SENSA DIET INFORMATION

As Americans fight the battle of the bulge, weight loss products continue to flood the market. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 68 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, and the numbers continue to climb each year. The Sensa diet is a weight loss method developed by neurologist Alan Hirsch, a smell- and taste-related disorders specialist, who proposes that manipulating your sense of smell can curb your appetite.

Concept

The Sensa diet concept is based on your body's smell and taste mechanism. The Sensa diet creator proposes that enhancing your sense of smell will expedite the process that leaves you feeling full. Hirsch created powdered smell-enhancing seasonings called Tastants you sprinkle on your food before eating. Tastants come in two forms, one for salty foods and one for sweet foods. According to Hirsch, using them will decrease the amount of food you eat each day, leading to weight loss.

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Claims

The Sensa creator claims you can lose weight without changing your eating habits or exercising and encourages you to eat anything you want, as long as you sprinkle Tastants on your food beforehand. The company, Sensa Products, LLC, says creator Hirsch has conducted 25 years of ongoing research and boasts of a six-month clinical trial including over 1,400 participants who lost an average of 15 percent of their body weight.

Clinical Data

The clinical trial the product's effectiveness hinges on is questionable, since results were not published in a clinical journal and thus were not subject to peer review. Peer review is a process of evaluation conducted to ensure the articles a journal publishes are of high quality. Unpublished clinical trials hold very little weight since they are unverifiable. The results of Sensa's clinical trial are not available to the public either, so there's no way to verify the claims made.

Bottom Line

The method used in Sensa's clinical trial is questionable. Patients took Sensa at home, weighed themselves at home and reported their own results, which is not a reliable method of conducting a clinical trial. According to the Mayo Clinic, there is no clear evidence that Sensa leads to significant, sustainable weight loss. A more reliable method of weight loss includes healthy eating habits, a reduction in caloric intake and a regular exercise regimen.