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"Yo-yo dieting" not tied to early death: study

Reuters Health News, 2012

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Despite earlier concerns, dieters who repeatedly lose weight and then gain it back aren't at higher risk of early death than people who don't "yo-yo diet," according to a new report.
About two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, and many are trying to shed the extra pounds.
The health effects of such weight cycling, also called yo-yo dieting, are a matter of controversy.
But the majority of that research failed to differentiate between intentional weight loss and weight loss due to disease such as cancer, researchers write in the new report.
In the current work, nearly 56,000 men and more than 66,000 women answered questions about how often they had intentionally lost 10 or more pounds and later regained the weight.
A total of 42 percent of men and nearly 57 percent of women in the study reported intentionally losing and then regaining at least 10 pounds one or more times in their life.
Among women whose weight yo-yoed the most -- 20 times or more -- 16 percent died over the study, compared to 15 percent of those who said their weight never cycled due to dieting.
But as it turned out, participants whose weight cycled the most were also more likely to be heavy 10 years prior to the start of the study, which could raise their risk of death.
When the researchers accounted for that, as well as health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure and smoking, the gaps in death rates disappeared.
"Our study shows that the act of weight cycling itself does not increase your risk of premature death," Victoria Stevens of the American Cancer Society in Atlanta told Reuters Health.
"While weight cycling may not kill you any sooner, yo-yo dieting is still not good for a whole lot of other reasons," Judy Caplan, a dietician in private practice in Virginia, told Reuters Health.