Some 68% of the country is either overweight or obese, but there’s not much clinical evidence on the best way to lose weight, outside of research on bariatric surgery. (True, “Eat less and exercise more” is great advice if you can manage to follow it, but public-health authorities have repeated that line until they’re blue in the face and as a population we’ve only gotten fatter.)
Research presented over the weekend at the annual meeting of the Obesity Society and published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests a few specific strategies that may help — namely making a commercial weight-loss program, including packaged foods, free.
In the study, some 442 overweight or obese women were randomly assigned to the Jenny Craig weight-loss program with once-weekly face-to-face counseling sessions, to the same program with weekly phone counseling or to a control group that received “usual care,” i.e. publicly available materials on diet and exercise. The two groups using the program also got $25 payments for every 6-month clinic visit to assess weight and other measurements. Jenny Craig, a unit of Nestl?, funded the research.
After two years, the in-person group had lost an average of 16.3 pounds, the phone group lost 13.6 pounds and the control group lost 4.4 pounds.
In the editorial accompanying the study, Rena Wing, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, writes the results suggest that if commercial weight-loss programs such as Jenny Craig were free to those who want to lose weight, “both retention and average weight loss outcomes might be far better than when participants must pay for these programs.” The program costs about $1,600 for 12 weeks, she writes. Compare that to the $19,000 to $29,000 cost of bariatric surgery, which is often reimbursed by insurers.
(The countervailing theory is that people value things more when they pay for them, and that the mere act of ponying up $1,600 for three months of a diet program may make you take it more seriously.)
Wing calls for cost-effectiveness studies, conducted by researchers without any financial ties to the companies involved, that compare different commercial programs with each other. She also notes that more research on weight loss maintenance is needed, since the average weight loss was greater at one year than at the end of the study.
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