January 12, 2016 | 2 minute read

Just in time for your New Year’s resolution to eat healthier and lose weight, US News published Best Diets 2016, a comprehensive review of diets of all kinds, including for overall health, weight loss and chronic disease prevention. They didn’t include lowering cancer risk in their analysis, but I couldn’t help but notice that most of the highest ranking diets would work well with AICR’s New American Plate model – designed for reducing risk of cancer and other chronic diseases.

They asked experts in nutrition and weight loss to rate – using the research behind them – how strong the diets are for long and short term weight loss, nutrition, safety, preventing and managing diabetes and heart disease, and how easy it is to follow. The DASH diet (to lower hypertension)won in the most categories, with Weight Watchers ranking highly too. Others scoring well were a diet for brain health (MIND) and for lowering cholesterol (TLC).

The analysis shows that no single weight loss diet is ideal for everybody. But the healthiest diets focused on plenty of plant foods like vegetables, whole grains, beans and fruits; and they included, but minimized animal foods. If you’re focusing on eating healthier – for any reason – take a look at the diet rankings, choose the one you think works best for you and go for it.

One way to help ease your way into a new diet that may have specific measures or points, is to start with AICR’s New American Plate. Make sure that at least 2/3 of your plate contains colorful plant foods (with little added fat, salt or sugar) and 1/3 or less contains animal foods – fish, poultry, red meat or dairy. You’ll be well on your way to meeting the basics for the top diets for overall health, heart-heart health, weight loss and diabetes prevention.

Sign up now for the New American Plate Challenge, beginning February 29 (just in time to boost your resolve to eat healthier). During this free 12-week program we send you weekly challenges to to help you eat smarter and move more for health and weight loss, if that is your goal. You can try our delicious recipes, a few menu plans and find support for one another and from the challenge dietitians – it’s a great way to find new ideas for that new healthy eating goal.