The 'recent' article referred to by Fat Fu in her blog is readily available in its entirety. All you have to do (and all she had to do) is click on PDF when she is in the Cambridge Journals Online site, which is exactly where her link takes you.
The Cambridge Journals Online site rarely - if ever - asks for payment for studies articles. I spend a lot of time in NCBI and whenever I see that I'm in Cambrige Journals Online, I pretty much know I have that article to save in a PDF.
She's a blogger. She's not even really a good blogger if I'm spending more time reading an article she didn't think was there for her but she's going to go ahead anyway and expand on her reasons for thinking WW is crap.
Here's the recent study she was referring to:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18042306
Click on the upper right hand corner icon which takes you to Cambridge Journals Online and then click on the PDF tab within the page.
NCBI is my favorite site and bloggers aren't even in the running when it comes to evaluating what is the 'science' behind dieting. I recently read a study by the guy who wrote the recent Atkins book and I had to smile when he reported the success rate for a low-carb group vs. the success rate for a low-fat diet, when both groups were compared during the maintenance phase of dieting.
Now, you have to understand that this guy Westman is a bit biased. Yeah, really! I was led to look him up in NCBI because Dr. Eades, who CAN be a flake sometimes, was on his own rant about the way an article appeared to be biased on a website used by cardiologists.
Westman actually stated this in the study, reporting the facts about the VLED - very low energy diet:
'Weight loss during the VLED was significant. Participants
assigned to the RC diet lost ~20% of their body
weight and the participants in the RF group lost ~19% of
their body weight. Change in weight during the VLED
was not different between groups (p > 0.05). Number of
shakes during the VLED for all participants was 34.8 ± 2.8
equaling approximately 2092 kJ per day.
During weight maintenance, the RC group non-significantly
increased body weight by ~2.8%. Likewise, the RF
group showed a non-significant change of ~3.0% in body
weight across weight maintenance; however, change in
body weight across the study was not different between
groups (p > 0.05). Similar trends were observed for BMI.'
Did you find your eyes starting to cross while reading that? It's the stuff of studies and why most people don't bother to read them much. What's interesting is that the low-carb dieters lost 20 percent of their body weight and the low-fat dieters lost 19 percent of their body weight - almost making you forget the fact that both groups ate exactly the same measured shakes at the beginning of the diet. There was absolutely no difference in what their intake was, dude. Umm, your point about making that distinction in weight loss was - what?
If Eades hadn't complained about the 'choice of words' that conveys bias, I wouldn't have been even paying attention to the difference between the low-carb and the low-fat dieters on the same exact liquid diet.
They lost the initial weight drinking liquid food supplements! All of them were the same. Guess how many calories these people drank each day for 3 months?
'During weight loss (months 1-3), a liquid VLED was utilized.
Liquid supplements (Health Management
Resources, Boston, MA) were taken at five different intervals
daily totaling ~2092 kJ/day. A vitamin and mineral
supplement was taken twice per day along with the liquid
supplements. As this was a weight-loss maintenance
study, a minimum weight loss of 10% of initial body
weight was required during VLED to progress to the
weight maintenance stage (months 4-12). Participants
reported their weekly liquid supplement total at each
group meeting. In addition, the VLED period was medically
managed by the study physician during its entire
duration.'
How many calories is that kJ (kiloJoules)? 500 calories a day for 3 months. OMG. They divided 500 calories into 5 feedings a day for 3 months and lived normal lives? I want THAT diet, thank you. Forget WW. Forget Atkins.
Gimme that diet but first take out my taste buds, please.
I love reading these studies.
Here's the study Westman worked on:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20515484
There are lots of such studies about diets. WW doesn't do so bad; it has been picked apart by various researchers who analyzed, along with other diets, every little bit. So if you come up with one study, there's always another. And so it goes.