New Insights on How Some Individuals with Obesity can Lose Weight-and Keep It Off
For decades, there's been a persistent one-size-fits-all approach to treating obesity: Embrace a diet that's low in calories. Yet evidence shows that this diet-focused approach simply doesn't work for a subset of adults with obesity who are adherent in a clinical weight management program.
Now, compelling new research published in the journal eBioMedicine challenges the deeply ingrained idea that diet alone should be adequate for everyone seeking to shed pounds. The important conclusions could significantly improve public health by guiding the advent of personalized treatment plans that will help individuals with difficult-to-treat obesity lose weight -and keep it off. Understanding distinct obesity phenotypes is key to teasing out insights into individual variations in weight loss. And for "diet-resistant" obesity-patients in the bottom 20% for rate of weight loss following a low-calorie diet-exercise training should be prioritized, as it decreases fat mass and boosts skeletal muscle metabolism.
Dr. Robert Dent, founder of the Ottawa Hospital's weight management clinic and an endocrinologist at uOttawa, described the findings as the "crowning glory" of the research work done alongside Drs. Harper and McPherson over two decades. The three partners have collaborated on numerous projects over the years, helping to unlock mysteries of mitochondrial energetics and the genetic predictors of weight loss.
"If you look at a large group of people who are overweight and trying to lose weight, they don't respond to exercise very much. But now we've found that people in this [diet-resistant] obesity phenotype really do," Dr. Dent says. "What the findings are telling us is that when we see individuals with obesity who don't respond to dietary restriction, they should be shunted over to physical activity."
The study has the potential to help reshape the science of weight-loss programs so they can be customized for individual patients. And since the study opens up various exciting research possibilities at the molecular level, the team is already recruiting for a study with a larger sample size.
