Episode 1 The Men Who Made Us Thin

Everyone wants to be thin.

It means beauty, success, desirability,

and yet, 60% of us are overweight.

In the middle of an obesity crisis,

the multi-billion pound weight-loss business is bigger than ever.

We have people spending billions of dollars of their money to look trim.

I'm Jacques Peretti, and in this series I'm going to investigate

the men who've made their fortunes

by selling us the dream of being thin through diets,

and left us fatter than ever.

The diet industry makes an enormous amount of money

and yet, has very little success to show for that money.

-I'll ask the diet billionaires...

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

..how they justify their enormous profits.

You sell hope to people

that they will never achieve, and that is...

Wait a minute! Whoa, whoa, whoa!

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!

And how the diet super-brands justify their low success rate.

Is it everything we would want? No.

But then, what's the alternative?

The alternative is doing nothing.

I'll look at how the diet industry was first created,

and the secrets that keep us coming back.

They have based multi-million dollar empires on false promises.

Welcome to weight loss 2013-style.

Oh, that is really not pleasant.

First, take a cold bath.

Aah!

Replace breakfast with...

black coffee.

And flatten your stomach by blowing up balloons.

That is a key part of this new fad diet - Six Weeks To OMG.

Blowing up a balloon in order to tighten your stomach muscles.

'These gimmicks helped Six Weeks To OMG get noticed

'in a market where competition is fierce...'

Oh, look at me back then.

So much has changed - my weight's been up and down...

'..with rival diets constantly pushed in glossy TV and web adverts,

often fronted by celebrities.

So, my advice is to lighten up with Lighter Life Lite.

I'm always eating out, so the ProPoints tracker

helps me keep tabs on how much I'm eating.

In just four and a half months, I'd lost 33 pounds.

27 million of us in the UK have tried to diet in the last year,

counting calories even if we're not overweight.

So, how many diets have you been on?

I've been on quite a few.

I've been on Slimming World, Lighter Life, Weight Watchers.

I think one of the worst I ever did was the Mars Bar diet,

where you only eat Mars Bars.

Do you know how many calories you've got in your lunch?

It's about 250 calories.

Cheese sandwich, roughly around 500/600 calories.

Do you know how many calories are in that?

It's 330 calories, and I believe it's 1.6 saturated fat.

Wow, that's pretty accurate.

Every single person counts calories or is on a diet.

Even though not a single person I spoke to was overweight.

Everyone is self-policing.

So, how do you turn this obsession into money?

Six Weeks TO OMG, with its snappy title,

cold baths and balloons, seems to have one answer.

It's turned its British author into a global diet phenomenon.

'A new diet plan has popped up across the pond.

'Six Weeks To OMG - Get Skinnier Than All Your Friends

'is a new diet book written by Venice A Fulton.'

Venice Fulton, an actor turned personal trainer,

now has a seven-figure publishing deal in America.

But not everyone is convinced by the marketing.

I think this is absolutely one of the worst fad diets I have ever seen,

because it's targeting young people - it's targeting teens.

In the UK, this ad for the diet was banned.

It was considered irresponsible

for encouraging teenagers to adopt unhealthy eating habits.

So, is Venice deliberately targeting the teen market?

Are they the next frontier for the diet industry?

Who is this book marketed at?

Who is this book written for?

Everyone.

Everyone who needs...

Everyone who considers themselves in need of losing body fat

and improving their health.

Right.

In the book it says, you shouldn't talk to your parents about it,

you shouldn't talk to doctors about it

and you should buy some scales and hide them from your parents.

-Right.

-Do you think that's a responsible thing

to be telling teenage girls?

Remember, I'm not targeting teenage girls.

The thing about scales...

Why do you keep saying it's not for teenage girls? Who's it for then?

-It's for everyone.

-Oh, it's for everyone? Right.

You know, adults have parents too.

Right.

The weighing scales thing

is simply about avoiding other people using your scales

in terms of accuracy.

Mm. You say on the cover, "Being skinnier than your friends,"

so, you clearly know how a teenage girl defines skinny.

They define it in terms of their friends, in terms of other people.

Well, let's just say that two out of three of us are obese - sorry,

not obese - overweight, heavier than we need to be.

Being skinnier than your friends

is simply being the one person out of the three

who is making a conscious effort to be mindful of health,

that's all that's about.

Extreme diets like this,

often justify themselves as a solution to obesity,

but they're not working.

The more diets we undertake, the fatter we're getting.

So, what exactly is the relationship of the diet industry to obesity?

In America's Midwest,

new research at the University Of Minnesota

has uncovered the truth.

In this study you're going to watch an 18-minute film.

Psychologist Professor Traci Mann

is researching eating behaviour

for the US National Institute Of Health, and NASA.

-And these are for you.

-Thank you.

She's looked at over 100 clinical studies of diets,

stretching back 30 years.

