Help with a research project, please

torregro

I was asked to do what seemed like a simple internet research project: Find out the source for the oft quoted "95% of people gain back the weight they lose". I have sourced this quote back to an original study in 1958 by Albert Stunkard, M.D., Philadelphia, and Mavis McLaren-Hume, M.S., New York. This poorly designed study of only 100 patients in New York, 97 of whom were women, went on to be cited more than 306 times by subsequent articles on obesity. These citations, despite the fact that the original study was not randomized, nor controlled, and the subjects were merely given diets to follow and not much else. The "successful patients" were those who lost and maintained between 20 and 40 pounds over a two year period. There were only 11 people left in the study at 2 years!

I have read abstracts online till my eyeballs are bleeding, and of course, one difficulty is lack of access to many/most of the ORIGINAL journal articles. It's not that plenty of research hasn't been done, but many scholarly articles have been cited in popular magazines and websites, and not always accurately. I cannot afford to pay for a subscription to JAMA, NEJM, etc, etc.
So.......I'm still seeing that "95% of people gain back the weight they lose" quoted used repeatedly, but can't find any even somewhat recent studies to back up that figure besides the original one in 1958.........................can anyone help?

amysj303

I read this recently:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?src=pm
And it seems to suggest that was the only study for this oft-quoted statistic.

dls06

Do you live in a city with a good library or University Hospital? They have what is called Periodical's. Ask the librarian. You could get them online too but sometime getting out into a different enviroment helps and people are there to help. Or did you try the Mayo Clinic online?

torregro

I read this recently:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?src=pm
And it seems to suggest that was the only study for this oft-quoted statistic.

This is a great New York Times article, and I'm definitely going to read the whole thing, but isn't it somewhat staggering to realize that this statistic genuinely seems to have originated in 1958 and never been questioned?

@pds06, my husband's a doctor and I'm hoping that he'll access some of these articles for me, but as I'm sure you can imagine, they sheer volume of studies is pretty overwhelming. It seems to me that if this is a GENUINE truth, it shouldn't be that hard to back up. Given my "google skills", I *thought* this was going to be a 15 minute project! ROFL

torregro

Wow.........hours later and I've read and checked dozens of fitness and exercise and nutrition sites. SO many so-call experts are perfectly content using the phrase "studies have shown.............." and then they back it up with absolutely nothing.
Seems like most of the writers are just perfectly content pulling quotes off of other sites.
I *have* found some citations from the Archives of Internal Medicine, the International Journal of Eating Disorders, and some university studies, which I will try to get pulled from the medical library, but have found little that was done in the past 5 years or so regarding this topic. If nothing else, it's been an enlightening experience regarding the vast "chain letter" that the internet has become.

As a side note, I found a letter from Albert Stunkard (creator of the original 1958 study of 100 people), written in a 1983 look back at the study . He remained unapologetic for his ridiculously poor study and in fact states, "I believe that this paper has been cited frequently because it documented for the first time the ineffectiveness of outpatient treatment for obesity, and thereby led to a more realistic assessment of the problem and of the means for coping with it." This statement, despite the fact that at the end of his two year study, there were only 11 people in the group.
Thanks for listening, time to hit the gym!