Fitness trackers don’t always have a lot of evidence to support the claims companies make about their health benefits, reports The Huffington Post.
“Many new technologies, and dietary supplements and new diets, are sold to the public with little actual research behind them. Wearable technology to encourage fitness is no different,” Aaron E. Carroll recently wrote in The New York Times, pointing to a study first reported on last year.
In fact, fitness tracker users lose less weight than people who track their activity manually through a website, according to a two-year weight loss study of nearly 500 overweight or obese adults.
The study, conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and published in JAMA in 2016, found that participants who relied on a fitness tracker to monitor weight loss actually lost, on average, more than 5 pounds less than similar participants who tracked their activity through a website.
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