The Paleo Diet: They get rid of dairy and refined foods. This diet, for these reasons, is a little better than the standard American diet. For this reason, they have a few (true) stories about people who benefited from a change from a truly awful diet to the very suboptimal Paleo diet. They have no serious research and missed the dramatic message in the above chart. They got the “unrefined” part but missed the “plant-based” part of the formula. Dramatic health improvements are possible, but not if you only get it partly right. It’s like dialing 3 out of 4 numbers correctly on a combination lock.

In 2011, US News & World Report rated 25 diets for weight loss, heart health, diabetes, and other health measures. Twenty five different diets, and at the drop-dead bottom of the list: the Paleo diet. Their experts concluded that concerned people are “better off looking elsewhere.”

“Junk” food vegans and their famous health problems: They get the plant-based part correct but miss the “unrefined” (whole foods) part. Again, that combination lock won’t open.

“Junk” vegans and their famous health problems: They get the plant-based part correct but miss the “unrefined” (whole foods) part. Again, that combination lock won’t open.

There is a diet that results in: (“diet” here means what you eat, not a short-lived attempt to starve yourself thin)

• Heart-attack proof, down > 98.5%
• Ischemic strokes down > 98%
• All cancers down > 90%
• Osteoporosis gone
• Obesity and type 2 diabetes gone
• Dementia rare, and not a “normal consequence of aging”
• Arthritis and other autoimmune diseases, like type I diabetes and multiple sclerosis, nearly eliminated
• Benefit to the individual who decides that personal responsibility trumps faith in our failed health care system: Read the above list again. You should decide the value of these proven benefits for yourself: nearly total elimination of our most common, most deadly chronic diseases.

Benefit to the US federal budget: 3½ Pentagon budgets saved each year (numbers calculated by the US government’s Centers for Disease Control). That is real money.

We benefit individually. We benefit as a nation.

Do not listen to nutritional nonsense. It is only your intellect, your mobility, your heart, your kidneys, your legs, your brain, and your life that are at risk.

—Philip Paden, M.D.