| Abstract: | Comments on an article titled Medicare's Search for Effective Obesity Treatments: Diets Are Not the Answer, by Mann et al (see record 2007-04834-008). The current author states that this article offers the following broad, sweeping conclusion: "The benefits of dieting are simply too small and the potential harms of dieting are too large for it to be recommended as a safe and effective treatment for obesity" (p. 230). This statement is provocative and unproven in the text. According to the laws of thermodynamics, which appear to apply everywhere in the known universe, anytime one consumes fewer Calories than one burns, there will be weight loss (Brooks, Fahey, & Baldwin, 2005, p. 22), despite the claims of some diet gurus and MDs (Cruise, 2005, p. 55; Katz, 2005). Any and every diet must work so long as a person voluntarily sustains a condition of fewer Calories in than out for a sufficient duration. Yet the article's conclusion denies this simple universal truth. This is a failing. Since the laws of thermodynamics are likely to remain operational on this planet for the foreseeable future and all episodes of fewer Calories in than out will always result in weight loss, the better approach to analyzing why diets fail is to look to expert diet advice as the primary cause. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
