The diet encourages people to eat large quantities of fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy products, nuts, beans and fish and meats, which are all low in fat and salt content. The diet also focuses on portion-size, nutrient-levels and the sorts of foodstuffs the body requires to intake the optimum levels of them. The architects of this dietary-approach assert that the diet can reduce blood-pressure and instil a well-balanced approach to eating, as a result of the low-sodium levels and high-magnesium, calcium and potassium levels instrumental to the approach. According to many experts, this type of diet can also offer resistance to the onset of stroke, heart-disease and diabetes.
In order to understand what the diet can achieve, researchers from the National Institute of Health observed three different diet-plans and contrasted the benefits of each: the DASH diet, a fruit and vegetable diet and an approach known as – the control diet.
The results confirmed that DASH provides the greatest benefits to health and wellbeing as it contains the highest levels of positive-nutritional-values and can help patients that experience chronic medical conditions such as pre-hypertension and hypertension. The diet can facilitate changes in blood-pressure, without any changes in body-weight, and has been received positively by the National Institute of Health due to their increasing concerns relating to high-blood pressure and its prevalence within the United States; with health authorities asserting that high-blood pressure presently affects at-least half of the population.
In January 2013, the U.S News and World Report described the DASH diet as the best overall approach to dieting, praising its positive impact upon a range of ailments and factors such as heart-disease, diabetes and nutritional-effectiveness.