Diet Debate

http://www.medhelp.org/posts/Weight-Loss-Alternatives/hcg-diet-scam-warning/show/39674

http://dietscam.org/reports/hcg.shtml

Thanks Beth for expressing your experience with the bHCG diet. I would Iike to add a comment about "scientific evidence".

First, I do value clinic experience and the success that clinicians feel like they see over through their careers. Yet there is something to be said for scientific evidence backing up claims. You say that traditional weight loss programs (diet change exercise) work only about 95% of the time after one year. While this may be true, what about numbers for the bHCG diet?? Can you cite objective, peer-reviewed (published in a reputable journal) percentages for the bHCG diet after one year? I know you clinical experience tells you it works (seeing 1000s of patients), but can you point us to studies (not done by HCG manufacturers or providers)? One possible explanantion for your experience: the 1000s of patients that you see positively affected may be just the ones who come back to you because it worked for them. It is possible that all the people for whom the bHCG diet didn't work or had serious problems/side effects, they didn't come back to you. In that case, you'd never know how well it worked overall. In a formal scientific study, this is something you have to think about through "intention to treat analysis" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_to_treat_analysis). Clinical experience doesn't make doing this kind of analysis possible.

Second, I would make a point on why traditional exercise and diet don't work much of the time. Maintaining a healthy diet and exercising regularly is not easy and takes a lot of focus/motivation over years. The reason diet/exercise fail "95%" of the time is because people have trouble maintaining healthy diet and activity. Most inevitably "fall off the train" and eat unhealthily and aren't physically active enough. If you were able to maintain a healthy diet and enough exercise, you would lose weight. There is no question about that. Studies at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where people are essentially locked into a room (voluntarily) and only given certain amounts of food and compelled to exercise an exact amount everyday, show that diet change and exercise DO WORK. Of course I am not suggesting people locking themselves in a room; I am just showing that on a basic level, diet/activity do work. Further, other experiments show that after a very low calorie diet (like the bHCG diet without the bHCG), traditional diet/exercise can help people keep weight off long term (example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/12792622/). The question is whether you can maintain traditional diet/exercise.

In real life, the reasons that diet/exercise don't work are not simple. It isn't necessarily an individiual's fault alone. We live in a world that makes eating unhealthily and not exercising easy. There is fast food all around us, processed foods with lots of fat everywhere, and portion sizes (the size of our plates) are getting bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, we have built cities that depend on cars, make biking/walking difficult, and have increasingly starting working jobs that don't include physical activity. We also are trying to cram more and more into our everyday lives, making less time available to eat well and be physically active. This also makes life more stressful (which can increase eating). All this means that it is not that physical activity and a healthy diet don't work, it is that getting there is very hard. I believe that the answer is not things like the bHCG diet (or any other diet), but fundamentally changing the way we live. We need to change our cities/towns and be advocates for creating a society that pushes healthy lifestyles. That would mean Beth's "95%" failure rate would go drastically down. We need real and meaningful change in our lives, not simple and quick diet/drug fixes to our weight problems.

Also, I would add that there have been many studies showing the ineffectiveness of the HCG diet. This one, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/595585, from the 1970s, showed that HCG injection did no more for weight loss, measurements of circumference of parts of the body, or hunger control than injection of water (a placebo). A newer study from 1995, that combined a bunch of prior controlled trials, showed that HCG is not more effective than placebo in helping with weight loss. The message here is that eating a 500 calorie diet will make anyone lose weight. HCG scientifically hasn't been shown to help this process at all.