WW and HCG are on an entirely different spectrum. WW has been around for decades with proven long term success and no long term ill effects. HCG is a subscription medication being prescribed for an unapproved use (a doctor could lose his license for this). There are no long term studies. VLCDs in general have a high regain percentage. It doesn't make sense to approve of it or say it works if you are unsure of the side effects.

I don't think a doctor necessarily risks his license for prescribing off-label prescriptions- doctors do this all the time when a drug is noted to have a side effect that is beneficial. This is how we found out that you could use Wellbutrin to quit smoking (it's labeled usage is as an anti-depressant) as just one example.

However, many "health food" stores sell the HCG diet and it's not got anything to do with doctors.

You are correct that there are no long term studies. I am very wary of the hCG diet because it's already showing a deleterious effect on cholesterol. I recall when the drug Phen-Fen came out and people lost so much weight on it and then it destroyed their heart valves. I prefer to wait and see that something is safe and that it doesn't have undesired side effects, particularly ones that aren't reversible, before I try something.

Dr Oz has never endorsed hcg diets.

But he does provide air-time to every wacky diet out there because that draws in more viewers which means more advertising dollars for the show.

Every now and then you can see him cringe and he'll try to establish that an idea is not healthy, but most of the time he tries to be very neutral and that is misleading. I've also noticed that he'll briefly mention something in passing without explaining the details, which also gives the wrong impression of an endorsement.

IMO his decision to approach diet products this way has hurt his credibility.

This is my thought exactly. I really loved Dr Oz when his show first premiered. All good things come to an end. The celebrity, advertising machine has run him over, I'm afraid.

I saw both shows in question. He is absolutely against the hcg diet, *however* he pointed out ways to naturally increase the human growth hormone production that our bodies make. Apropos Weight Watchers, it is definitely partnered with Dr. Oz on something called "Transformation Nation," which is a sort of motivational program on his website that viewers can join.
http://doctoroz.sharecare.com/
On the show he announced an offer that WW would give away a free membership if you signed up by a certain date. Although I think this is a great thing, it came about a week after he announced he NEVER endorses any product...and there he was endorsing a product.

I'm pretty grossed out by Oz, he gives me the creeps. He ends up repeating a lot of advice, and it just seems he's running out of things to talk about and mostly gives spotty tips that don't add up to much. My ex-husband was on the show once, and he and the producers spent a huge amount of time concocting graphics and "party tricks" that mostly had entertainment, not practical, value. Also the way he interacts with guests sometimes very much creeps me out what with the fake-y handholding and physical contact that at times seems forced.

My mother often watches the show and I think you have to just have a brain to pick out the gems from the load of garbage. I've seen a lot of useful stuff mixed in there. It's often pushed aside for the "sensational" part of the show, but he still gets it in.

I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it, but since my mother has it on and I usually do my work in the living room, I happen to catch some of it

Yesterday for example, he had a small segment where people who lost a lot of weight came in and showed off things they found that made it easier to lose weight. One woman who lost 185 pounds showed off this machine that could instantly make frozen fruit into a nice, ice-cream like treat and it's just made out of fruit. It was certainly something I'd like to try (I LOVE fruit) and it seemed a bit easier to work than my ice cream maker.

I saw an ep where he said he was against the HCG diet based on the requirement that you eat only about 500 calories a day.
But he did have people on that show who were saying how they loved the diet and showing their dramatic before and after pictures.
I too used to love Dr. Oz and use to DVR when I was at work, I barely watch it now.

I'm a big fan of the Berkeley Wellness Letter, from the University of California- Berkeley. They do a fantastic job of covering the latest health advice and sift the hype from reality. One of the articles in the October issue covered a supplement that was mentioned on Dr. Oz recently. They ended the article with:

As for the Dr. Oz and Oprah shows, they may be good entertainment but their medical advice is often questionable.

I have not been a big fan of Dr. Oz , I think he is more interested in getting ratings than giving good solid medical advice.

