The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

What's wrong with the best diets?

Every year, it's the same thing. U.S. News and World Report

ranks 38 of the most popular diets from best to worst. And every single time the paleo

diet or some variant, in this case the whole 30 plan, comes in dead last. I've written about

this before. You know my stance. You know how silly the whole thing is

and why you shouldn't care about a ranking, especially when you've transformed your health eating the

worst diet in the world. Frankly, I'm skeptical these reports have much impact anymore,

but I got another barrage of emails about the rankings, so I'm going

to address them. Instead of defending ancestral eating, which I've already done plenty of times before,

I'll scrutinize the two so-called best diets, the pair that wallop paleo and the whole 30,

the ones you'd apparently be fools not to adopt. The most ironic part of all this

is their descriptions of the best diets have the least citations supporting their rankings.

In bashing paleo, they had to acknowledge five studies and clinical trials that found the diet works,

inserting weasel words like one tiny study and parentheticals like

even the scientists called their study underpowered, to diminish the impact.

To boot, several of the studies show that paleo compares favorably to the Mediterranean

diet, number 2 overall, and Dash diet number 1 overall. The Dash diet. Dash stands for dietary approaches to stop hypertension, and that's exactly

what it sets out to do, reduce blood pressure. It does this by reducing sodium and increasing

intake of foods high in potassium, calcium, fiber, and protein. As the U.S. News and World Reports puts

it, just emphasize the foods you've always been told to eat, like lean protein, low-fat dairy,

fruits, veggies, and whole grains. Isn't that what people have been trying to do for the last 60

...