If you sell a product or service, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could get some prestigious researchers to write a scientific paper proclaiming that what you do works like a charm and that you are the greatest?  And wouldn’t it be even better if that paper could get published in a really prestigious, peer-reviewed journal such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) or Lancet, which is the British equivalent of JAMA.

Well if you are Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers, it turns out that you can do exactly that.  We call it researchaganda (researchaganda = research used as marketing propaganda).  The weight-loss industry is particularly adept at using researchaganda as part of its overall marketing effort.  Whether it is the constant general drumbeat of “obesity is a disease” research, or research more specifically focused on products and services such as hari-kari surgery (bariatric surgery) or weight-loss programs, researchaganda is an ideal promotional tool.  Instead of blowing your own horn, you have researchers publishing in respected journals blowing your horn for you.

Who are the people who conduct this kind of research? No, for the most part they aren’t flacks bought and paid for by the Weight Loss Industry, even though it is true that many studies are funded by Weight Loss Industry companies, some researchers have conflicts of interest because they give paid speeches at Weight Loss Industry conferences, and some do consulting for companies in the Weight Loss Industry. However, on the whole, they are usually well meaning researchers. So why do they do it?

Perhaps because it’s popular and in fashion. And of course, there is lots of funding available for obesity studies. Maybe they have simply bought into the fat is bad mythos created by the Weight Loss Industry. And it’s also conceivable that some of them are simply fatistas. That is they have a deep-seated, visceral negative reaction to how heavy people look.

But regardless of the reasons, they churn out study after study that mainly function as marketing and branding tools for the Weight Loss Industry.

In this series of blog posts we will look at researchaganda in the weight loss program arena.   We will see what Jenny Craig did to blow the field away with a paper published in JAMA, how Consumer Reports was totally bamboozled by that paper and bought the Jenny Craig story hook, line and sinker, how Jenny Craig managed to spin a different, previous negative research report to its advantage, and what Weight Watchers has done in just the last few weeks to strike back.