Everything in Moderation?

Dietary advice commonly calls for eating a variety of everything in moderation. But like a lot of dietary aphorisms, it seems that dietary variety might be a little overrated. A new study in PLOS ONE finds that greater dietary variety is actually associated with a higher waist circumference. The authors concluded that it is dietary quality, not diversity that matters for obesity and metabolic health. They conclude:

Our findings provide little evidence for benefits of dietary diversity for either waist circumference or T2D [type 2 diabetes]. Greater dissimilarity among foods was actually positively associated with increase in waist circumference. Our results challenge the notion that “eating everything in moderation” leads to greater diet quality or better metabolic health.

So maybe your children who settle into healthy patterns of sticking with a few good foods that they like are going to be just fine. Maybe the advice to eat a variety of foods from the pyramid was better for food marketers than our metabolic health.

It pays to question the conventional wisdom from time to time.

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” — Oscar Wilde

Click here for the study and here to read more from Science 2.0.

Produce Rainbow, photograph © Ben Seese / flickr

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November 14, 2015