Are Meal Replacements a Tool for Weight Loss or Profit Gain?

Meal Replacements (MR) include products that substitute a typical meal. The popular examples are Slimfast™, Shakeology®, Herbalife™, Isagenix®…I could go on considering Google came up with 6.7 million results in less than half a second, but I’ll keep it brief.

Commonly sold as ‘diet’ foods, the weight loss industry spends on average $60 billion dollars in marketing for these products to those trying to control their weight. MRs are portion controlled and therefore put a limit to the number of calories being consumed in that one meal, assuming this is the only food/drink being eaten. Meal replacements come in the form of a drink, bar, or an entrée and have carbohydrates, protein, fat, and have anywhere from 200-500 calories. Medically prescribed MRs usually have added vitamins and minerals(1).

Benefits

Excess portions are a major barrier to weight loss and maintenance. Hormones, especially Leptin, are meant to sense when the body is full/fed but it is very easy to override these cues, especially when US food industry spends 136.5 million dollars on advertising an ‘eat more’ message (2).

Meal replacements protect us from eating more than one serving and they also teach us what a 100-calorie serving of nuts, for example, looks like. Another benefit to MR is that users are generally more compliant (3). This is likely because MRs are convenient and take the guess work out of calorie counting. This is important because we have a tendency to underestimate how many calories we eat (4). However, MRs do not fit in with social settings and don’t teach users how to strategize at family dinners, holiday parties, or at restaurants.

Drawbacks

Looking at the ingredient list of a meal replacement is likely to add a new list of words to your vocabulary. The ingredients while not inherently bad for us, are not found in fresh foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, plant oils, and seafood and therefore are note essential to our health. The ingredients are only added to the products to make them shelf-stable which leads to higher profits for the company creating the products.

The rate of processed foods entering the market is similar to the rates of increasing obesity. This is correlation, not causation, but it does propose a question of how effective meal replacements are at promoting weight loss. Excess calories come from foods similar to meal replacement foods: sugar-sweetened beverages and snacks that are high in refined sugars.

Also, while not adding calories, meal replacements tend to have high amounts of sodium per serving, again to preserve freshness. Too much sodium increases blood pressure, and high blood pressure is one of the biggest risk factors in heart disease and kidney disease (5). We need to remember that the purpose for weight loss is to improve health, as overweight and obesity are also major risk factors for chronic disease (6). However, it’s counterintuitive to eat products that may aid in weight loss while increasing the risk of other diseases.

A Tool for Weight Loss or Profit Gains?

There is a huge profit motive for companies to create meal replacements and market them to mostly women so that they, as the primary shopper in most households (7) think they need to lose weight to be healthy even if they are already at a normal weight. Slimfast, the meal replacement brand owned by Unilever, brought in $2.3 billion to the company in 2000 (8) and at $129.95 per 30 servings (which is over half of the $219 that the average household in the US spends groceries monthly (9), the Shakeology brand of meal replacement shakes brings in some serious coin for the Beachbody LLC.

Also, while some studies do show weight loss while sing certain meal replacement products, one must be critical of the special interests who benefit from these types of results, as the food industry is often a contributor to major research studies (10).

Who may they be most beneficial for?

Meal replacements are pricey but several studies have shown that subjects lose weight when undergoing a plan that uses them (11). However, it is important is to acknowledge that these studies also had the participants eat fewer calories overall, which of course will induce weight loss.

Meal replacements may be useful for those who are in the contemplation stage of behavior change but struggle with portion control, as these products are most effective at calorie-control.

This practice of eating portion controlled MRs should accompany the advice from a Registered Dietitian to ensure that the user is learning why this is helping induce weight loss and how he or she can eventually stop using these products and learn to control portions on their own.

How do MRs compare to an ‘ideal’ weight loss plan?

The ideal weight loss plan promotes behavior change beyond that of just eating low-calorie items. While meal replacements may replace behaviors of excess consumption with portion control, they don’t teach individuals other important behaviors known to be helpful for weight loss like preparing home-cooked meals and reading nutrition labels.

Secondly, the ideal weight loss plan also induces other benefits like lowering blood pressure and blood lipid parameters. Relying on portion controlled snacks in lieu of fruits and vegetables may not have these effects especially since not all meal replacements are created equal. Some products are very high in sodium, providing over 340mg of sodium per serving, which is considered a ‘high-sodium’ food according to the Federal Trade Commission (12).

Finally, the ideal weight loss program promotes fresh food, not food products. Interestingly, most meal replacement diet plans include one ‘real’ food meal i.e. a lean protein with vegetables and a whole grain for dinner, but the focus is still on eating the snacks and drinking shakes.

Overall, it is the excess of calories from any nutrient, whether its carbohydrates, fat, or proteins, that results in weight gain.

Don't let any media source tell you otherwise.

Instead of providing consumers with more snacks and more drinkable meal replacements to choose from, there should be more focus teaching consumers portion control, how to select and prepare fresh foods, and get daily exercise. This is the trifecta for successful weight loss efforts, and any 'diet' product on market has only 1 goal and that is to get you to eat more.

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1. Rothacker DQ. Five-year self-management of weight using meal replacements: comparison with matched controls in rural Wisconsin. Nutrition. 2000;16:344–8

2.http://www.marketdataenterprises.com/diet-market-our-specialty/

3. Heymsfield, S. B., Van Mierlo, C. A. J., Van der Knaap, H. C. M., Heo, M., & Frier, H. I. (2003). Weight management using a meal replacement strategy: meta and pooling analysis from six studies. International journal of obesity,27(5), 537-549.

4.Chandon, P., & Wansink, B. (2007). Is obesity caused by calorie underestimation? A psychophysical model of meal size estimation. Journal of Marketing Research, 44(1), 84-99.

5. Sacks, F. M., Svetkey, L. P., Vollmer, W. M., Appel, L. J., Bray, G. A., Harsha, D., ... & Karanja, N. (2001). Effects on blood pressure of reduced dietary sodium and the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet. New England journal of medicine, 344(1), 3-10.

6.Calle, E. E., Rodriguez, C., Walker-Thurmond, K., & Thun, M. J. (2003). Overweight, obesity, and mortality from cancer in a prospectively studied cohort of US adults. New England Journal of Medicine, 348(17), 1625-1638.

7.Today’s Primary Shopper. Private Label Manufacturer’s Association. http://plma.com/2013PLMA_GfK_Study.pdf. Published April 29, 2013. Accessed October 9, 2016.

8. Leuthesser, L., Kohli, C., & Suri, R. (2003). 2+ 2= 5? A framework for using co-branding to leverage a brand. Journal of Brand Management, 11(1), 35-47.

9.https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/USDAFoodPlansCostofFood/reports

10.foodpoitics.org

11.Noakes, M., Foster, P. R., Keogh, J. B., & Clifton, P. M. (2004). Meal replacements are as effective as structured weight-loss diets for treating obesity in adults with features of metabolic syndrome. The Journal of nutrition, 134(8), 1894-1899.

12. https://www.nutritioncaremanual.org/client_ed.cfm?ncm_client_ed_id=96