Extrait

Background and study aims There has been a dramatic increase in the number of people who are overweight/obese. Given this high rate of obesity there is a need to investigate the effectiveness of simple and cheap interventions that have the potential to reach the high number of people needing to lose weight. Many popular weight loss programmes advise people to drink water to help control their weight, but no studies have directly tested whether this advice is accurate and actually leads people to lose weight. One particular strategy that might help people lose weight is to drink about a pint of water before their main meals. Studies conducted in the laboratory and a small trial in older people have shown that drinking water before meals leads people to feel more full and satisfied and so this results in them eating less food/calories during their meals. Whilst the results of these previous studies are very encouraging they have many flaws which means we now need to test this question in a bigger study before we can say for sure that drinking water before meals helps people lose weight. Who can participate? We will recruit 88 obese people from GP practices. What does the study involve? Half of the obese people recruited will be asked to drink a pint of water before their main meals and half will not. Participants who are not asked to drink water will instead be asked to imagine their stomach is full before their meals. This is called a comparison group. We will measure the weight of the two groups at the start, middle and end of the study and compare them to see who lost the most weight. We will also ask all participants to provide us with urine samples at the start, middle and end of the study as this will tell us objectively whether the water group drank more water than the comparison group. What are the possible benefits and risks of participating? The results of this study will help us decide whether the instruction to drink water before meals used in this study is useful in helping people to lose weight. Taking part in the study does not guarantee weight loss, but we hope it may help. We do not anticipate any risks or side-effects from the intervention. Where is the study run from? University of Birmingham (UK) When is the study starting and how long is it expected to run for? May 2013 to November 2013 Who is funding the study? European Hydration Institute Who is the main contact? Dr Helen Parretti [email protected]

Critère d'inclusion

• obesity

Liens

• isrctn
• ictrp