Study: Drink less to lose weight

A new study from Penn Nursing suggests that if you want to lose weight and keep it off in the new year, you might want to think about cutting back on drinking. The study, which was led by Ariana Chao, an assistant professor of nursing who studies obesity treatment and binge eating, examined how drinking affected weight loss among 4,901 people with type 2 diabetes who participated in the Action for Health in Diabetes study. That study compared weight loss for people who underwent an inten- sive lifestyle intervention that focused on improving diet and exercise with those in a control group. The people in the intervention group were told about the calories in alcohol and advised to decrease drinking to reduce caloric intake. On average, people in the intervention group lost considerably more weight during the first year (around 9 percent of total weight) than those in the control group, who lost less than 1 percent of body weight. During the first year, drinking level didn’t affect weight loss. Nor did people in either group actually reduce their drinking. However, nondrinkers in the intervention group had kept more weight off at four years — 5.1 percent of initial weight — than those who drank at any level. Alcohol abstainers were also considerably more likely to lose 10 percent or more of their weight. Twentyseven percent of nondrinkers attained that goal compared with just 4.8 percent of heavy drinkers. Twentyfour percent of light drinkers lost 10 percent or more of their body weight.