Her research is the most comprehensive study

of commercial weight loss ever undertaken.

After having looked at all these diets and evaluated them,

would you say that diets work, or not?

No, I would not say that diets work.

If by work, you mean do you lose a significant amount of weight

and keep it off for a long time?

No, I would not say that diets work.

We found that, on average, the amount of weight they lost

over two to five years

was under one kilogram, on average.

-Under one.

-That's extraordinary.

Yeah, we were shocked.

We were shocked.

With a diet, it comes off and then it slowly comes back on.

From one- to two-thirds of all the dieters regained more than they lost.

So, with all diets, regardless of what kind of diet,

the pattern seems to be the same.

You lose the weight and then you regain the weight

and probably a little bit more.

-So, you're actually better off not going on a diet?

-Yes.

I completely believe that.

The diet industry makes an enormous amount of money,

and yet, there's very little success to show for that money.

Professor Mann was damning,

but amazingly, she isn't the first scientist in Minnesota

to uncover the problems with diets.

Over 60 years ago,

before the modern diet industry had even begun,

scientists here were already examining the effect

of cutting calories on the body.

In 1944 an experiment took place here at the football stadium

at the University Of Minnesota.

36 men volunteered to live on a diet

of just 1500 calories a day for six months.

It was done to find out what happens to the human body when it's starved.

The experiment was run

by the world's leading nutritionist, Ancel Keys.

The American government wanted to understand the effect

malnutrition would have on war-torn Europe.

The men were housed in windowless rooms beneath the stadium.

They were given a programme of mental and physical exercises

and monitored throughout.

Their diet of just over 1,500 calories was strictly controlled.

Being starved made them lose weight,

but it also had profound psychological effects on them.

This is an extract from one of the volunteers' diaries.

"April 24th 1945.

"I'm beginning to want to isolate myself from the other subjects,

"who are developing all kinds of weird behaviours.

"Everyone seems to be losing their interpersonal skills

"and starvation is less than half over."

One of them bit one of the other volunteers.

Many tried to escape from the compound

to eat grass from nearby gardens.

Another became so deranged

that he chopped three of his fingers off with an axe.

I mean, this is what a diet based on half of a normal calorie intake

did to these people, in less than six months.

But Keys' most important discovery for the diet industry,

was what happened after the diet ended.

When Keys started feeding them again after six months,

he noticed something totally unexpected.

They rapidly put on weight, but not only did that,

they actually gained more weight than they had been originally.

Dieting had actually made them fatter.

What would you say the significance of the Keys' study was

in terms of what we know about diets today?

Basically, I think of it as the first diet study.

The more I look at his books, the more I'm amazed

at how much he figured out about how diets work, back then.

Keys showed that trying to lose weight long term by dieting

wouldn't work for the vast majority of people.

So, how did the diet industry

convince us to keep buying their diet products for the next 60 years?

The answer lies in an insurance office in Manhattan.

Decades before there was a real obesity epidemic,

one man made a decision

that would change the way the world perceives its shape.

That man was Louis Dublin.

He was the chief statistician of what was, at the time,

the biggest insurance company in the world -

Metropolitan Life - who were reviewing their premiums.

In the early 1940s, Dublin made a remarkable discovery

whilst analysing the records of four million Met Life customers.

He compared the age they died with the weight they were

when they first took out their policy

and concluded that if you were overweight,

you were far more likely to die young.

Dublin drew up a chart

to show how much he thought customers should weigh

to avoid an early death.

He based it on their weight between the ages of 25 and 30.

In effect, what Dublin did was to make the weigh

at which you're considered too heavy much lower.

Instead of just a few people...

suddenly, half the American population

was reclassified as overweight.

But the effect on America was profound.

At the stroke of a pen,

normal, healthy Americans had a weight problem.

His redefinition of much of America as overweight

was adopted by the medical establishment

and then the US Government.

America was now officially fat.

Joel Gurin has examined how Dublin's ideas

influenced the creation of the modern diet industry.

Louis Dublin was probably more responsible than any one individual

for our modern notions of, quote-unquote,

"ideal weight" or "desirable weight".

But it wasn't based on any kind of scientific study at all,

and Dublin, essentially, looked at his data

and just arbitrarily decided

that he would take the desirable weight -

or what appeared to him to be the desirable weight -

for people who were aged 25, and apply it to everybody.

Well, I'm a little bit older than 25,

if I could weigh what I did when I was 25, I'd probably be happy.

The human body doesn't work that way.

So, think now about the cultural impact that these tables have.

So, here are these tables that you now start seeing

on every scale in every drug store,

that say, "This is your ideal weight."

So, if you're somebody who's naturally a little heavier than that,

if you're somebody who's 30 years older than age 25,

all of a sudden, you are overweight.

All of sudden, you look at that table and there's something wrong with you,

when there may be absolutely nothing wrong with you at all.

What did that do to the American state of mind?

What did it do to ordinary people's perception of themselves?

