Althought not notorious for rating things such as diets, Consumer deemed Weight Watchers support group meetings and Slim-Fast's shakes as an alternative to cooking the best formulas to eliminating unwanted weight.
The ratings were based on pounds lost, nutrition, how easy the diet was to follow, and dropout rates after six months and a year. Though everyone seems to be practicing the low-carb mantre, the highest marks went to Weight Watchers, which uses weekly meetings to reinforce its simple philosophy - eat less and exercise more. After a year, its followers were far more likely to stick with the plan. Weight Watchers did not, however, earn the strongest scores on weight loss. Second-ranked Slim-Fast took that prize with its plan replacing parts of two meals a day with shakes and bars. Atkins, the low-carb culprit, got good scores for short-term weight loss, but landed at the bottom of the ratings because of poor marks on retention and nutrition.
The report, released in the magazine's June issue, said the Atkins diet calls for too much fat and saturated fat, too few fruits, too little fiber and "might have a negative effect on some dieters' health." Colette Heimowitz, vice president of education and research at Atkins Nutritionals, criticized the study, saying it focused only on Atkins' weight-loss components, ignoring its more flexible weight maintenance stages. The magazine's conclusions are based on a review of published clinical research on each diet, and a nutrient and calorie analysis of a week's worth of menus, including how closely they follow federal dietary guidelines. According to the magazine, four other programs, Internet-based eDiets, Jenny Craig, South Beach and Volumetrics, were included in the review, but not ranked because not enough independent clinical studies had been done on them to allow comparison.