I just heard a podcast about how the amino acids craze was very 1980s -- and Oz is constantly pushing one called Arginine -- except that they're good for heart health. Shall I say I'd really like to see his investment portfolio, especially regarding all these supplements he's hawking. Also now his daughter, who is only 24, is the "healthy living" co-host on another ABC show. She's actually very likable and dynamic, but doesn't seem to have all that much information. She wrote a "best-selling" book on avoiding the freshman 15 weight gain...however, she has, er, never been mentioned in the NY Times, which is *the* source of the bestseller list. So it was a best seller somewhere, but not nationally. And although she does look healthy, she's a bit chunky for someone specializing in weight control. Or maybe I've just been hitting the "Instyle" mag too often...

His daughter's book is called "The Dorm Room Diet" but he is listed as a co-author. Amazon does have it listed as a best seller.

I think with Dr. Oz, or any celebrity, you have to glean the good from the bad in what they say. I will still read the articles he's featured in but I'm going to use my own common sense.

@EagleRiver, I must say Daphne's book does look pretty good and fills a niche that no one thought of before. Dr. Oz wrote the foreword, which is legitimate standard procedure for anyone to boost sales -- get an authority or expert to write it and gain more credibility and publicity.

I'm an author, and I just get so peeved when someone's marketing machine mis-uses "best-selling..." Every book on Amazon has a "Best Selling Rank," even if they're #2,000,000 in sales. It's a big joke among authors that you're hunched over the computer googling your ranking right after pub date, LOL!

Daphne's book is currently about #20,000, and only has 24 reader reviews (a least a few of which may have been placed by her publisher and friends), which is by no means a bestseller -- I'm not arguing, it just annoys me that it's marketed that way. (My first book is pretty old and started out in the 1,000s and currently in the #300,000s lol, but still has a "best sellers rank!"

Mine has fallen on and off various Amazon "best sellers in X category" as nearly everyone's book does...but I never got to the status of one of my friends, who's been on the NY Times bestseller list with a fun book about dogs for over a year. Amazon has all kinds of really obscure "best seller lists" like those for five-legged Minotaurs who live in Lichtenstein and love gilded marshmallow-almond s'mores. I exaggerate -- but almost anyone can claim the status however the gold standard of the pub industry is the NY Times list, followed by things like Publishers Weekly and the now-defunct Kirkus reviews.

Anyway, forgive me for ranting. It does look like a good book and I wish her well! (And you too -- kudos on your weight loss so far!)

@Crimsons- rants are okay! You're among friends. Besides, I just learned a lot about the publishing world that I didn't know. Thanks!

I do like some things about Dr. Oz's show but I just pick and choose what I want to know more about and then I do my own research.

I did find the WW show to be bothersome for the same reasons as Kaplods mentioned.

Then there are all the endless supplements! My goodness, according to his show there are a million and one supplements that we can take just for benefiting weight loss! I did buy some supplements that he recommended on his show and I didn't notice any difference in my weight loss. It was a waste of money. That doesn't mean that it wouldn't help someone else, but after that, I decided to not pay a whole lot of attention to the supplement advice either.

Honestly, I'm burned out with his show. I do TiVo it so that if there's a topic I'm interested in, I'll skim through it but overall, it's not the high quality show I wish it were. I think what made Oprah successful is that she didn't talk down to her audience. She assumed the audience was intelligent. I don't think Dr. Oz's show has that same assumption in mind. It's too gimmicky in my opinion.

I mostly agree, except that it seems to me, that as a physician (speaking as such, giving medical advice), Dr. Oz. should be held to a different standard than Paris Hilton.


But that's not how "edutainment" works, and I'm not sure that the average viewer realizes just how crazy some of his advice is, because he seems so caring, intelligent and sincere (he does have charisma).

And he also has an incredible talent at making nonsense sound reasonable, so it takes more than common sense to evaluate his advice. Much of what he says, you'd have to go to medical school to be able to evaluate.

In getting my BA and MA degrees in psychology, I had to take undergraduate and graduate coursework in bioology, chemistry, physiology, research methods, statistics and the psychology coursework also covered a good deal of human development, physiology (mostly brain physiology) and even nutrition.

Without that background, I'd have no way of "gleaning" the good from the bad. And even with it, I can easily get caught up in "hey that sounds perfectly reasonable," until I go looking for the science behind his recommendations (and again I need my science background to evaluate what I see online - because crackpot theories often have a lot of self-proclaimed experts "supporting" them. Recognizing fact from crackpot theory isn't easy without a strong science background, which most people do not have).