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February 27, 2007

The ruse of dieting

This earlier post made the point that a sound understanding of nutritional principles and moderate eating habits are far more likely to result in proper personal weight management than relying on the dozens of fad diets that are available to the American consumer.

Along those lines, this Sandy Szwarc post reports on some rather startling statistics relating to one such diet program:

A study on one of the largest commercial weight-loss programs was just published in the International Journal of Obesity but has been ignored by the press. Understandably, a major media campaign and flurry of press releases have not trumpeted its findings.

Researchers at four major research centers across the country followed 60,164 adults enrolled in the Jenny Craig Platinum program in 2001-2002 to evaluate how long people were able to stick with this program and how much weight they lost.

They found that a quarter dropped out the first month, 42% after 3 months, 22% after 6 months, and only 6.6% were able to stick with the program for a year.

Unlike Kirstie Alley, the weight loss among people not being paid as celebrity spokespersons was considerably less notable. For a 200 pound woman able to keep with the program an entire year, according to this study, she would have lost half a pound a week....except fewer than 7 out of 100 were able to hang in for a full year. Hardly winning endorsement for the success and palatability of the program.

Read the entire post. Research is increasingly concluding that being overweight does not equate with increased mortality risk. Rather, physical activity and fitness have a far greater impact on lowering mortality risk than one's body mass index or waist measurements. Despite our cultural stereotypes of what “fit” looks like, research on obese adults has shown that about half rate highly fit on maximal exercise testing, which is not much different from slender people.

Thus, there is nothing wrong with wanting to lose a few pounds, but forget about the latest fad diet. Instead, understanding nutrition and modifying eating habits over the long-term is much more likely to produce the calorie deficit that will eventually result in permanent weight loss. But if the goal is to reduce mortality risk, the better bet is simply to increase the exercise and recreation regimen, and more exercise is not necessarily better — a couple of hours total spread over 3-5 days a week is fine.

Posted by Tom at February 27, 2007 4:17 AM |

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