NUTRI: Health Benefit About Dash Diet

THE DASH DIET

The DASH diet focuses on vegetables, fruits and whole grains. It includes fat-free or low-fat dairy products, fish, poultry, beans and nuts. The diet limits foods that are high in salt, also called sodium. It also limits added sugar and saturated fat, such as in fatty meats and full-fat dairy products.

Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, or DASH, is an eating plan designed to help treat or prevent high blood pressure, which is clinically known as hypertension.

It emphasizes eating plenty of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean meats. It is low in salt, red meat, added sugars, and fat.

While the DASH diet is not a weight loss diet, many people report losing weight on it.

How it works
The DASH diet recommends specific servings of different food groups. The number of servings you are encouraged to eat depends on your daily calorie intake.

For example, each day an average person on the DASH diet would eat about:

five servings of vegetables
five servings of fruit
seven servings of healthy carbs like whole grains
two servings of low fat dairy products
two servings or fewer of lean meats
In addition, it’s recommended to consume nuts and seeds two to three times per week (7Trusted Source).

Health benefits
The DASH diet has been shown to reduce blood pressure levels and several heart disease risk factors. Also, it may help lower your risk of breast and colorectal cancers (7Trusted Source, 8Trusted Source, 9Trusted Source, 10Trusted Source, 11Trusted Source).

Studies show that the DASH diet can also help you lose weight. For example, an analysis of 13 studies found that people on the DASH diet lost more weight over 8–24 weeks than people on a control diet (12Trusted Source).

Another study in adults with obesity over 12 weeks found that the DASH diet helped decrease total body weight, body fat percentage, and absolute fat mass in study participants while preserving muscle strength (13Trusted Source).