There is something soothing about simplicity…knowing results follow a single easy step. People don’t want to have to think too deeply or make too many choices; they want convenience. The office supply superstore Staples caters to this attitude, promising the epitome of ease by pressing a giant red “EASY” button in their commercials. Yet, most other aspects of life are complicated by the confusing variety of options. Unfortunately, when there are so many options, people suffer from a paralysis of choice. It is the same paradox identified by author Barry Schwartz in his aptly named book,

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.

In some ways, weight loss has suffered from the paradox of choice as well. On any given day, there is a new report of why one diet works or the other doesn’t. Fat-loss drugs and supplements are touted as miracles in ads and defamed as useless or even dangerous in editorials. Physicians and scientists offer convincing studies of effective diets and drugs, but it does not help that the experts so commonly contradict each other. If science truly wished to make a contribution to the American public, it would find one act that was powerful enough to make a difference in weight loss. Something simple that would drop the scale another couple pounds without any mental or physical effort. This is the allure of fat-loss drugs and supplements; a simple decision to pop a pill or take an injection daily greatly improving one’s odds of achieving weight-loss success. However, the effective drugs and supplements have all been taken off the market due to safety concerns and the dubious promotion of the fat-blocker Alli, which is described as only working if you do, makes one wonder if excess fat is a divine punishment.2 Have mortals been sentenced to carry thick layers of fat much like the hypocrites residing in the eighth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno? [People who did not practice what they preached were forced to spend all eternity walking about in golden cloaks that were lined with lead, never allowed to rest.]

Fortunately, the sins of the flesh are not permanently retained in the flesh, so it is possible to shed excess weight, but how? What is the simple choice that can result in dropping a couple extra pounds? Believe it or not, the answer discovered by an international group of researchers was not an exotic African plant or a colloidal mineral. Instead, the group, headed by Professor Thorsdottir of the University of Iceland, learned that simply adding fish to the diet was all it took to increase weight loss in men on a hypocaloric diet. The design of the study was very simple. The men were measured and randomly divided into four groups. All the subjects were placed on hypocaloric diets (diets that contained fewer calories than the person burns in 24 hours) that resulted in a 600-calorie daily deficit. The groups differed as to whether they were allowed to consume any fish products. The first group ate no fish products, the second ate three meals a week with a lean fish (3 X 150 grams of cod, roughly 5½ ounces per meal), the third group ate three meals a week with a fatty fish (3 X 150 grams of salmon) and the fourth received six fish oil capsules daily.

The researchers followed the men for eight weeks, recording weight loss and using lab tests to confirm compliance with the diet (if they were eating the fish or taking the capsules). As expected, all the men lost a significant amount of weight by following a hypocaloric diet. After all, the foundation of weight loss is always taking in fewer calories than one burns throughout the day. As a group, the men lost an average of 14 pounds in eight weeks. Clearly, these were motivated subjects, as many weight-loss studies fail to show any benefit, because many people fail to follow the guidelines.