Diets Dont Work

Diets Don’t Work Review:

Overview

A common aphorism quoted by both those who oppose diets, such as fat acceptance advocates, as well as those who tout their new diet as the solution to all other diets that have come before, is that “Diets don’t work,” that “95 percent of diets fail.” The origins of these claims is put down to “studies” or “statistics,” and left at that.

How is diet defined? What constitutes working or not working? And who did these studies or collected these statistics? These questions are left unanswered, other than that some define working as maintain an unstated amount of the weight loss for five years.

The New York Times Investigation

In 1999 Jane Fritsch of the New York Times set out to try to track down the origins of the 95 percent That 95 percent figure claim. Dr. Thomas Wadden of the University of Pennsylvania summed up what she discovered: “That 95 percent figure has become clinical lore. it’s part of the mythology of obesity.”

The National Weight Control Registry, coordinated at the University of Colorado, is a project whose aim is to identify long term dieters and analyze what they have done to maintain their weight loss. At the time of her article the Registry had identify 2,000 long term success stories (currently they are tracking 5,000 successful dieters). Not only have people managed to lose and keep weight off, but half of them did so without following a formal diet, cooking up their own personalized, ad hoc system. And most of them had not heard that maintaining weight loss was “impossible,” so their ignorance served them well.

The Stunkard McLaren-Hume Study

But what about those “studies” and “statistics”? Dr. Kelly D. Brownell of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity did manage to track the 95 percent statistic down. The studies turn out to be a single study, a clinical study of 100 patients treated for obesity at a nutrition clinic at New York Hospital in the 1950s. The conclusions of the paper’s authors, Dr. Albert Stunkard and Mavis McLaren-Hume, was that “Most obese persons will not stay in treatment, most will not lose weight, and of those who do lose weight, most will regain it.”

This study does not stand up to scrutiny. In addition to the small sample, the patients at New York Hospital in the 1950s were simply handed a diet plan and sent home. So the conclusions can hardly be applied to obesity treatments of the 21 century.

Of course, there have been other clinical studies which have reached varying results, but none of the sort that can be generalize to the overall population of the obese. In particular, binge eating is thought to be more common among those who end up in clinics where such studies are done. But many of these studies were looked at by a group of psychologists and psychology researchers in an April 2007 paper, which reached a rather more pessimisted conclusion that the National Weight Control Registry have.