The Aesthetics Advisor

Each year, U.S. News & World Report ranks the best diet plans . This year marks the seventh consecutive year that the Mediterranean diet has been ranked the best diet overall 2025. The Mediterranean diet is a healthy departure from our typical modern diet. The Mediterranean diet has been touted as being among the healthiest ways of eating since the 1950s when researchers first noticed that heart disease was uncommon in people from countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. In the years since, researchers found a Mediterranean diet reduces risks of stroke, heart disease, and certain types of cancer, and even promotes longevity. More recent studies have shown that eating a Mediterranean diet can also help with depression, dementia, and type 2 diabetes (1). Despite the numerous benefits associated with the Mediterranean diet, there are still some questions about its practicality, considering its primarily plant-based suggestions deviate from a typical American diet. Read on to lea...

In the early 1900s, Americans consumed about   18 pounds of butter   per person per year—and that doesn’t include the butterfat they got from whole milk, cream, and cheese. Today that number stands at about five pounds, a slight increase over the last few years from a low of four pounds per person per year. What happened? Why did butter consumption in the U.S. plummet? What happened is that America became electrified and stopped using candles. I am not kidding, this is the genesis of butter’s decline. An American company called Procter and Gamble had figured out a way to solidify liquid cottonseed oil—a waste product of the cotton industry—into a hard fat that could burn in candles. The process was called partial hydrogenation, which reconfigured the molecules in liquid oils into an unnatural type of fat called trans fats, which are hard at room temperature. Since their candle business was declining, Procter and Gamble decided to  promote partially hydrogenated ...