Oops! Study Accidentally Finds that Dieting Does Nothing For Your Heart

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The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) “Look AHEAD” trials -- whose major donors included Slimfast, Optifast, and Roche Pharmaceuticals (manufacturers of diet pills Xenical and Alli) -- was touted as the largest lifestyle-intervention study of people living with Type 2 Diabetes. It compared a control group with one that was subjected to strict calorie-restriction, frequent group sessions, physical activity and standard diabetes weight management counseling. The hypothesis was that the group with the intense “lifestyle changes: would have a reduction in negative cardiovascular outcomes. It was cancelled for “futility” because there were no significant differences in cardiovascular outcomes between groups.

Diets don’t work!? That is a huge conclusion that should have been all over the news when this study was cancelled. Were people too scared or making too much money off the diet world to say anything? It took three diet researchers a month to finally make the case in a Huffington Post op-ed.

According to the authors, one of the problems was that they used weight loss as a variable. The participants in the study maintained a 5 percent weight loss for 4 years. This was touted as proof that weight loss interventions were successful since, per the NIH, 5 percent is “an amount of weight loss that experts recommend to improve health.” But that recommendation rests on shaky, shaky ground.

The authors point out that, the “standard is not only remarkably lax but has no medical rationale.” The originals standards were based on the Metropolitan Insurance Tables and were medically arbitrary but aggressive. When they found dieters rarely reached those goals, and they didn’t have any more effective weight loss interventions to try, they simply changed the standard and recommended the same interventions. They just kept changing it until the goal seemed doable -- “despite having no scientifically-supported medical reason for doing so.” Last time I checked, moving the goal post and declaring victory was not a legitimate health strategy.

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