Noom Announces: We’re Not a Diet – We’re a Pill Mill?

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Noom has announced the start of Noom Med, a division focused on selling diet drugs. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Weight Watchers just did the exact same thing.

Like Weight Watchers, Noom built their business on the lie that they could create significant long-term weight loss based on a questionable 9-month study and doling out weight loss advice that had been debunked since at least the 1980’s.

Here’s what they have to say about their new model:

How is Noom’s approach different?

We believe the best outcomes combine both biology AND psychology. We think medication can be a powerful tool that can be prescribed by qualified clinicians, but it needs to be paired with long-term behavior change to be sustainable—which is and always has been an underlying foundation for weight loss.

Note their use of “we believe” and “we think…” which is not remotely the same as “we have even a little bit of evidence that shows…”

But, as we know, they aren’t very attached to concepts like “evidence-based claims” or “ethics.” For example, their claim that behavior change is the underlying foundation for sustainable weight loss is refuted by about one hundred years of data.

Noom points to the study “Weight loss maintenance after a digital commercial behavior change program (Noom Weight): Observational cross-sectional survey study” as proof of its “long track record of success” Let’s take a look.

Let’s start with the conflict of interest statement:

Authors C.N.M., M.C.-M., A.S.H., M.M., C.C., K.B., P.B., and A.M. are employees at Noom Inc. in the Academic Research department and have received salary and stock options for their employment. Authors H.B. and E.S.M. were employees at Noom at the time of the manuscript. This study was funded by Noom, which did not (other than the specific authors listed above) play a role in the study's design, execution, analyses, interpretation of the data, or the decision to publish the results.

It's the “other than the specific authors above” that makes this art. Other than our employees being in charge of study design, execution, analyses, interpretation of the data, and the decision to publish results, we had absolutely nothing to do with this study.

So what did the study find?

75% of individuals maintained at least 5% weight loss after 1 year, and 49% maintained 10% weight loss. On average, 65% of initial weight loss was maintained after 1 year and 57% after 2 years.

So 25% of people didn’t even manage to lose 5% and everyone else was steadily regaining.

It’s not that Noom doesn’t understand the research, it’s that they want to use it for profit.

First of all, they are relying on the debunked claim that 5-10% weight loss will create health benefits.

Next, they know that almost everyone loses some weight in the first year, and almost everyone gains it back by year five, they even mention it in their study introduction. Then they only examine two years of weight loss data, sparing themselves the truth about years 3-5.

They cite the National Weight Control Registry, which is just embarrassingly bad science.

But the real manipulation comes from bragging about the fact that weight regain was trending up when they stopped their study, because that’s exactly what they are doing.

For 81% of the people, the amount of weight-loss maintained was self-reported which creates a lot of variables. Also, there was no control for people who were on the lower weight section of another weight loss/ weight cycling attempt.

Still, even if we believe that this weight loss was all from participation in Noom, on average people had regained 35% of their weight by year one, and 43% of their weight by year two, right on track for full regain in five years.

These are the people we’re supposed to trust to dole out potentially dangerous weight loss medication that doesn’t have a much better track record of long-term success for a membership fee of $120/month?

I’ll pass.

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*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.