Sixty Four Different Research Projects Evaluated For Weight Loss

it was published by the very prestigious and respected Cochrane Library

Dr Luttikhuis and colleagues from the Beatrix Children's Hospital in The Netherlands have recently conducted a clinical review of 64 lifestyle modifications and drug treatments which could have a bearing on preventing children from becoming overweight and obese. Their conclusions say that among other things it is important that parents take an active part in educating and training their children to eat healthily especially before they become teenagers. The researchers said that a change in family lifestyles along with proper counseling about the importance of diet and physical activity provided the most “significant and clinically meaningful” weight loss in children and teenagers in the short and long term.

This research is especially important as it was published by the very prestigious and respected Cochrane Library, which is an offshoot of The Cochrane Collaboration that the only produces extremely precise and rigorous reviews of medical research. Out of the 64 individual research projects seen by Doctor Luttikhuis and her colleagues twelve focused purely on exercise, six were concerned with diet alone, 36 of them studied the treatment of behaviour and ten looked at weight loss drugs.  In all over 5,000 children took part in the different studies.

Doctor Luttikhuis explained that while many of the studies did produce clinically meaningful weight loss it was not always possible to conclusively evaluate the quality of individual weight loss methods. Because many of the studies were conducted in different ways they could not conclusively say what the best way to lose weight was except that “behavioural lifestyle interventions” definitely had a big impact on helping children lose weight and more importantly to maintain weight loss in the long term.

The researchers also looked at studies which made use of the appetite suppressant medication Reductil and also the weight loss medication Xenical. They said that the both these drugs showed “significant weight loss benefits” but could not to ascertain which one was most effective compared to the other.