Weight Loss Pills, Products, Potions Finally Falter

Food and Drink reports that weight loss products are flagging under the weight of consumer skepticism. This is great news for the culture of health, as this points to the "growing up" of the diet consumer.

Pills, powders, and other quick fix potions are being disregarded by people who are through with their unfulfilled promises of rapid and easy weight loss.

The Food and Drink report whines that this decline is due to those 'bogus' weight loss supplements and food products, which are $3.7B dollar industry. It is hard to shed a tear for their exploitation of your hopes, and blatant use of come-hither advertising to skirt the need for long term lifestyle solutions.

From the article: There have been 29 new weight loss supplement products launched in the US from January to May 2008. Last year, GNPD recorded a total of 59 new weight loss supplement launches. The food category for weight loss recorded 167 new products in 2007 and 94 new products in the 2008 year to date.

Volatile salesAccording to Mintel, liquid and powder meal replacement drinks have dominated sales in the weight loss category, but this segment has also seen declined sales between 2004 and 2006, "reflecting the market's overall poor performance".

Why are consumers sour on the pills/products/potions? A huge factor are all the law suits, health problems, and the fact that they just don't work in the long term.

"The FTC has prosecuted over 100 such cases since 1990, and by all indications appears to be tightening its regulatory methods in the near future. Furthermore, consumer worry about physical side effects and dependency also mitigate sales."

When fat can be healthy

The New York Times reported today that there are some great ways to cook vegetables to maximize the vitamin content, and that eating them raw was not always as good for you. Here is the full article.

But the most interesting aspect was in an afterthought at the bottom of the article, concerning the problem of getting kids to eat their vegetables:

What accompanies the vegetables can also be important. Studies at Ohio State measured blood levels of subjects who ate servings of salsa and salads. When the salsa or salad was served with fat-rich avocados or full-fat salad dressing, the diners absorbed as much as 4 times more lycopene, 7 times more lutein and 18 times the beta carotene than those who had their vegetables plain or with low-fat dressing.

Fat can also improve the taste of vegetables, meaning that people will eat more of them. This month, The American Journal of Preventive Medicine reported on 1,500 teenagers interviewed in high school and about four years later on their eating habits. In the teenage years, many factors influenced the intake of fruits and vegetables. By the time the study subjects were 20, the sole factor that influenced fruit and vegetable consumption was taste. Young adults were not eating vegetables simply because they didn’t like the taste.

You get more out of your vegetables when they are accompanied by olive oil, a little butter, or avocado -- what a wonderful food!! Well of course it does, and what in the world is wrong with that? Nothing.

We simply need to eat those fabulous fats in control. This becomes is a key for our health and that of our kids. A wonderful take-home message of this passage is that food is not the bad guy. Food is not the enemy, any more.

Doctors Dissing Dairy Debatable

Our culture of health can be so misleading, especially when we hear reasonable.

This woman is Amy Lanou, who co-authored this article dissing the prospective role of dairy in diet . If you read the release, you'll see that they make it seem like she is an academic who is helping Dr. Barnard on their dairy research project.

However, she is actually a part of the same group -- the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine -- which is an extreme and aggressive organization.

When Robert Atkins tragically slipped, cracked his head, and ultimately diet, this group had the foul taste to publish an article stating that Dr. Atkins was obese upon his death and that his weight was due to his dietary approach. This was blatantly untrue ... not only was he not obese, but he simply gained water weight due to the edema that was caused by his fall.

But this group took advantage of his tragedy, twisted it to their own ideological ends, even when they (if they are indeed physicians) knew this to be false.

Now they are slamming dairy. Maybe they are right this time, but such inappropriate and unsavory behavior on their part makes anything they say suspect.