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Trying to find out what the real facts are about diets, diet studies and dieting is an exercise in futility. There are literally tens of thousands of reports, studies, clinical trials and research studies done and they all have different outcomes.

So who do you trust? How do you know what information or statistics to believe when it comes to finding out the truth about your diet? Believe me when I say that it’s not that easy.

Most of the information out there about diets and the results you can expect, come from the manufacturers or providers of the diet plan or products. The information comes from studies they have funded and there’s no way to find out about studies that produced results they didn’t like or weren’t favorable to their product. Because of that, the information they provide and promote is automatically suspect because they will likely only publish information or results that favor what they are selling.

For example, a widely published study done by Weight Watchers in 2011 suggests that people going on the Weight Watchers plan will lose up to twice as much as those on regular diets. The results sound great but the study was funded by Weight Watchers and provided free diets services to those who participated. Even with the free diet services only 61% of those who started, completed the program. Will this level of success be seen with those who pay to go on the program? Who knows, but it’s not likely. Even with this free service the most weight lost by participants was about 15 pounds.

Numerous other studies have shown that diets have varying degrees of success and the level of success reported seems to be directly related to who did the study. Reports by companies promoting diet products report wildly greater results that those done by independent organizations.

A study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), about the best you can get when it comes to analyzing and reporting on studies, says that a study of four of the most popular diet programs showed only a 4.8 to 7.3 pound weight loss for participants after one year. Hardly newsworthy results for all the effort of sticking with a diet for a year and not even close to the advertised results of the companies that market the products. It should be noted that their advertised results almost always come with the disclaimer that says “results seen here are not typical.”

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