Apps May Be the Solution To Global Obesity Epidemic

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Published research by Dr. Pacanowski and Dr. David Levitsky, of Cornell University has determined that phone apps used to track food and weight are helping people lose more weight.


People have been tracking their food intake for centuries in an effort to lose weight and keep it off. Now, a growing number of popular, modern smartphone apps are making it easier for people to record their consumption and weight, and successfully lose unwanted pounds.


Obesity is an epidemic in the U.S. – with the American Heart Association advising medical communities to treat it as a disease. Excess weight is associated with a large number of debilitating and deadly conditions – prompting global attention and escalated efforts to reduce the statistics of obesity worldwide. New technology may help provide people with the tools needed to help overcome this growing problem.


Pioneering smart applications, such as the most popular – MyFitnessPal and Lose It – hope to change the dismal looking situation, and have already signed upwards of 100 million users. Dr. Carly Pacanowski, of the National Institutes of Health, explains ways the apps can be beneficial for weight loss, “It’s a preventative daily strategy that always stays with you. Over time, it provides you a lot of interesting information. It lets people be more in the driver’s seat with regards to their health.”


Dr. Pacanowski stresses that research has shown that keeping track of what is consumed, as well as weighing regularly, are successful strategies for losing weight and keeping it off. She adds that learning how someone’s environment and behaviors affect their health – through self-tracking – are also helpful and positive solutions to the challenge of reducing obesity, saying it forces people to connect how food affects weight.


In an analysis by smart apps Withings and MyfitnessPal, researchers found that tracking food and weight at least once every three days helped users lose an average of eight pounds over a year, in comparison to users who were not as diligent – and lost only one pound in the same time period.


Published research by Dr. Pacanowski and Dr. David Levitsky, of Cornell University, concluded, “Self-weighing and visual feedback may be a useful strategy combined with other techniques to promote healthful weight loss”, saying that “a weight loss as small as 5% of body weight may improve health”.


Learn more about the benefits of healthy weight loss at the website.


Release ID: 97592