the Keto and Paleo diets have been shown to be detrimental to heart health due to reduced fiber intake and lack of limits on saturated fat intake.

Experts say that while these diets can lead to short-term weight loss, they aren’t sustainable in the long term, but could cause lasting damage.

Dr. Christopher Gardner, chair of the editorial board of the new scientific statement and Rehnborg Farquhar Professor of Medicine at Stanford University in Stanford, California, explained that the misinformation spread about dieting techniques on social media means that we are more confused than ever about which diets are good or bad for our health.

He said: “The number of different and popular diets has proliferated in recent years, and the amount of misinformation about them on social media has reached critical levels.

“The public – and even many healthcare professionals – may rightly be confused about heart-healthy eating, and they may feel like they don’t have the time or the training to evaluate different diets.

“We hope this statement will serve as a tool for clinicians and the public to understand which diets promote good cardiometabolic health.”

The AMA’s new Healthy Heart Statement assesses how well popular diets align with its dietary guidelines for good cardiometabolic health — a group of factors that affect our metabolisms and the risk of heart and cardiovascular disease.

These factors include blood sugar, cholesterol and other lipids, blood pressure and body weight.

While abnormal levels in any one of these factors can increase the risk of heart disease, abnormalities in more than one factor increase those risks even further and for potentially more life-threatening conditions.

The AMA’s Dietary Guidance includes ten key features of a diet to improve cardiometabolic health, with an emphasis on limiting unhealthy fats and reducing our intake of excess carbohydrates.

The balance that the guidelines encourage aims to limit the risk of health problems like type 2 diabetes and risk factors like obesity, which increases the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The new scientific statement – which is the first ever to analyze how well popular dieting techniques adhere to these guidelines – reviewed the defining characteristics of long-term diets and broke them down into ten different categories.

These categories include DASH-style diets; Mediterranean-style diets; vegetarian and pescetarian diets; vegan diets; low and very low fat diets; low carbohydrate diets; Paleolithic diets and ketogenic diets.

Each diet was rated against nine of ten characteristics of the AMA’s Guidelines for a Heart-Healthy Diet.

The defining characteristics of the different diets were scored based on their fit with the recommendations, with one full point for fully meeting, 0.75 points for largely meeting, and 0.5 points for partially meeting the recommendations.

The resulting scores were calculated and adjusted to arrive at a score between one and one hundred, with 100 indicating complete adherence to the WADA dietary recommendations.

The experts found that the diets reviewed varied widely in their scores – ranging from 31 to 100 – and grouped the diets into four levels of heart health.

They found that the top-ranked diets for heart health – with scores over 85 – were flexible and provided a wide range of healthy foods to choose from.

DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension)-style diets—designed to treat or limit high blood pressure—scored a perfect score in meeting all AMA guidelines.

These diets tend to be low in salt, added sugar, alcohol, tropical oils and processed foods and high in non-starchy vegetables, fruits, whole grains and legumes.

Protein tends to come mostly from plant sources (such as legumes, beans, or nuts), along with fish or seafood, poultry, and lean meats, and low-fat or fat-free dairy products .

The Mediterranean-style diet, which limits dairy and emphasizes vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, fatty fish, and extra virgin olive oil — and includes moderate consumption of red wine – also received a high heart score.

This type of diet has helped Big Lebowski actor John Goodman, 70, lose a jaw-dropping 14 stone while following the diet that Spanish actress Penélope Cruz, 48, and American actress Cameron also adhere to Diaz, 50 years old.

The Pescatarian diet – in which the only meat you can eat is fish – has also scored high for heart health and has singers Beyoncé, 41, Harry Styles, 29, Victoria Beckham, 49 and Miley Cyrus, 30, among his followers. .

Likewise, the vegetarian diet – followed by Sir Paul McCartney, 80, Zendaya, 26, and Russell Brand, 47 – was included in the top tier of diets by including dairy and eggs.

Based on these diets, Dr Gardner said: “If implemented as intended, the high-level diets best align with WADA guidelines and can be adapted to meet best practices. cultures, food preferences and budgets to allow people to always eat this way, for the long term.”

The second tier of diets, with scores between 75 and 85, included vegan and low-fat diets that encourage consumption of fruits and vegetables, grains, and nuts while limiting alcohol and food and drink consumption. with added sugar.

However, experts have acknowledged the long-term difficulties of adhering to these strict restaurant diets and have warned vegans like actors Olivia Wilde, 39, and Joaquin Phoenix, 48, as well as the former heavyweight boxer heavy David Haye, 42, that they could risk vitamin B-12 deficiency which could cause red blood cell abnormalities leading to anemia by following a strict vegan diet, and recommended taking supplements.

Very-low-fat, low-carb diets formed the third tier of diets with scores between 55 and 74, with some very-low-fat diets linked to the potential slow progression of accumulation fatty arteries.

Both diets were also said to restrict the food groups highlighted in the AMA guidelines.

However, the lowest ranked diets, with scores below 55, turned out to be the Paleolithic and very low carb/ketogenic diets.

The bizarre Paleo diet, which was followed by actors Matthew McConaughey, 53, and Channing Tatum, 43, is a plant-based diet based on foods humans might have eaten during the Paleolithic era around 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago.

It focuses on foods that our ancestors could obtain through hunting and gathering and avoids foods that came after the agricultural revolution such as grains, legumes, and dairy products.

Keto dieters, on the other hand, eat a lot of fat and very little carbs, so your body enters a fat-burning mode called ketosis.

This bizarre diet technique was sampled by the Kardashian sisters, actress Halle Berry, 56, and basketball superstar LeBron James, 38.

These restrictive diets, while helpful in the short term for weight loss, may lead to reduced fiber intake while being unrestrictive on saturated fat, which could increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Of these low-ranking heart health diets, Dr. Gardner said: “There really is no way to follow Level 4 diets as intended and still be aligned with the AMA’s dietary advice.

“They are very restrictive and difficult for most people to stick to long term.

“While there are likely to be short-term benefits and substantial weight loss, it’s not sustainable.

“A diet that is effective in helping an individual maintain their weight loss goals, from a practical standpoint, must be sustainable.”

Dr. Gardner added that conflicting information about diets prevents us from identifying which one might work for us.

“We often find that people don’t fully understand popular eating habits and don’t follow them as expected,” Dr. Gardner said.

“When this is the case, it is difficult to determine the effect of the ‘diet as intended’ and to distinguish it from the ‘diet as taken’.

“Two research findings that seem contradictory may simply reflect that there was high adherence to diet in one study and low adherence in the other.”

The AMA’s advice did not take into account commercial dieting techniques such as Weight Watchers or Noom, short-term diets intended to be followed for less than 12 weeks, practices such as intermittent fasting or time-restricted diets or diets designed to manage non-cardiovascular disorders. terms.