Weight Watchers twice as effective as doctor-prescribed diets, study claims

OVERWEIGHT patients told by their doctors to go to Weight Watchers lose around twice as much weight as people receiving standard weight loss care over 12 months, according to a study.

In the first randomised controlled trial to directly compare a commercial weight-loss programme with standard care by family doctors, Weight Watchers was more than twice as effective.

More people stuck to the Weight Watchers diet, lost more weight and fat mass, and also shaved more off their waist measurements than those assigned to standard care.

Susan Jebb of Britain’s Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research Unit, who led the study, said the results showed Weight Watchers is “a robust intervention that is generalisable to other economically developed countries”.

“This kind of research is important so that we can identify clinically effective interventions to treat obesity,” she said.

The study comes in the wake of research last month which said obesity is a global epidemic that is replacing tobacco as the single most important preventable cause of chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

About 1.5 billion adults are overweight and 500 million more are obese, with 170m children overweight or obese.

In the study, which was funded by Weight Watchers International but run as an investigator-led trial with all data collection and analysis conducted by the independent research team, researchers assessed 772 overweight and obese adults in Australia, Germany and Britain.

Patients were randomly assigned to receive either 12 months of standard care as usually offered by the primary care team, or referred to and given a 12-month free membership for a Weight Watchers group in their neighbourhood.

Patients referred to Weight Watchers were more than three times as likely to lose 10% or more of their initial body weight.

The average weight loss at 12 months was 5.1kg (11.2 lbs) for those using Weight Watchers versus 2.2kg for those on standard care.

For those surveyed who completed the full 12 months, average weight loss was 6.7kg on Weight Watchers versus 3.3kg on standard care.