Consumer Reports Rates Best Diates

To help consumers navigate their way around the latest diets, Consumer Reports recently unveiled its list of the most effective diets currently on the market. The editors used a nutrition analysis database to calculate the calories and nutritional composition of a week’s worth of meals from a number of food plans. Also considered were the long-term sustainability of each plan and its conformance to the newly released 2005 U.S. Dietary Guidelines.

Here are some of the findings, which were released online (www.consumerreports.org) in May.

• Weight Watchers^®: This plan was one of the highest rated and had the best overall adherence rate of all nine diets studied.
• Slim-Fast^®: This liquid diet rated favorably on its ability to provide short-term weight loss, but the long-term dropout rate was high.
• Atkins^™: This plan was also effective in terms of short-term weight loss, but meals were found to contain too much fat, too little fiber and too few fruits.
• South Beach^™ & Jenny Craig^®: Both plans came up short in supporting clinical data that could prove overall efficacy.
• Online Diets: Plans such as eDiets^® also had a paucity of clinical data to support their claims.