Evaluating Diet Programs and Products: Introduction
Why is it that even with all the diet books, various diet programs and products, support groups, “fat camps,” surgery options, medications and exercise equipment available to Americans is the rate of overweight people continuing to climb? The percentage of Americans who state that they are “dieting” actually increased from twenty-four percent in 1996 to thirty-three percent in 2004. It seems that weight is being lost, but long term effectiveness of these programs is where the problem area is. People are gaining the weight back or even more when they go off their “dieting” program. Do some of these “dieting” plans actually make the problems worse? The component of healthy weight management over the human life span and methods to evaluate the various programs and products is covered in this unit.