News and Comment
Comment: Is standard diet advice wrong?
30 August 2011
Newspaper reports on 26th August 2011 called into question standard advice given by dieticians and GPs to people needing to lose weight (Daily Mirror, Independent). This follows a paper published in the Lancet which argues that the current guidance – to cut 500 calories a day for short-term weight loss – is less effective than reducing daily food intake by 100 calories to lose weight over several years.
Does this study represent a shift in the body of evidence on which current advice is based? We asked Lucy Jones, dietitian and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, to help us make sense of the story.
“The researchers make a good point here, that cutting calorie intake and losing weight does slow your body’s metabolism. This is one of the reasons why dietitians also advise increasing exercise - particularly resistance exercise and weights - because muscle is metabolically active, burning calories at a faster rate.
The advice to cut a small number of calories daily over a longer period of time is very sensible for people of a healthy weight. Previous studies suggest average weight gains of 0.5-1 pound of fat per year in adults throughout their lifetimes, which really adds up over the decades: a small 100 calorie change in daily dietary intake would stop this happening. However, cutting 100 calories a day is unrealistic for people who have 2 stone or more to lose: following this advice, losing just 2 stone would take nearly 9 years!
I don't think that these new findings will have a huge impact on frontline obesity advice but may offer a useful insight into prevention.”
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