It set in stone the dieting goals that helped fuel the diet industry.

Made millions of people ashamed of their bodies.

And also led millions and millions of doctors

to tell their patients that they needed to lose weight,

that they needed to diet,

when that may not have been the best thing for them.

America's sense of itself was transformed overnight.

The belief they had a weight problem

was burnt in to the nation's consciousness.

Met Life was such a massive and respected company,

that this new definition of being overweight set a ball rolling.

The US government adopted the Met Life standard

and mass neurosis spread across the nation that people were

overweight, rushing to their pharmacies and doctors in panic.

People were now neurotic about their weight and wanted to lose it,

creating a huge market of consumers, convinced they were too fat.

But the screw was about to tighten.

This sense of inadequacy was reinforced by fashion,

when Christian Dior launched his new look in 1947.

The look demanded a 17-inch waist.

It dominated fashion, not just that year, but long into the 1950s,

creating an unattainable goal that few women could achieve.

'How to get the new look, even if

Mother Nature forgot to give you the right figure for it.'

Yet, beneath the surface of suburban America,

something profound was going on,

laying the foundation for the diet industry.

For millions of women, affluence had led not to happiness,

but depression, expressed through dissatisfaction about their bodies.

And in this unhappiness, big business saw an opportunity.

This was the defining moment of post-war American capitalism,

when corporate America realised that to sell the impossible dream

would generate unimaginable profits.

The problem of a nation being overweight had been invented,

and now the diet industry was going to sell us the solution.

'One out of two adults is overweight,

'and because overweight not only detracts from appearance

'but impairs health and shortens life, you lose weight...'

The first mass-market diet product was launched in 1959.

It was called Metrecal.

Each can contained 200 calories, and the contents had

a startling resemblance to baby milk formula.

'..Each can is a low calorie meal. Simply open, pour and drink.

'By any standard...'

The idea was that you had Metrecal for breakfast and lunch

and thanks to knowing the exact number of calories,

you could monitor your intake.

You could even eat an evening meal.

'If you are the one out of every two adults who is overweight,

'try Metrecal soon.'

Metrecal used Dublin's flawed statistics to persuade people

they needed the product.

By using these charts, Metrecal were convincing more people that they

had a weight problem, so they could sell them the solution.

One of the first female copywriters on Madison Avenue was Jane Maas.

She was charged with putting Metrecal in every kitchen

in America.

We came up with the idea that Metrecal was something

that would be fun to have for lunch every day - a way of life.

Men and women drinking it together.

So it became almost a party.

# There's a change in the weather

# There's a change in the sea

# And with Metrecal there's been a change in me...#

It was almost like a cocktail party.

People were mixing up these Metrecal things like you were mixing up

a Martini, and toasting each other.

And the men were all handsome and slim,

and the women were all beautiful and slim.

And this campaign was a breakthrough -

it was the first time dieting had been presented.

A way of life - a sexy way of life - and it was a huge, huge success.

It ran for years.

'For a beautiful change, Metrecal Shake,

'the instant powder diet you mix with milk...'

In Jane's new ads, Metrecal was aspirational.

The people buying it were thin, the overweight didn't feature.

'..Full of vitamins and protein, for a beautiful change.'

# There'll be some changes made. #

Do you feel now that, in some ways,

what you did was to blame for this world we now live in?

I don't think the advertising business really created

the necessity of being slim but I think we fanned it.

I think it was there and because of all this advertising saying,

"Look how gorgeous you could be. Look how good you'll feel about yourself.

"Look how attractive you're going to be to the opposite sex."

Metrecal soon had hundreds of imitators.

The quick-fix calorie diet industry was born,

providing an instant solution

to the invented problem of America's weight crisis.

While consumers swallowed the low calorie message,

scientists who were studying weight loss were becoming

convinced there was a problem with it.

Professor Jules Hirsch has been

at the forefront of obesity research for 50 years.

In 1959, at Rockefeller University in New York,

he carried out a ground-breaking study.

He wanted to find out how and why

the human metabolism is transformed by dieting.

Take me back to when you first did this study.

Well, our people would lose 50, 60 pounds over a long period of time,

on a radically reduced diet.

Now, I saw fat people losing weight to normal,

but they were showing the same symptoms, or changes,

that people who were normal show when they starved,

which seemed very odd.

I would've of course thought that if an obese person can be

reduced, everything would be better and goodbye, problem.

When their weight fell to normal,

the overweight subjects did something totally unexpected -

their brains and bodies panicked,

believing they were starving

and compensated by doing everything possible to put the weight back on.

I learned that it was impossible, seemingly,

for them to keep the weight down

because the psyche of human starvation sets in at that point.

It makes them seek techniques for returning to what they were before.

And that's where diets fail - that's where it all fails.

Hirsch had found that our biology can prevent us

from keeping the weight off.

He tested his findings out on some commercial diets.

