Commercial diet schemes better than doctors' help

COMMERCIAL weight-loss programmes such as Weight Watchers and Slimming World are more effective and cheaper than family doctor-based services led by specially trained staff, according to the findings of a study published on Friday.

With a global epidemic of obesity putting huge pressure on health budgets, researchers at Britain's Birmingham University wanted to compare the effectiveness of doctor-led weight loss programmes against several well-known commercial schemes.

The results suggest that while commercial schemes generally help people to lose weight, doctor-led programmes do not.

After 12 weeks, people in all the schemes studied had achieved significant weight loss, but the average loss ranged from the highest at 4.4kg with Weight Watchers down to 1.4kg on a programme led by primary care staff.

A control group who were not put on any specific diet programme but were given vouchers for free access to a gym for 12 weeks lost just as much weight on average as those using health clinic-based based weight-loss programmes.

After a year, statistically significant weight loss was recorded in all groups apart from the primary care programmes, but Weight Watchers was the only programme to achieve significantly greater weight loss than the control group.

Worldwide, around 1.5 billion adults are overweight and another 0.5 billion are obese, with 170 million children classified as overweight or obese.

Obesity takes up between two to six per cent of healthcare costs in many countries.

This latest research, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), comes in the wake of the first gold-standard randomised controlled trial of Weight Watchers last month which showed that the programme works far better than getting doctors to tell patients to lose weight.

Another study in the United States published in 2003 found that one year's free access to Weight Watchers resulted in an average weight reduction of 3.5 kg after one year.

In the BMJ study, which involved 740 obese and overweight men and women in Britain, several other commercial weight loss programmes were also studied including Slimming World, Rosemary Conley and a group-based dietetics programme as well as general practice one to one counselling and pharmacy-led one to one counselling.

The study also noted that at a cost of roughly £40 (around US$64) for 12 weeks, they are also relatively inexpensive, particularly when compared to the the billions of dollars spent on healthcare for overweight and obese people worldwide every year.

Reuters