Just how ethical is the weight loss industry?

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Just how ethical is the weight loss industry?

By Lauren | January 14, 2009

It’s that time of the year again. Two weeks into January, how well have you kept your new year’s resolutions? If one of those resolutions was to lose weight, you may well have fallen off the wagon. Every year, millions of Americans vow to lose weight in the new year, but they rarely succeed in achieving lasting results.

Their failures are not for lack of investment. Americans spend about $35 billion annually trying to lose weight, and there’s never a shortage of products to buy. Pills, patches, creams, lotions, exercise equipment, gym memberships, hypnosis tapes, self-help books, and a range of diet plans, frequently endorsed by newly-slender celebrities, boldly promise effortless weight loss miracles … until you squint your way through the absurdly tiny disclaimers at the bottom of the ads that quietly admit, “results not typical.”

Anyone who’s ever struggled to reduce knows that taking off weight is just plain hard work and there are no reliable short cuts. Exercise machines, diet plans and other products can help people who are independently determined to lose weight. None of them work for everyone, though, and none of them can legitimately guarantee permanent results. Worst of all, some diets, pills and badly-designed exercise equipment can seriously damage users’ health, which means that consumers do lasting harm to their bodies even as they try to make them look healthier.

The weight loss industry is legally entitled to brazenly advertise the potential benefits of its products (so long as it doesn’t actually lie), and to take the money of anyone who’s willing to buy them. But is it really ethical for weight loss companies to take advantage of the desperation of people who are willing to try practically anything to drop a few pounds? And, if they’re going to sell products that aren’t likely to work very well for very long much of the time, is it ethical for them to pretend otherwise then fall back on fine print to avoid being taken to court?

Many weight loss products are little more than hope prettily packaged in a bottle, box or book. It’s legal, and extremely profitable, to sell them. But that doesn’t make it right.

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