So, each new diet was looked at - what was the conclusion?

It works for a while, but two years later they're fat again.

Everything works for a short while, by the way.

If I make, right now, a diet for you and say,

the trouble with you is you don't eat enough pears,

and when you do they must be sliced this way and not that way,

and if you do that, you will lose weight.

The more novel the diet - if you also have to do it whilst

standing on one leg, when the sun is in the air, it'll work better.

And the more intricate it is, and the more publicity there is...

People say, "I don't know why it works, but it works."

And after 26 weeks or so, it starts creeping back up

and by two years you're back to where you started from.

Why, then, when you found this out

50 years ago that diets don't work,

do we have a diet industry?

I suppose...

I mean, nothing that I did,

or the people at Rockefeller did was in any way hidden, so it was known.

But I don't think it had permeated the general scientific

and the general public and industrial consciousness.

What Professor Hirsch has just told me

should have spelled the end of the diet industry before it even began.

But, you know, it was almost as if it was all the scientific

evidence they needed.

If a diet is going to fail, long term,

the dieter will come back to the product again and again.

The fact people kept putting on weight and coming back turned out

to be a good, not a bad thing, for the diet industry.

MUSIC: "Gimme Shelter" by The Rolling Stones

Consumers' failure was a recipe for business success.

By the end of the 1970s,

diet companies were turning over millions of dollars a year.

# Oh, see the fire is sweepin'

# At our streets today...#

As the market became more competitive,

the products became more extreme.

The Last Chance Diet was particularly popular.

People were losing up to 100 pounds by using it instead of food.

But the high-protein drink was

lacking essential nutrients and vitamins.

In 1977, it began to be linked to serious health problems and death.

Each of the victims had a low blood level of potassium,

a condition that can lead to heart trouble.

The inventor of the diet, Dr Robert Linn,

denied any responsibility for any deaths.

I don't know that you can blame that on a diet.

People live and die under normal lifestyles,

whether they are or are not on a programme.

In the face of so much concern,

the US Food and Drug Administration was forced to act.

We are addressing this warning, in significant part,

to a large number of people who are already using it,

for whom it is...it is...

We would like them - A, to stop and B, to see a doctor.

The industry responded by adding vitamins and other nutrients

to meal replacement drinks, and people just carried on buying them.

I had a Slim Fast shake for breakfast, one for lunch

and a proper meal in the evening.

And in one week, the weight just dropped off.

The most popular of the new versions was Slim Fast,

sold as a natural and healthy approach to weight loss.

'Each delicious Slim Fast shake is a nutritious,

'low calorie meal packed with

'vitamins, minerals, protein and fibre.'

I lost four pounds the first week and two the second.

I lost seven. It's a great start.

Slim Fast was invented in 1977 by New York businessman

Daniel Abraham.

Abraham's strategy was to sell Slim Fast cheaper

and make it tastier than his medicinal-tasting rivals.

Slim Fast powder that you mix with milk.

And then the ready-made shakes that you just shake and serve.

-The 3-2-1 Plan.

-Two shakes a day.

-OK.

-And a healthy meal.

-Have you ever tried any of these?

-Yes, these.

-These are good. The chocolate ones.

-How long did you do that for?

-A couple of weeks.

-Yeah. OK.

This is about 40 ingredients in here,

of which the first is sugar.

I wanted to find out how Slim Fast became so successful.

The company's website contains studies attesting to its short

and medium-term effectiveness.

But what would the founder say?

So, we're in Palm Beach, one of the most expensive parts of Florida,

to see the most successful diet billionaire that has ever lived -

Daniel Abraham.

And he lives just over there.

When he sold the company to Unilever in 2000, they paid him £1.4 billion.

HE GROANS

I found him in his gym.

HE GROANS

Wow.

THEY LAUGH

Danny, it looks, to be honest...

I think it's just a lot easier to let yourself go -

I don't like the look of trying to stay together like you.

Depends what you like. What else do I got to do?

Swimming and working out and...

..sore deeds and good friends.

-Do you drink Slim Fast?

-I do.

See this? Look at this?

I didn't put it there because of you.

-Cheers!

-Cheers!

Damn, still good.

-OK.

-Let me taste it. I've never had this before.

Really?

-Tastes all right.

-Cold is better.

I thought it would taste terrible but it tastes OK.

Get out of here!

What... You didn't do your homework.

If I went and bought a car and it didn't work,

I could take it back to the store and say, "My car doesn't work."

But with diets, if it doesn't work, the people blame themselves.

So, it's like the perfect product. It's like you've insulated...

Oh, see, you're looking at it like a business

and you're trying to pull something over the eyes of people.

You don't do that.

You deliver to people everything you promised them.

And then you will succeed.

This is not a car that doesn't run.

This is a programme, it's a product that does work.

And it's very inexpensive.

What you do is you sell to people, you know, you sell, with diets,

with these kind of products a hope that they will never achieve.

