What's Wrong With The Southern Diet? Not Much That Can't Be Fixed Researchers Say

Can keeping the fried chicken but ditching the sweet tea make the traditional Southern diet more healthful?

Researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill have found benefits of making such tweaks to the diet as a way of losing weight without losing the cuisine that so many people in the Tar Heel state grew up on and continue to enjoy.

It's called the Med-South diet. The idea is to combine the benefits of a Mediterranean diet with the way that Southern foods are often prepared.

The Mediterranean diet is known for its preference of lean meats such as fish over red meat, generous use of vegetables and fruits, healthy plant-based fats, and nuts.

Thomas Keyserling is a professor of medicine at UNC who has researched the diet. He says participants in a Lenoir County pilot program have been able to lose weight by making only a few small changes to their diet. It helps that those dieters have been able to continue eating foods they know and enjoy.

He says the results have been backed by scientific studies.

The federal National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute recently awarded the researchers a nearly $4-million grant to expand their study. 

North Carolina is part of what's known as “the stroke belt” — an area of the Southeast where the mortality rate from strokes is elevated compared to the rest of the country.

Diet may play a role. Keyserling points to refined carbohydrates as a possible culprit.

“Sugar-sweetened beverages are a major component of the diet across the country, but maybe more so in certain regions of the country and certain regions of North Carolina,” he says.

They're also found in white bread, white rice, bakery goods, and sweets, and other refined products packaged to have a long shelf life.

“Those are probably components of the diet that are considered most problematic,” he says.

He says one of the misunderstandings about Southern foods is that fat is what makes it unhealthy.

There was some truth to that when transfats were a large part of how things were fried. Over the years, the dangers from transfats have led to them being largely replaced by healthier oils.  

That means as long as your fried chicken is cooked in a healthy, plant-based oil like peanut oil, it's okay to have, skin and all.

“Eat it,” Keyserling says.    

Including healthy fats will make people feel less deprived, which means they're more likely to stay on the diet, Keyserling says. And some products that are marketed as less fat can be worse because they sometimes make up the flavor with sugary corn syrup.

“What we now appreciate through various lines of scientific evidence is that fat consumption — especially high-quality fat consumption — is important for a healthful diet,” he says.