Poor rating for GP-led diet schemes

Diet schemes such as Weight Watchers and Slimming World are cheaper and far more effective than those run by the NHS, research shows.

A study in the British Medical Journal found that offering patients counselling in diet and fitness via GP surgeries or pharmacies was “ineffective”, as are programmes run by NHS food advisers and dieticians.

However, the researchers, from Birmingham University, said money would be better spent on encouraging people to attend classes run by commercial companies.

The new research involved 740 obese or overweight men and women recruited from one NHS trust in Birmingham.

They were divided into six groups and attended either Weight Watchers, Slimming World, Rosemary Conley, a group-based NHS programme run by advisers and dieticians called Size Down, one-to-one counselling sessions in GP surgeries or pharmacies.

All programmes saw people lose weight at 12 weeks – from an average of 1.37kg in the GP group to 4.43kg in the Weight Watchers group.

But the NHS programmes were found to be no better than a control group of people exercising at a local fitness centre at this point.

At the one year mark, all the programmes except the GP and pharmacy groups had resulted in “significant weight loss”.

Weight Watchers was the only programme to achieve significantly greater weight loss than the control group – and was the best attended group.

Compared to the NHS programmes, commercially-run ones meant people typically lost an extra 2.3kg.

The authors said: “Commercially provided weight management services are more effective and cheaper than primary care based services led by specially trained staff, which are ineffective.”