-And that...

-Wait a minute. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!

I just told you, it's not up to some magic,

it's up to you to understand that your weight is

dependent on the amount of calories you eat every day.

I get on the scale every day. I keep my calories down.

They lose the weight initially,

but then they put it all back on afterwards.

Because they don't get on a scale every day.

And they don't eat the right balance of foods to give them the calories.

So do you think when people put weight back on, it's really,

we're wrong to blame the product, we should be blaming people?

Of course.

Most of the time people stop using the product.

But you have to understand, it's up to you, not up to something else.

You're in charge of you, aren't you?

Danny's philosophy is very simple - here is a product, it works

and if you fail on your diet, that's your fault.

I said to him, whose fault is it?

Is it your product or the customer if it doesn't work?

It's the customer. It's that simple.

The diet industry relies on the shame the overweight already

feel about themselves.

Their shame is the industry's guarantee of profits.

The diet industry really has you where they want you.

Even if somebody fails, they may not say,

"Well, this was a lousy diet programme."

They may say, "Well, my fault.

"I'm not a good enough person. I'm going to try again.

"I'm going to be better."

Now, this has some really serious problems.

One is that your satisfaction with your weight affects,

not only your mental but probably your physical health.

That if you live your life constantly feeling that

I'm a bad person, I should weigh less,

there's something wrong with me,

that actually is going to be a source of stress for you.

The other issue is that if you're susceptible to that

kind of thinking, you're very likely to become a yo-yo dieter.

You know, your weight goes down, goes up, goes down, goes up.

Yo-yo dieting itself,

is a very dangerous pattern for a couple of reasons.

When you go on a diet, you're really putting your body through

a metabolic roller coaster that's not good for it.

So, you may fid that problems like hypertension become more

prevalent as you go up and down, up and down, up and down.

So, that whole pattern of repeated dieting,

of people blaming themselves

and people going through this cycle that is bad for their metabolism,

it's a very, very bad cycle and one that, unfortunately,

millions and millions of people fall into.

From the beginning, the diet business relied on the guilt of the

customer, but could never square the circle of selling a consumer

product that promotes non-consumption and denies pleasure.

Until 1963, when an overweight New York doctor, Robert Atkins,

had a strange epiphany whilst watching JFK's assassination on TV.

In so doing, he created a huge new market.

Atkins vowed that he would lose weight,

but he would do it eating exactly what he wanted.

Robert Atkins developed the Atkins Diet on the idea that it was

not how many calories you ate, but what you ate that made you fat.

Atkins broke a plate of food down into three groups -

fat, protein and carbohydrate.

And concluded that if it was the carbohydrate that made you fat,

then if you dropped the carbs, you could eat as much fat

and protein as you want, without putting on weight.

Atkins' diet was based on a new idea that it wasn't fat, but sugar

and other carbohydrates like bread, rice

and potatoes that make you put on weight.

His book, The Diet Revolution, became a bestseller,

shifting 100,000 copies a week.

Atkins was the first international diet guru.

Nice to meet you.

Thank for your time.

Fran Gare, one of his early devotees, worked alongside him.

He was a bigger-than-life person, a bigger-than-life personality

and he was a bit of a hedonist

and he wanted it to be the easiest possible way to lose weight.

And we know, eating bacon and mayonnaise and steak -

that's not such a bad way to lose weight.

So, this was the eating-man's diet.

He came under a lot of attack from the medical establishment,

they didn't like him, did thy? Why was that?

Because he told them they were wrong.

I mean, who likes to be told they're wrong?

They all said, you have to count calories and fat is bad for you.

And when you tell doctors that what they learned in medical

school may not be exactly how the body works, they get angry.

Despite the criticism, over the next 40 years Atkins built

an empire with best-selling books and a range of low-carb foods.

The success of the diet helped fund his lavish lifestyle,

including a large house in the Hamptons.

But even in the late 90s he was still defending himself

against critics, including the US Government.

They are bread pushers.

And bread is a junk food - it has white flour.

It's a junky as white sugar.

They're pushing that.

And they've got to be held in check.

They should be the ones that are being reprimanded.

They are the guilty party.

When Atkins died in 2003,

critics used his death to discredit his diet, saying he had become obese

and suffered heart disease as a result of the rich food he ate.

But the promise that you could eat as much as you like

and still lose weight if you cut out carbs remained a popular one.

The success of Atkins has been repeated by a Paris doctor,

Pierre Dukan.

In 2010, his book became the best-selling diet in the UK,

getting a further boost when it was reported that

members of Kate Middleton's family had used it to slim for her wedding.

I wanted Dukan to explain the medical science

behind his globally successful low-carb diet.

-Pierre, I'm Jack. Nice to meet you.

-Nice to know you, Jack.

Be here with me in my home.

I collect everything I find in the street.

I can do like that, or you can do like that!

