Arkansas is the most over weight state in the U.S. A couple of weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times carried a story about all the things that the state had done to combat the problem. I would have endorsed every one of them. Sorry to say, none of them worked. See if you can find the article (I couldn't find it online) and it was entitled, "The Arkansas Experiment......................."
Today's New York Times has a report on the results of a clutch of commercial weight loss programs. The results are not encouraging. When you need to lose 50 or 100 pounds, which most over weight people need to do, these results are not happy news.
Taking Measure of Weight-Loss Plans, and the Studies of Them
By TARA PARKER-POPEConsumer Reports, famous for its ratings of appliances and cars, has jumped into the diet wars.
In an article in its June issue, published last week, the magazine declared Jenny Craig the winner among several commercial weight-loss plans, beating out Slim-Fast, Weight Watchers, the Zone fast weight-loss plan, Dr. Dean Ornish’s “Eat More, Weigh Less” diet, the Atkins diet and Nutrisystem.
Consumer Reports said it relied on the available scientific evidence. But readers who try to follow its advice will discover that a Jenny Craig diet in the real world is far different from the one studied for the article.
Indeed, the findings, which generated widespread news coverage, highlight just how little weight the participants in commercial diet plans manage to lose, despite considerable expense in money and time.
The magazine said Jenny Craig had “the edge over the other big names” on the basis of a two-year study published last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association. In that study, 92 percent of 442 overweight and obese women stuck with the program for two years, which Consumer Reports called a “remarkable level of adherence.” They lost an average of about 16 pounds.
But the magazine failed to report that the women in the study didn’t pay a dime to sign up for the Jenny Craig program. Unlike real Jenny Craig customers, they received $6,600 worth of membership fees and food during the two-year study.
Today, someone who wanted to spend two years on the program would pay about $400 in registration fees and about $100 a week for packaged meals during the first several months of the plan. Later in the program, dieters are encouraged to make the transition to their own foods, but typically still continue to pay for some packaged Jenny Craig foods.
The study wasn’t designed to test the success of Jenny Craig in the real world, but to determine whether a free prepared-meal program could help people lose weight and keep it off.
Rena R. Wing, director of the Brown Medical School weight control and diabetes research center, wrote an editorial in JAMA noting that the study results were most likely influenced by the fact that the diet program was free.
“An important question is whether an obese individual enrolling in this or a similar structured commercial weight-loss program will achieve similar results,” she wrote. “Most likely, the answer is no.”
Nancy Metcalf, senior program editor for Consumer Reports, said it was the nature of medical research to pay participants, and she defended the magazine’s reliance on a study that paid for the dieters’ foods. She noted that studies of Weight Watchers also paid for program fees, although free food was not provided.
“I don’t think it’s normal for clinical trials to make people pay to be in the trial,” she said. “Would I like it better if there was a lot more independent research on diets? I would.”
While praising the dieters’ level of adherence to Jenny Craig, Consumer Reports ignored a 2007 study that showed just the opposite. Researchers led by the Cooper Institute in Dallas tracked 60,164 men and women enrolled in the Jenny Craig Platinum program between May 2001 and May 2002. Only 3 out of 4 dieters stuck with the program for a month; by 13 weeks, 58 percent had dropped out, and after a year the dropout rate was 93 percent. Those who stuck with the program for at least three months did lose about 8 percent of their body weight, but there is no long-term data on whether they kept it off.
Patti Larchet, chief executive of Jenny Craig, said the free food received by participants in the JAMA study needed to be considered in context.
“The hardest part of a weight-loss clinical trial, whether they get the product or not, is they have to adhere to the program,” she said. “Our adherence and weight loss was by far the best. In this study, the same as in the real world, people do transition off of our food.”
But Karen Miller-Kovach, chief science officer for Weight Watchers, said Consumer Reports appeared to misconstrue the JAMA study, whose stated objective was not to study real-world retention rates on the Jenny Craig plan but to determine whether a free, structured diet program could help people lose weight.
“We thought they didn’t do a particularly good job of putting the end results of that study into context for consumers,” Ms. Miller-Kovach said, adding, “A real-life consumer is not going to have the experience the study participants did.”
Weight Watchers has conducted dozens of published studies of its program. In those studies, dieters are given free access to meetings, but no free food. In the real world, Weight Watchers participants can often join the program for no charge but pay about $14 a week to attend meetings.
Last year, Weight Watchers published an analysis of all dieters who joined the program in Germany during 2009. Among those who attended at least two weekly meetings, the average length of participation was 17 weeks and the average loss about 12 pounds. About 20 percent of participants achieved weight loss of 10 percent or more, according to the report, published in Obesity Facts.
Ms. Metcalf of Consumer Reports said a diet was a “much more personal thing” than an appliance purchase and that consumers would choose among the ranked diets depending on their needs and priorities.
“This is just a starting point,” she said. “I wish all the diets that put themselves out there before the public would do what these diets have done, which is subject themselves to scientific evaluation.”
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