Popular Diets: Correlation To Health, Nutrition, And Obesity

Examines the association between a range of health and nutrition indicators and popular diets, including vegetarian (no meat, poultry, or fish on day of survey) and non-vegetarian diets.

The research objective was to examine the relationship between health and nutrition indicators and popular diets.

The prototype diets included vegetarian and non-vegetarian diets, which were further divided into low, medium and high (also separated into pyramid and non-pyramid) carbohydrate groups.

The findings show that diet quality as measured by the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) was the highest for high carbohydrate pyramid group (82.9) and lowest for low carbohydrate group (44.6).

Vegetarians (1606 kcals) and high carbohydrate/low fat (1360 kcals) had low energy intakes.

For women, BMIs were lowest in the vegetarian group (24.6) and the high carbohydrate/low fat group (24.4).

For men, vegetarians (25.2) and the high carbohydrate pyramid group (25.2) showed the lowest BMIs.

Literature review suggests that weight loss is independent of diet composition, and that energy restriction is key to short term weight reduction.

This study concludes that high carbohydrate/low fat diets tend to be lower in energy.

Diet quality as measured by HEI was highest for high carbohydrate diet and lowest for low carbohydrate diet.

The BMIs for men and women on high carbohydrate diets were lower and the BMIs for men and women on low carbohydrate diets were higher.