Ripe for study: Complementary and alternative treatments for obesity[Review]

摘要

The increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity affecting children and adults of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds is a major public health problem. Both research and education are needed to meet this challenge. Prevention and treatment strategies are complex, require commitments to lifelong behavior changes in diet and physical activity, and are often unsuccessful in the long term. No single approach is likely to work for all people. Thus, overweight or obese individuals may experiment with unproven therapies commonly unbeknown to their health care provider. There is no documentation in the literature of what, how much, how often, and in what combinations overweight and obese individuals are using complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to reduce or maintain their weight. Allison and colleagues in their article Alternative Treatments for Weight Loss: A Critical Review, in the current issue of this journal, provide an interesting introduction to a little-understood topic. The article summarizes evidence from studies of highly variable quality regarding the safety and efficacy of 18 alternative therapies for obesity. In addition to these therapies, countless others exist, including dietary therapies (e.g., low-carbohydrate and ketogenic diets). As suggested by the authors, many of the studies of products and techniques that showed efficacy were animal studies or were human studies that were not published in peerreviewed journals and used substandard methodology. Of the published, peer-reviewed human studies cited by the authors, many were small, uncontrolled, poorly analyzed, and/or methodologically flawed. The evidence is still too small to draw firm conclusions about efficacy.