Endocrine Abstracts

Context: Developing reliable diet methods for facilitating long term weight loss outcomes my help to decrease obesity rates. It is then of paramount importance to investigate the potential benefits of the use of new dietetic approaches aiming at weight loss.

Objective: To determine the clinical efficacy of two different dieting methods.

Materials and methods: This was a randomized clinical study of dietary intervention. In total 40 healthy individuals, aged 32.5±8.58 y with mean BMI of 33.5±7.74 Kg/m², had been categorized in two intervention groups: intervention group which received a diet based on caloric substitiution of equivalent food choises (CSE) (20 participants) and intervention group which received a point-calorie equivalent system (PCS) (20 participants) for a 3-month period. The CSE diet included pre-planned caloric equivalent meals that the subject had to follow where as the PCS diet was a free food choice system with specific points attributed to every food and the subject had to receive an exact amount of points. The recommended energy consumption was 500 Kcal less than the predicted total energy expenditure (TEE) by the Mifflin – St. Jeor equitation (1990) for every participant in both dietetic approaches. The clinical efficacy of each method was assessed via weight loss (=weight day 0 – weight day 90) and % weight loss (=weight day 0 – weight day 90/weight day 0×100). Participant compliance was self evaluated as good, moderate or poor adherence.

Results: Both groups achieved weight loss compared to the baseline (mean initial weight for the CSE group and PCS group was 92.17±7.22 and 95.10±6.42 Kgr respectively). The CSE group had a mean % weight loss 6,60±4,60 while the the PCS group had a mean % weight loss 8.95±2.94 (P=0.02 and P=0.04 respectively). The actual weight loss in SCR group was 7,22±4.08 kgr where as in the PCS group was 8.38±3.36 kgr but these findings were not found to be statistical significant due to the variability of the initial weight of our sample.

Conclusion: These preliminary findings suggest that targeted nutritional interventions via use of a point-calorie equivalent system may have increased clinical efficacy in order to achieve better weight loss outcomes. Further studies need to be done on the level of compliance and the sustainability of the weight loss achieved between the two different dieting methods.