When it comes to losing weight, nearly all of the people who try commercial programs are being fooled nearly all of the time, a national panel of experts concluded Wednesday.
After two days of testimony from leading obesity specialists, the panel said it had found no good evidence that any currently popular methods of
”voluntary” weight loss had much chance for long-term success. In fact, what evidence the panel could find suggested that 90 to 95 percent of dieters regain all or most of their hard-lost pounds within five years.
Furthermore, the panel heard ”disconcerting” evidence linking weight loss to increased death rates, even though obesity is known to raise the risk of several potentially fatal diseases, including high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.
But the panel said this finding might reflect the fact that people who are sick are more likely to lose weight or that people are choosing health-damaging methods to shed unwanted pounds. They said the finding should be studied further.
The panel was convened by the National Institutes of Health to arrive at a consensus about the safety and effectiveness of weight-control techniques.
The 13-member panel was headed by Dr. Suzanne Fletcher, editor of The Annals of Internal Medicine, a publication of the American College of Physicians.
The panel also expressed concern about the large numbers of ”normal weight” people, particularly young women, who were trying to lose weight and who might be damaging their health in the process.
Fletcher said in an interview that the pressures on Americans, and particularly women, to be thin have increased even as changes in the way people live have led more people, overall, to gain weight.
The panel considered only ”voluntary” measures to shed unwanted pounds, from appetite suppressants to medically supervised liquid diets, not such techniques as stomach surgery and fat suctioning, and it only addressed weight problems in adults, not children. It also did not address the effects of making permanent changes in one`s diet like eliminating meat or lowering fat consumption without reducing calories.
In a report issued Wednesday, the panel came down particularly hard on commercial programs and products, including appetite-controlling drugs, liquid meal replacements and programs that provide participants with special low-calorie meals.
Walter Glinsmann and his colleagues at the Food and Drug Administration asked producers of weight-loss products for data on the results of their programs.
They said they received and reviewed 75 pounds of documents most of which they described as scientifically inadequate. They did not name the companies they queried.
Few scientifically designed studies have been done to justify advertised claims even for short-term successes, and solid evidence for long-term weight maintenance is virtually nonexistent, the panel found.
