A report issued by the American Heart Association revealed that both the keto diet and the Paleo diet, also known as the Paleolithic diet, will do nothing for your heart.
The conclusion of the report came after analyzing several of the most popular diets, and ranking them based on which ways of eating are best and worst for your heart, according to the American Washington Post.
The report’s authors, according to Al-Qabas daily, stress that one of the purposes of their report is to counter widespread misinformation about nutrition peddled by diet books, blogs, and people on social media, as posts promoting both keto and paleo diet plans have spiked in recent years.
The report, published in the journal Circulation, was drafted by a team of nutrition scientists, cardiologists, nutritionists and other health experts, who analyzed a variety of dietary patterns.
The diets were evaluated for how closely they aligned with guidelines for heart-healthy eating, which draws on evidence from decades of randomized controlled trials, epidemiological research and other studies. The report also took into account factors such as whether the diets allowed for flexibility so that people could adapt them based on on their cultural and personal preferences and budget constraints.
The Heart Association’s guidelines include advice for eating a variety of fruits and vegetables, whole grains such as brown rice, bulgur and rolled oats, as well as cutting out lean meats and foods such as olive oil, vegetable oils and seafood, which are high in protein and heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, and limiting of foods that are salty, sugary, highly processed, or made with white flour.
The Heart Association gave the lowest rating to low-carb diets, using a scale of 0 to 100, to some of the most widely popular diets on social media. These included low-carb diets such as the Atkins diet and the keto diet (31 points) and the paleo diet (53 points).
Following such diets usually requires restricting carbohydrate intake to less than 10 percent of daily calories, and the diets are widely promoted for weight loss and endorsed by many celebrities.
Some studies have found that low-carb diets can help with weight loss and improve certain markers of metabolic health, such as blood sugar levels and triglyceride levels, but the Heart Association report notes that these improvements tend to be short-lived, and diets are low in calories. Carbohydrates often cause an increase in bad cholesterol levels, which can increase the risk of heart disease.
The report found similar problems with the paleo diet, which excludes grains, vegetable oils, most dairy products, and legumes such as peanuts and soybeans.
The theory behind the diet is that it allows foods such as fruit and honey that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had access to but excludes grains and other foods associated with modern agriculture.
The Heart Association gives the DASH diet a score of 100, which stands for “Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension.” The DASH diet was developed by researchers at the National Institutes of Health in the 1990s and has been widely endorsed by doctors, dietitians, and other nutrition experts. It focuses on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds and low-fat dairy products, while encouraging people to limit their intake of salt, fatty meats, added sugars and refined grains.
The vegetarian diet got 92 points, and the Mediterranean diet got 89 points.
► The keto and paleo diets are far from healthy eating guidelines for heart health
► The keto diet is a low-carbohydrate diet, and these diets cause an increase in harmful cholesterol levels, which pose a risk to the heart
► The keto diet got only 31 points out of 100 on the scale of the American Heart Association, and the paleo diet achieved 53 points
► The DASH diet got the full score of 100 points and the Mediterranean diet got 89 points