Despite running his £80 million business,

Dukan still has time for his hobby - making art from found objects.

I am looking for a second one like that, to have a breast,

-chest of a woman.

-Right.

-It looks like, uh...

-So you need another bell?

But it's an old-fashioned one, I can't find it.

But one day, I will find it.

-Tell me what your diet is, Pierre.

-Yeah, my diet is very simple.

That's the first key. Two...one in red food.

72 coming in proteins, the meats, the fish, the seafood, eggs and so on.

And 28 coming from vegetables. That makes 100, and that's your treasure.

-That's your treasure, right. OK.

-It's very well-structured, organised.

Two phases. To lose weight, and two, to conserve it. Right? Not to regain.

'Dukan has expanded massively beyond his diet,

'creating a business built on books, foods, and health supplements.

'And his company makes some miraculous claims for one

'product in particular.'

Devorcal's advertised on your website as a miracle calorie burner.

So, what does it do?

How does it burn these calories in a miraculous way?

First, I have to say that you ask me the question, scientifically,

I can answer to you. But it's not me who developed and made the products.

-All the products are made by the company.

-But which company is that?

It's a company of the Regime Dukan.

But you are Dukan, it's your name,

-and you don't know what the product does?

-Yes, I can tell you.

Devorcal, it's a mixture of vinegar, cider vinegar...

-Cider vinegar?

-..Extract.

-Right.

-And pectin of apple. In apple, it's just like in grape.

With grape we make...

We make wine and with wine we have flavenoids

and many things very good for the health.

And with apple, it's not our tradition,

the French tradition is wine.

But the English tradition, the British tradition, works on apple.

More than us.

In many, many traditions, they use vinegar to be thinner.

And so it's traditional.

-And English people say, two apples a day makes the doctor away.

-Yeah.

And they are not wrong. And it helps a lot.

It's not a miracle, but it helps.

The science behind the "miracle calorie burner" was one thing,

but what about Dukan's diet?

I wanted to know whether it worked, long-term.

After all, so many other diets have poor success rates.

How does your diet compare?

I have statistics.

ERm... 100 people buy a book,

50% lose the weight they wanted to lose.

And on these 50,

half - that means 25 -

keep the weight after four years.

That means 25%.

Right. One in four?

Do you think, Pierre, that people know that diets fail?

The viewers watching this programme, they do diets even though they know

that it's going to fail and that they're going to do another one.

You ask me if people know that they are fail...?

-But they still do it anyway.

-You're right. I think that it's true.

Because it's not only the diet. The diet is a tool.

But if you use only the tool, without the philosophy, the life,

if you don't want to change your life, you fail.

You fail.

I can see the appeal of this charismatic doctor,

who's selling not just a diet, but a whole philosophy of living.

And it clearly works for some people, in the short-term.

But for the majority, long-term, it's just like any other diet.

In a market full of quick fixes,

which don't actually work long-term, what if there was a product

that could provide a lifelong plan for weight loss?

In 1961, a global diet brand was founded on the idea that

if it was unhappiness, particularly among women, that was to blame for

overeating, then what was needed was not a quick fix, but group therapy.

And it was all created one night round the kitchen table

at this suburban house in Queens, New York.

The new idea came from an overweight housewife called Jean Nidetch.

# I know I'd go from rags to riches... #

She lost weight with standard-issue advice from the New York City Board

of Health and began giving talks to other housewives who wanted to slim.

Remember these things that happen to you, because that's your signal.

# I'd be a millionaire... #

I encourage overweight people to do one of two things.

Either stay overweight and stop complaining,

or do something about it.

One night, Jean and a friend came up with a novel business plan.

What if we were to create thousands of Jeans across America?

Franchise out her inspirational speeches,

and charge for the privilege?

They even came up with a name for it. Weight Watchers.

They started selling Weight Watchers franchises

and training the franchisees to host meetings around the United States.

The price of admission is two dollars and a weigh-in.

That's very nice. Very nice.

The business grew rapidly and soon boasted a million members.

In 1967, Weight Watchers came to Britain.

Twiggy's was now the look women aspired to.

If Dior's 17-inch waist had been hard for most women to achieve,

the Twiggy look was even more extreme,

with no natural curves at all.

Under this pressure,

British women proved a ready market for Weight Watchers.

Think you've lost any weight?

-I don't know, I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

-What's your goal?

-Nine stone three!

-And what are you now?

-I was 15:6.

-I'm 14 what, Mrs Weston?

-14:5 and one eighth.

-14:5 and one eighth.

-I was 15:6.

-You've only got five stone to go, then.

Good luck if I do it!

THEY LAUGH

The head of the UK operation was Bernice Weston.

Now, what about the group therapy? Why is that important?

It's not only important,

it's the thing that makes the other thing work.

Any diet will help you lose weight.

It is because, I believe, that no fat person can do it alone.

When it comes to eating, fat people are basically very stupid.

