‘Weight Watchers’ twice as effective in weight loss as standard care: Study

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDSep 9 2011

A new study published this Thursday shows that 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.

This was a first study that directly compared a commercial weight-loss program with standard care by family doctors. Weight Watchers was found to be more than twice as effective. More people stuck to the Weight Watchers diet, they 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 (MRC) Human Nutrition Research Unit, who led the study said the results showed that Weight Watchers is “a robust intervention that is generalizable to other economically developed countries.” “This kind of research is important so that we can identify clinically effective interventions to treat obesity,” Jebb said.

The study, published in the Lancet medical journal, comes in the wake of research last month which said obesity is a global epidemic that is fast replacing tobacco as the single most important preventable cause of costly chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Worldwide, around 1.5 billion adults are overweight and another 0.5 billion are obese, with 170 million children classified as overweight or obese. Obesity takes up between 2 to 6 percent of healthcare costs in many countries.

The study 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. The 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 neighborhood.

Patients referred to Weight Watchers were also more than three times as likely to lose 10 percent or more of their initial body weight. Ultimately, 61% of the Weight Watchers group completed the 12 months; 54% of other doctor-treated groups did. Some 61 percent of patients in the Weight Watchers group lost at least 5 percent of their body weight, compared with 32 percent in the standard care group.

The average weight loss at 12 months was 5.1 kg for those using Weight Watchers versus 2.2 kg for those on standard care. For those who completed the full 12 months, average weight loss was 6.7 kg on Weight Watchers versus 3.3 kg on standard care.

The greater weight loss in the Weight Watchers group led to greater reductions in waist circumference and fat mass, too, the authors wrote, suggesting that the program would also reduce risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

In a commentary on the study, Kate Jolly and Paul Aveyard of the school of health and population sciences at Britain's Birmingham University said cost-effectiveness was a key factor in determining whether commercial programs like Weight Watchers become part of publicly funded health care. They added that “the low cost of these programs - at present about 50-60 for 12 weeks - makes the case for incorporation intuitively appealing.”

David Kirchhoff, CEO of Weight Watchers International said the Lancet study “proves that Weight Watchers is part of the solution to help transform the health of nations.” “There is a clear need for practical treatment solutions that are proven effective, affordable and scalable to have a population-wide impact,” he said in a statement.