A 25 year review of the effectiveness of caloric restrictive diets in sustaining long term weight loss reports a 97% failure rate. So why are weight loss diets still the main therapeutic modality of physicians and dietitians?
Caloric-restrictive diets have been prescribed for obesity since the times of Hippocrates, and still today is the most prescribed therapeutic modality by front line healthcare providers. But yet dieting has 97% failure rate measured over 5-7 year follow periods
A review by Traci Mann and colleagues found in a 25 retrospective review of diets, that between 33-67% of dieters gain back more weight than they had lost
Such a failure in pharmaceutical drugs would not pass FDA review, and therefore not be approved as a medical therapy.
Watch the Video Review Produced by St-Jude Nutrition Medical Communications
This video provides strong evidence that caloric restrictions for weight loss are ineffective for long term weight management. Taken from OBESITY IN AMERICA A NATIONAL CRISIS. Distributed by Films for the Humanities and Sciences http://www.films.com/id/24027. This analysis confirms that the field of medicine and dietetics persists in prescribing an ineffective therapy. Admittedly, medical associations are now advocating for the permanent use of appetite suppressant, rather than diets for both children and adults because most physicians see diet failures as the result of patient non-compliance. It is also worrisome that bariatric surgery is on the rise for adults and more recently for adolescents. But none of the surgeons who do these surgical modifications of the stomach and intestine are asking how these adolescent and adults got to be so disproportionately over fat in the first place.
INSATIABLE drills down deep beneath the surface to where no medical doctor or dietitian wants to go. First, they have no time to explore the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the patient. Frankly, they are trained in these areas and they don't really care. Doctor treat visible and measurable organic diseases; they do a real good job at that, and none of us really want them to change their therapeutic focus. As for dietitians, their primary therapeutic care package is dieting despite mounting evidence that this approach does not work. Somebody better find an alternative therapeutic strategy...and quick.