Slim-Fast

Slim-Fast is a line of meal-replacement products marketed to people who wish to lose weight. The first Slim-Fast product on the market was the Slim-Fast powdered shake formula, introduced in 1977 by S. [Page 694]Daniel Abraham. The company Slim-Fast Foods was spun off in 1990 from Abraham's company Thompson Medical, and was bought by Unilever in 2000 for about $2.3 billion. At the time of the sale, the worldwide sales of Slim-Fast products were valued at over $610 million per year. Slim-Fast currently sells food replacement products, including shakes, shake powders, and snack bars under the brand names Slim-Fast, Ultra Slim-Fast, and Optima.

Slim-Fast markets a number of products and promotes several diet plans. The company Web site promotes weight loss as part of a healthy lifestyle, and includes a great deal of standard health behavior advice, such as including physical activity as part of one's daily schedule and avoiding consuming empty calories from soft drinks. It also includes tools that could be useful to any individual wishing to lose weight (without regard to purchasing Slim-Fast products), such as a body mass index (BMI) calculator and an interface to create an exercise program and track one's activity level. This standard information is intermingled with promotion for Slim-Fast products and related materials such as success stories of people who have lost weight using them, and access to some of the health-related materials requires registering with the Web site.

The original Slim-Fast product was the Slim-Fast shake, which was intended to be used as a partial meal-replacement system within a diet plan. The Slim-Fast dieter was instructed to consume a Slim-Fast shake each for breakfast and lunch, and have a low-calorie dinner of conventional food. This type of diet has been shown to produce larger weight losses than diets that allow individuals to select conventional foods whose total calories add up to the same amount. They have also been shown to be effective in maintaining weight loss. The primary explanation for this phenomenon is obese people typically underestimate their caloric intake, sometimes by as much as 50 percent, so that if allowed to choose their own foods, they actually consume far more calories than specified by their diet plan.

Use of meal replacements such as Slim-Fast shakes removes this difficulty by presenting the individual with a fixed portion for each meal. In addition, use of meal replacements removes many of the emotional connections people have with food, and the monotony of consuming the same food every day removes the temptation to consume more than prescribed, so the dieter is not distracted from his or her goal of consuming only a fixed amount.

Slim-Fast has diversified its product line over the years, partly in response to the popularity of low-carbohydrate diets, and currently markets five lines of products. In general, all Slim-Fast products are calorie-controlled meal-replacement products that include fiber and are fortified with micronutrients (vitamins and minerals). Slim-Fast Original products include shakes which contain 220 calories and 10 grams of protein and are fortified with a number of vitamins and minerals; and meal bars of a similar nutritional makeup, and breakfast and lunch bars which are intended to be consumed with 8 ounces of skim milk: the bars themselves are 140 or 150 calories, and when consumed with milk the total becomes 230 or 240 calories.

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