THEY LAUGH

Thank you! These are with saccharine, isn't it?

-How much profit is made out of this?

-Well, I can't tell you.

We are a profit-making organisation.

I can tell you that the directors have drawn no salary from the

organisation. We hope that it will be a profitable one. I don't know.

Thus far, it isn't. In America, it's a very profitable organisation.

Weight Watchers did soon become highly profitable in the UK.

And by 2011, they had revenue of £130 million a year.

APPLAUSE

Today, they're keen to point out that they are promoting

a lifestyle, not a diet.

It just works. And you know what? I feel like I've got my sparkle back.

But I wanted to find out

if the Weight Watchers model of gradual weight loss through

careful eating and group support was any more effective

than other kinds of diet.

I took Weight Watchers' own statistics

to the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University,

where Dr Carl Heneghan, an expert in clinical trial data,

analysed exactly what the figures mean.

Carl, over the long-term, for an average person,

how effective is Weight Watchers?

Well, OK, long-term, "over the long-term" is a bit general.

-What would you like?

-Five years.

-Five years. Not effective.

-Full stop?

-Full stop.

Carl, Weight Watchers do have a five-year study,

but what does that show?

What it shows is that two years - and actually, I've got the figure

here - about 20% of them maintain their goal weight.

By five years, that goes down to 16%.

So basically, you pick the best people, the lifelong members,

and actually even they struggle. With the majority of people

not obtaining their long-term goal weight.

And after 40 years of them,

when are people going to wake up and say, this is not the answer?

Weight Watchers was transformed from a small domestic business

to a global super brand under the financial direction

of Richard Samber.

I wanted to know what he really thought of the product

he had helped make so successful.

When I came there in 1968, the turnover was 8 million.

-And when I retired in 1993, the turnover was over 300 million.

-Wow.

How effective is being on Weight Watchers, long-term?

It's hard. You have to follow the diet, you know.

And there are a lot of distractions. Just look at all the food in there!

-Mmm.

-You have to be motivated to get to your goal weight.

If you drop out, maybe something happens

and you come along and you try again.

You play the lottery ticket.

If you don't win, you play it again and maybe you'll win the second time.

Even using Weight Watchers' own statistics, the very best after

five years, 16% of people have maintained their goal weight.

I mean, that's hardly anyone. It's sort of a total failure.

And I just wonder how on earth it is a business that can be

so huge, can be based on patent failure?

Well, but it's successful

because the other 84% have to come back and do it again!

That's where your business comes from.

I've got to take my hat off to you.

You have a business where if it actually worked,

the business would be over!

THEY LAUGH That's what I said!

Richard was the finance director of Weight Watchers for 25 years,

and he said to me,

"If diets worked, we wouldn't have a business because the customer

"wouldn't come back." But because they fail, they keep coming back.

Under Richard Samber, the financial success of Weight Watchers soon

caught the eye of food giant Heinz, who bought the company in 1978.

The deal paved the way for an extraordinary series of

takeovers that gave a surprising new twist in the diet business story.

Many of the companies now making the most money

out of dieting are also food producers.

Slim Fast is owned by Unilever. Jenny Craig is owned by Nestle.

Weight Watchers was sold by Heinz to Artel, an investment fund,

who bought them for 735 million,

but have so far taken out 3.8 billion in profits.

And profits could be about to soar.

With the global spread of obesity, the diet companies spotted

a potentially massive new revenue stream.

The growing problem of obesity could have terrifying health consequences.

Leading doctors today called for urgent action,

including educational programmes and higher standards of food labelling.

As governments looked for solutions to obesity,

the diet companies said they could help.

The NHS now pays for obese patients

to go to commercial weight loss classes.

But how much of a public health benefit are we getting

for our money?

Carl Heneghan has analysed the data, including results of a trial

when the NHS offered obese and overweight patients

a 12-week course with slimming groups including Weight Watchers.

These numbers represent what's going on in the evidence.

Let's take 1,000 people.

Imagine I invite 1,000 people who are overweight to come to

Weight Watchers. Out of 1,000 people, 115 will take up the invitation.

885 will say, forget it. OK?

You then take about the half who attend all the classes.

So remember, of your 1,000, we're now down to just 62 people.

And they will lose about 5.4 kilogrammes in one year.

But by two years - remember we started with 62 - you'll only

be left with 13 people who have maintained their goal weight.

And by five years, of the original 1,000,

you're now down to ten people who've maintained their goal weight.

-Ten in 1,000.

-Yeah.

That's not going to, as a public health intervention,

make any difference to the problem at large.

I wanted to put Carl's findings to Weight Watchers themselves.

I'm going to meet Karen Miller-Kovach.

She's the chief scientific officer at Weight Watchers,

here at their global headquarters in New York.

I want to find out what she has to say about Carl Heneghan's findings.

-Hi.

-I've got an interview with Karen Miller-Kovach.

