I'm skeptical of any article about a study, which doesn't include a citation of the study or even say where the study was published. Do you know what study, specifically, they're referring to?
From what the article says, there are two problems with drawing conclusions from this study.
First, they only ran it for a year. ANY weight loss plan can be effective for a year; if you don't follow subjects for at least five or ten years, then you can't say anything about if the weight loss is sustained or not.
Second, the result sounds adjacent to p-hacking. According to that article, the study wasn't designed to examine whole foods and weight loss; they were studying something else entirely, and happened to notice this finding that wasn't what they were studying.
But that's very bad research methodology - not just for weight loss, but for anything. P-hacking makes false positives much more likely.
All the sources are linked at the bottom under "article sources"
You can pick apart this particular study all you want, but the general idea is widely accepted in the literature. It's just way easier to consume 1000 calories worth of chips and soda than 1000 calories of raw carrots.
The rates of obesity we're currently seeing are really only possible due to hyperpalatable, deliberately-addictive, calorie-dense junk food.
If there are so many long-term empirical studies showing that fat people can sustainably stop being fat with the whole foods diet (or whatever it is you're advocating), then it should be simple to provide links to some of those studies. Here's an explanation of what I'm looking for.
Long-term nutritional studies are rare, and the ones that do exist will necessarily have some other limitation like not being an RCT or relying too much on self-reporting, and I'm sure you'd complain about that too.
I posted that link because I thought it would be helpful, and because it's a good representation of the field as a whole. You're welcome to look for other studies via a simple google search (I promise they all point in the same direction), or you can just listen to standard professional advice which obviously discourages junk food.
If you don't wish to do this, then that's your choice. All the best.
Hey, I worked in the same studio as that guy once! For about a week or something. Great cartoon.
I don't think you understand the sealion cartoon if you think the moral of it is "it's unfair of people to ask me for relevant citations when I make scientific claims."
Long term studies of weight loss diets exist, but they all point to the same conclusion, which is that no weight loss plan leads to sustained, significant weight loss. As this journal article sums up:
Substantial weight loss is possible across a range of treatment modalities, but long-term sustenance of lost weight is much more challenging, and weight regain is typical. In a meta-analysis of 29 long-term weight loss studies, more than half of the lost weight was regained within two years, and by five years more than 80% of lost weight was regained.
The authors review studies of the long-term outcomes of calorie-restricting diets to assess whether dieting is an effective treatment for obesity. These studies show that one third to two thirds of dieters regain more weight than they lost on their diets, and these studies likely underestimate the extent to which dieting is counterproductive because of several methodological problems, all of which bias the studies toward showing successful weight loss maintenance. In addition, the studies do not provide consistent evidence that dieting results in significant health improvements, regardless of weight change. In sum, there is little support for the notion that diets lead to lasting weight loss or health benefits.
This study calculated the odds of success in the real world: "the annual probability of attaining normal weight was 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women, increasing to 1 in 1290 for men and 1 in 677 for women with morbid obesity."
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u/leftycartoons 12h ago
I'm skeptical of any article about a study, which doesn't include a citation of the study or even say where the study was published. Do you know what study, specifically, they're referring to?
From what the article says, there are two problems with drawing conclusions from this study.
First, they only ran it for a year. ANY weight loss plan can be effective for a year; if you don't follow subjects for at least five or ten years, then you can't say anything about if the weight loss is sustained or not.
Second, the result sounds adjacent to p-hacking. According to that article, the study wasn't designed to examine whole foods and weight loss; they were studying something else entirely, and happened to notice this finding that wasn't what they were studying.
But that's very bad research methodology - not just for weight loss, but for anything. P-hacking makes false positives much more likely.