Weight Loss Tips - The Facts and Myths

A substantial amount of research has been done on obesity. A search using the keyword "obesity" on PubMed (a popular search engine for articles in peer-reviewed medical journals) brought up almost 90,000 journal articles.

metabolic processes

With so many studies done, we know a lot about how the body handles different diets, about metabolic processes and the hormonal control of energy substrates, about the effect of exercise for weight loss down to the cellular level, about the links between obesity and its co-morbidities and even about the psychology of how to lose weight fast. It is daunting enough for doctors to digest all that information, more so for the general public.

To aid healthcare givers, original research articles are reviewed and graded according to various levels of evidence. Findings presented by better-quality papers are coalesced into guidelines, recommendations and position stands. An example is the American College of Sports Medicine's position stand on the "Appropriate Intervention Strategies for Weight Loss and Prevention of Weight Regain for Adults", which is one of the evidence-based papers this weight loss tips site draws from.

Why We Keep Falling for It

Despite the proliferation of such evidence-based information, people generally continue to fall for unsubstantiated claims made by advertisers in the mass media. There are a number of reasons why this happens.

1. Journal articles are mostly found in medical libraries, not on coffee tables or on television or in bus ads, newspapers and glossy magazines. If you have no access to medical journals, you have no direct access to the information they contain.
2. If the mass media reports any scientific discoveries, it tends to pick those with a sensational, "newsworthy" angle, thereby presenting a biased perspective. For example, a solitary finding that exercise failed to result in weight loss is more likely to be reported in the press than the hundreds of findings that showed otherwise.
3. Journals are not exactly the easiest things to read. The language is dry, the text is lengthy and there are hardly any colorful pictures. But look at an advertisement proclaiming the starch-blocking power of a natural product - the message is short and succinct and entirely "believable".