I asked Karen about Carl's analysis of the NHS trial.

But she disputed his methods, and conclusions.

To put credible,

best-practice lifestyle management programmes into a pot

called "weight loss"

and then say, "This is what would happen" is unfair.

Just to use an analogy of what you're saying is that if you had a headache

today and you took an Aspirin and it took care of your headache today.

And ten years from now, or five years from now, you get a headache

and you say, "I took Aspirin!

"I shouldn't have gotten that headache, it's not fair!"

That's not the way it works. Obesity is a chronic condition.

To believe that a person should be able to take

a 12-week course of Weight Watchers, and that's it for life,

and then go back to their old habits,

go back to the obeso-genic environment in which we live

without having the skills to make a difference, is a fool's errand.

There was a 2007 study, which I believe looked at five years.

16% actually managed to keep the weight off after five years.

It was 16%.

Actually, 16% weighed less than what they started with. At.

-In terms of that.

-Do you know how much less? I mean, to what degree?

-How much did they weigh less?

-Let me be clear.

If they joined at, erm, 14 stone...

..and when they went on to be Gold members

and that maintenance study started, they weighed 12 stone.

What I'm saying is that 16%, five years later, weighed less

than - whatever I said - the 12 stone to the 14 stone.

Mmm.

Is it everything we would want? No. But then, what's the alternative?

The alternative is doing nothing.

I interviewed Richard Samber, who was the finance director

-of Weight Watchers here in the US for 25 years.

-Mmm-hmm.

And he told me, "Diets fail, we know they fail.

"And actually, do you know what?

"That makes it a brilliant business model." That's what he told me.

That's what he told you?

First of all,

I don't think that that is what the company was built on 50 years ago.

I know for sure that that is not the business model of today.

We cannot sustain a business on failure.

There's a reason why we have been around 50 years.

We've been around 50 years because people come to us

time and time again, to help them with their chronic condition

of weight management.

I don't know that the business model was in 1965, I wasn't here.

Apparently, he was.

I am here, in 2013, and he's not.

Today, Weight Watchers are based in the very building where

Louis Dublin paved the way for the diet industry all those years ago.

redefining the American population as overweight.

And now, 60 years later, unless we take care,

we will end up creating a new market for the diet industry.

It's very fashionable to have a tiny, tiny waist...

Hemmed in by images of the super thin

and fear of being fat,

British children are becoming anxious about their weight.

We see very young children say,

-"It's good to be hot, it's good to be skinny."

-And how old are those kids?

Six, seven.

Children talking about calories, or this has got a lot of calories.

They'll all be able to tell you about different diets,

because fat is such a dirty word in a child's vocabulary.

They are bombarded with the adverts that we see every day, we see

on New and Closer and OK magazine as we queue up in the Co-op.

They are bombarded with that.

And the message is constantly, what we value about you is how you look.

They did used to think I was fat and I used to get bullied a lot

and it wasn't nice.

You'd start losing your self-confidence

and end up becoming this really shy person.

-And you would not do anything, you wouldn't go out or anything.

-Yeah.

-Not see any of your friends any day.

-Yeah.

These children are learning to deal with the pressure to be thin.

But a leading specialist in eating disorders believes it's the euphoric

hit we get at the start of a diet that we seek out again and again.

When people enter into dieting,

first of all they get a real high out of a sense of achievement.

Of watching the weight decrease on the scales.

So you get a lovely hit and you think,

"This is great, I've done really well."

And the more intoxicating it becomes, the more obsessed we get with it.

The more driven we are towards it.

So they had the hit, they had the euphoria,

and they think it must be possible again.

So it's not that it's truly addictive,

but it certainly has a quality of that.

This is the key to the success of diets.

That hit of control which we keep trying to repeat.

Over the decades, we've seen diets promise success again and again.

Each one convincing us we can feel healthier and look thinner.

But have we been looking in the wrong direction all along?

If we could get people to focus on health instead of weight,

as what they're striving for, we'd be a lot better off.

In every way.

The only thing that makes sense is to look at your diet,

look at your activity level, and say, "OK, would I

"be a healthier, happier person if I ate a more balanced diet?

"Would I be happier if I exercised three, four times a week?"

The answer to all those questions is probably "yes".

That really should be what we're asking ourselves.

Not, "How can I make the scales show a smaller number?"

There's no sign of the popularity of diets ending.

In fact, the industry is bigger than ever.

And despite all the evidence,

we just can't resist our addiction to diets.

Buying into a myth that we'll end up thin.

Next time, I'll see how the exercise industry

expanded into weight loss...

The demand was insatiable.

..Followed by drug companies...

It's the magic bullet.

To eat whatever you want and then take a pill?

-It doesn't get better than that!

-..And how that went wrong...

The US government is calling it the biggest case of health care

-fraud in American history.

-What they see is money, flowing in.

Because so many people are so desperate to lose weight,

they'll do anything.

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