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Alarms about the "obesity epidemic" abound. However, in the article by Manson et al,¹ the effectiveness of the proposals they advance for combating the "epidemic" is completely unproven, and they will sound unconvincing to clinicians exposed to the daily contact with patients, many of whom claim a desperate desire to reduce their weight but rarely make real progress and frequently relapse. "Crash diets," even when they result in massive weight loss, have notoriously resulted in relapses and minimal net weight loss over protracted periods. Practicing physicians have been involved in educating and orienting overweight patients for years and the results have not been impressive. What, then, are we to do?

Perhaps the first step we need to take toward finding effective measures in this field is to admit that at this time we do not know of any. Next, we should call for a moratorium on all presentations that contain . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Jonas Brachfeld, MD

Correspondence: Dr Brachfeld, Cardiology, Cooper Heart Institute, Three Cooper Plaza, Suite 311, Camden, NJ 08103 (jonas@brachfeld.org).

RELATED ARTICLE

The Escalating Pandemics of Obesity and Sedentary Lifestyle: A Call to Action for Clinicians
JoAnn E. Manson, Patrick J. Skerrett, Philip Greenland, and Theodore B. VanItallie
Arch Intern Med. 2004;164(3):249-258.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT