In October, 2010, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a paper entitled  Effect of a Free Prepared Meal and Incentivized Weight Loss Program onWeight Loss andWeight LossMaintenance in Obese and OverweightWomen, A Randomized Controlled Trial.  The publication of this paper in JAMA has to be counted as one of the greatest reseachaganda coups of all time.

The study was paid for by Jenny Craig.  The lead investigator was Cheryl L. Rock, PhD, RD, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine and a member of the Jenny Craig advisory board from 2003-2004.

The study recruited 442 women and randomly assigned them to three different groups.  Two of the groups were placed in the Jenny Craig program, one receiving telephone counseling and the other receiving counseling in Jenny Craig centers.  The third group was a control group (called usual care) which received minimal counseling and information packets.

The weight-loss results are in figure 2 on page 1807 and show that the intervention groups in the Jenny Craig program lost 8% to 10% of their weight during the first six months and only regained a small portion of that over the next 18 months.  The dropout rate for the two Jenny Craig groups was only about 8%, as shown in table 2 on page 1806.

The Jenny Craig program was free to all the participants in the intervention groups and was valued by the study as being worth $6,240 for free food plus $718 in program fees per person.

The study’s conclusion: the Jenny Craig program works, it works, it works!!!!!  And of course Jenny Craig flooded the world with its own self-congratulatory press release.

So did it work?  Well Duh.  Of course it worked.  The Jenny Craig program involves a calorie restricted diet, like all the weight-loss programs, and if someone sticks with any of them, they will continue to lose weight until they plateau.  And if you bribe people with about $7,000 worth of goodies, there’s a good likelihood that they will stick with the program, which obviously is why there was such a low dropout rate.

So now Jenny Craig can tout that they have been certified in an article published in JAMA that they are truly the greatest.  Great marketing coup.  But of course, any serious observer would immediately see that this is a marketing puff piece masquerading as a scientific article …. wouldn’t they?