what they said (Hover the mouse cursor over underlined words for more info)

There's no free lunch with diet pills, new research concludes they work much better accompanied by the hard work of dieting and exercise.

The study backed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health is the biggest and best yet to demonstrate why obese people should adopt healthy habits, even if they take weight-loss drugs, researchers said.

"If you pit this medication against your favourite all-you-can- eat buffet, the ... buffet is going to win nine out of 10 times. So it's important you try to modify eating habits," advised Thomas Wadden, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist who led the study....

The original article can found in the Media Doctor archives.

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what we said (Hover the mouse cursor over underlined words for more info)

This article about a four-armed study of diet and exercise, with or without weight loss counseling or sibutramine, a weight-loss drug is well written and concludes the intuitive: that individual counseling, exercise and a weight-loss pill achieves the most in terms of weight reduction in a one-year period. This short article outlines the available evidence, but only in the briefest detail, and is without noticeable bias.

What is sketchy in this article is the harms associated with the weight loss drug, harms that are acknowledged, but not quantified. Also it would have been useful for the reader to know, in better detail, what the limitations of such a study are, the costs of the treatment being tested, (the cost of diet counseling and the drug) and whether the researchers may have had any conflicts of interest with the treatments in question.

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