A Mixed Buffet Of Food Info

Three sites worth a visit, the report concluded, are Aetna's Intellihealth.com, MedicineNet.com and MayoClinic.com. Each earned an "excellent" rating from the report because they provide unbiased, peer-reviewed information written by health professionals. Each of these sites clearly labels ads and reveals commercial sponsorship, the report found.

Two sites -- the federal government's National Institutes of Health site ( http://www.nih.gov/ ), which takes no advertising, and the commercial http://www.webmd.com/ -- were rated as "very good." WebMD's fee-based interactive weight loss program -- a feature the NIH site doesn't provide -- also earned a "very good" rating for asking participants questions about what they ate, calculating their daily calorie intake and then offering suggestions for improvement.

Whether Web-based nutrition and diet information helps people lose weight, however, is under debate. Studies at Brown University suggest simply providing information about food, calories and exercise to shed pounds "is not very effective," says Rena Wing, lead author of the studies and director of the Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center at Miriam Hospital in Providence, R.I. But when Wing and her colleagues added behavior strategies and one-on-one e-mail diet counseling, the weight-loss results "markedly improved," she says.

It doesn't even seem to matter whether the e-mail messages are drafted by people or computers. Both proved superior to not receiving regular e-mail diet and exercise feedback.

If you decide to seek out nutrition, exercise, weight-loss or other medical information from the Web, "choose sites with strong contents and sound editorial policies and procedures," advises Peter Goldschmidt, president of the Health Improvement Institute.

Here's how eight of the sites that have interactive online diet programs stacked up in the report:

· Very good : http://www.webmd.com/ .

· Good : http://biggestloserclub.com/ ,

http://www.ediets.com/,

http://www.sonomadiet.com/ ,

http://www.southbeachdiet.com/ ,

http://www.weightwatchers.com/ .

· F air : http://www.lightnfit.com/ .

· Poor : http://www.trimlife.com/ . ·