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ARTICLES:
Patricia van den Berg, Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, Peter J. Hannan, and Jess Haines
Is Dieting Advice From Magazines Helpful or Harmful? Five-Year Associations With Weight-Control Behaviors and Psychological Outcomes in Adolescents
Pediatrics 2007; 119: e30-e37 [Abstract] [Full text] [PDF]
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[Read P3R] Could weight gain not be responsible?
Yoni Freedhoff   (3 January 2007)

Could weight gain not be responsible? 3 January 2007
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Yoni Freedhoff,
Physician
Bariatric Medical Institute

Send letter to journal:
Re: Could weight gain not be responsible?

drfreedhoff{at}bmimedical.ca Yoni Freedhoff

Teenage years are hard to say the least. Given societal role models for teenage girls, gaining weight would almost certainly lead many teenagers to look for help. Where would they look for help? They'd look at what they might well already have at hand - magazines and the diet/weight loss articles therein.

Frankly the omission of a control for weight or BMI at the end of the study is a staggering one. I think it is extremely likely that those girls who may have gained more weight during the five years of the study would in turn be the ones to be more likely to read diet articles, be more likely to engage in unhealthy eating behaviors and have more difficulties with their body images.

Therefore I feel the study is misleading as it does not exclude the very real possibility that in fact it's weight that leads to not only the reading of the articles, but also to the disordered eating behaviours and attitudes rather than the other way around.

Conflict of Interest:

None declared