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A study analyzed eight diets:

In an analysis of eight popular diets, researchers found that the Ornish plan, the Weight Watchers High-Carbohydrate diet, and the New Glucose Revolution plan came out on top in terms of nutritional quality and potential effects on heart health.

What the plans all had in common were high amounts of fruits, vegetables and fiber, and low amounts of artery-clogging types of fat, researchers found.

At the bottom of the list came the high-protein, low-carbohydrate Atkins plan, mainly because of its more liberal attitude toward red meat, saturated fat and trans fats, and low amounts of fruit and fiber.

The findings are published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

For overweight and obese adults, it’s important not only to shed pounds, but to do it by eating heart-healthy foods, explained Dr. Yunsheng Ma, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

“Obese people already have a higher risk of heart disease,” Ma told Reuters Health. So it’s particularly important that they make heart-healthy diet changes that can be kept up for the long haul, the researcher noted.

It’s no surprise, really, as Dr. Dean Ornish devised his diet plan to prevent and reverse heart disease. Recently Dr. Ornish wrote a commentary in Forbes, noting the U.S. health crisis and the importance of lifestyle choices and personal responsibility:

What we’ve found is that it’s not just providing availability of care; it’s the type of care that’s provided. If there’s more of an emphasis on wellness, prevention and the power of lifestyle changes to prevent and reverse disease, we can provide a higher quality of care at a lower cost. The managed-care approach doesn’t address the fundamental causes of why people get sick. It just treats the symptoms. It should not be about risk factor reduction and fear of dying, but about joy of living and feeling better.

You don’t have to do a whole lot to be healthy. Walking half an hour a day can cut premature death rates in half. Doing a few minutes of meditation and stress management every day can make a difference.

These are changes that can make your life a lot more fun. There’s no point in giving up something that you enjoy unless you get something back that’s better, and quickly. We’re learning how quickly people can improve in ways that really matter–your brain gets more blood, you think more clearly, you have more energy, your heart gets more blood, you become more sexually potent. What we try to do in our studies is to show how powerful these approaches are and help people understand how quickly these changes can occur. Then it becomes for many people a choice worth making.