July 8, 2008
Kaiser Permanente Study Finds Keeping Food Diaries Doubles Weight Loss
Nearly 70% of participants lost enough weight to lower health risks
(PORTLAND, Ore.)—Everyone knows that eating less and exercising more will help you
lose weight. The hard part is figuring out how to do that consistently. A new study
from Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research finds that one of the most important
things you can do is write down what you eat.
“The more food records people kept, the more weight they lost,” says Jack Hollis
PhD, a researcher at KPCHR and lead author of the study published in the August
issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. “Those who kept daily food
records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records. It seems that the
simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.”
Funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes
of Health, the study is one of the largest and longest weight-loss maintenance trials
ever conducted. It is also one of the few trials to recruit a large percentage of
African Americans as study participants (44 percent). African Americans have a higher
risk of conditions that are aggravated by being overweight, including diabetes and heart disease.
In addition to keeping food diaries, study participants were asked to follow the
Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension or (DASH) diet which is high in fruits and
vegetables and low in fat, attend weekly group sessions and exercise at moderate
intensity levels for at least 30 minutes a day. After six months, the average weight
loss among the nearly 1,700 participants was 13 pounds. More than two-thirds of
the participants (69%) lost at least 9 pounds, enough to lower their health risks
and qualify for the second phase of the study, which lasted 30 months and tested
strategies for maintaining the weight loss.
“More than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. If we all lost just
9 pounds, as most people in this study did, we would see vast decreases in hypertension,
high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and stroke,” says Victor Stevens, PhD,
study co-author and KPCHR investigator. In an earlier study, Stevens found that
losing as few as five pounds can reduce by 20 % the risk of developing high blood
pressure.
“Every day I hear patients say they can’t lose weight. This study shows that most
people can lose weight if they have the right tools and support,” says Keith Bachman,
MD, a Kaiser Permanente internist and weight management specialist. “Keeping a food
diary doesn’t have to be a formal thing. Just the act of scribbling down what you
eat on a Post-It note, sending yourself e-mails tallying each meal, or sending yourself
a text message will suffice. It’s the process of reflecting on what we eat that
helps us become aware of our habits, and hopefully change our behavior.”
Dr. Bachman helped to develop Kaiser Permanente’s Weight Management Initiative which
recommends food journaling as a strategy for losing weight. Founded in 2002, the
Weight Management Initiative unites clinicians, researchers, insurers, and policymakers
to identify practical, effective, non-surgical approaches for the prevention and
treatment of overweight and obesity. (http://www.kpcmi.org/weight-management/index.html)
The study was also conducted at Duke University Medical Center, Pennington Biomedical
Research Center and Johns Hopkins University. In addition to Hollis and Stevens,
the Kaiser Permanente research team included William M. Vollmer, Ph.D.; Cristina
M. Gullion, Ph.D.; Kristine Funk, M.S. and Daniel Laferriere, MR, Other study co-authors
included Phillip J. Brantley, Ph.D. and Catherine M. Champagne, Ph.D. at Pennington;
Jamy D. Ard, MD at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; Thomas P. Erlinger,
MD, MPH at University of Texas; Lawrence J. Appel, M.D. and Arlene Dalcin at Johns
Hopkins, Pao-Hwa Lin Ph.D. and Laura P. Svetkey, MD at Duke University; Carmen Samuel-Hodge,
Ph.D from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Catherine M. Loria,
Ph.D. at The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and National Institutes of
Health, which funded the study.
Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research, founded in 1964, is a non-profit
research institution whose mission is advancing knowledge to improve health. It
has research sites in Portland OR; Honolulu, HI; and Atlanta, GA.
For more infomation contact:
Mary Sawyers,
(503) 335-6602, Mary.A.Sawyers@kpchr.org
or
Gail Mathabane, (503) 758-9024, Gail.Mathabane@kpchr.org