The diet industry, broadly speaking, is among the most tenacious and unrelenting sectors of the economy.

No matter how many times some new diet fad is revealed to be a useless waste of time, they keep coming up with new systems for eating and losing weight, even though they all pretty much fail completely.

Give them credit for sticking with it!

This has gotta be a hard one to take, though. It had so much promise!

The weight-loss idea is quite appealing: Limit your eating to a period of six to eight hours each day, during which you can have whatever you want.

Studies in mice seemed to support so-called time-restricted eating, a form of the popular intermittent fasting diet. Small studies of people with obesity suggested it might help shed pounds.

But now, a rigorous one-year study in which people followed a low-calorie diet between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. or consumed the same number of calories anytime during the day has failed to find an effect.

The bottom line, said Dr. Ethan Weiss, a diet researcher at the University of California, San Francisco: "There is no benefit to eating in a narrow window."

For real?? There's "no benefit to eating in a narrow window??"

Here's the rundown:

The study, published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, was led by researchers at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, and included 139 people with obesity. Women ate 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day, and men consumed 1,500 to 1,800 calories daily. To ensure compliance, participants were required to photograph every bit of food they ate and to keep food diaries.

Both groups lost weight — an average of about 14 to 18 pounds — but there was no significant difference in the amounts of weight lost with either diet strategy. There also were no significant differences between the groups in measures of waist circumference, body fat and lean body mass.

Sounds about right. If you're eating just 1,500 calories a day, you're going to lose weight. Those are sub-maintenance levels of caloric intake and you're going to shed the pounds no matter what time of day you eat.

Diets are no good. That seems obvious at this point. What may be less obvious is this: In general, if you want to eat healthy—and you have no specific dietary/medical needs—all you have to do is:

• Follow a normal schedule of three meals a day, with reasonable portions, made from good high-quality ingredients.
• If you want to lose weight, eat a little fewer calories at every meal. If you want to gain a few pounds, eat a little more.
• Eat with other people whenever possible.
• Snack very minimally.

Is that it??

Also, start placing your bets now on the next diet fad that won't make it past trials!

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