Can You Trust a Diet Plan?

Ray Kelly over at Worth the Weight has made an excellent post on how to check whether a diet is really as good as it seems…

I was particularly interested by his first point:

If the marketers say that it is backed by studies, find out a little about the research

This is something that is often badly overlooked, and many diets/programs/advertising get away with adding credibility with totally uncredible research. To the average consumer, the mere presence of academic/scientific research backing a product is enough to establish trust. One such case that springs to mind is that of the dairy industry and the claims made most recently during their Dr. Phil milk moustache campaign. According to the Physicians Comittee for Responsible Medicine and the Centre for Science in the Public Interest these claims that milk aids weight loss were based upon only three small published studies, and all were done by one researcher with a patent on the claim, who was funded by the dairy industry.

Fortunately, Ray’s post gives a solid, step-by-step approach to looking a little deeper into the claims made by health companies.