Weight loss – a futile exercise?
This is a conclusion from a large UK-based study conducted over 10 years. The analysis covered nearly 300,000 adults with data taken from the UK Clinical Practice Research Database, which is an anonymised database of longitudinal patient electronic medical records. Being the world’s largest primary care database and containing more than 7% of the UK population, the data is thought to be largely representative of the UK.
The study found that the chance of returning to a normal weight whilst being obese was 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women over a year. In morbidly obese patients these figures were 6 times worse in each group. Additionally, the research found that the probability of obese patients with BMI 30-34.9 (simple obesity) achieving a 5% weight reduction were 1 in 12 for men and 1 in 10 for women, however most had regained this weight and more after 5 years.
The study raised questions against the efficacy of current obesity treatments, saying that ‘current nonsurgical obesity treatments are failing’. It called for research to develop new and much more effective approaches to obesity management programmes that stop further weight gain and maintain weight loss. One of the authors of the paper, Professor Martin Gulliford commented that ‘the greatest opportunity for stemming the current obesity epidemic is in wider-reaching public health policies to prevent obesity in the population’.
