By Sally Squires
Tuesday, October 10, 2006; HE01
Ask Sally about healthy eating at 1 p.m. on Tuesdays
Tens of millions of consumers seek nutrition advice online, regularly searching for information about dietary supplements, food allergies and how to lose weight.
But a new evaluation of the 20 most popular diet and nutrition Internet sites by Consumer Reports Web Watch shows that the information they dish out can be slim on facts and sometimes bloated with commercial interests.
"More than half the top 20 sites were not rated well by our panel," says Beau Brendler, director of Web Watch. "That is of some concern."
To evaluate the sites, Web Watch teamed with another nonprofit group, the Health Improvement Institute. Using data from Nielsen//NetRatings, they identified the 20 most popular diet and nutrition Web sites, from WebMD.com, with 11 million unique users per month, to TrimLife.com, with 743,000 users.
Nineteen experts, including doctors, nurses and medical librarians, were then tapped to rate the sites. The raters spent more than a month digging deep into the sites, six of which, including WeightWatchers.com, charge fees for use. Ten attributes were used to evaluate each site, including accuracy, disclosure of advertising and other commercial sponsorship, ease of use, privacy policies, authorship, references and how errors are corrected.
The ratings stopped short of testing the medical effectiveness of specific diets or medical treatments. "We're upfront in saying that we can't really take on the role of arbitrator of medical procedures or treatments that even the medical community doesn't agree on," Brendler says.
The six lowest-rated sites frequently blurred lines between supposedly impartial information and ads, the Consumer Reports study found. They were AOLhealth.com, QualityHealth.com, Dannon's LightnFit.com, Healthology.com, Rodale's Prevention.com and TrimLife.com, which sells dietary supplements.
"There are other places on the Web where people are better off spending their time," Brendler says.
Michael Neuwirth, a spokesman for Dannon, notes that the report is "not based on any science, as Consumer Reports states themselves."
As for mixing ads and editorial content, "it's obvious that any company-produced Web page that is clearly branded, as ours is, is a form of promotion. There's nothing duplicitous here. No sleight of hand. And the expert that helped us to develop the diet insight is a registered dietitian."
An AOL spokeswoman also took exception to the findings. "They confused AOL Health with AOL Diet & Fitness. . . . So, they were comparing apples to oranges in the category. . . . It's kind of entertaining that they talk about WebMD.com having great content. We get a lot of content from WebMD."
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.southbeachdiet.com/ ,
http://www.weightwatchers.com/ .
· F air : http://www.lightnfit.com/ .
· Poor : http://www.trimlife.com/ . ·
