The Coffee Bean

by **Admin** Thu Dec 22, 2016 9:00 pm

The Coffee Bean

[size=32]The Green Coffee Bean Experiment[/size]

Dr. Mehmet Oz hosts a popular TV show in which he promotes all sorts of medical treatments, some good and some - well, not so good. And once in a while, he tries to do a science experiment, as he did in 2011 with a badly flawed experiment on arsenic in apple juice.

Well, Dr. Oz has done it again. This time he wanted to re-examine a claim that he himself had made on an earlier show about green coffee bean extract.

In April 2012, Oz aired a segment on his TV show called "Green Coffee Bean Extract: The Fat Burner That Works!" On it he "this miracle pill can burn fat fast, for anyone who wants to lose weight." Not surprisingly, sales of green coffee bean extract skyrocketed in response.

"A marketing apocalypse was ignited!" Dr. Oz pointed out in his show in September of 2012. "I was surprised by the firestorm," he said.

Dr, Oz loves this topic, by the way. He's run dozens of shows on weight-loss gimmicks, such as "The New Silver Bullet for Weight Loss" in which he promoted a new diet pill called Qnexa, and "Ancient Ayurvedic Secrets to Lose Weight". But let's leave those for another day.

One problem with Oz's first green coffee bean show was that he based it on a study that has some serious problems. That study claimed that a particular brand of green coffee bean extract called GCA led to significant weight loss. Subjects lost a lot of weight, too: 8 kilograms (over 17 pounds) on average. Dr. Oz called it "a staggering, newly released study." Wow, must be good, right?

Let's look at that study, shall we? First, it only involved 16 people, a tiny sample. There were 3 treatments: high dose GCA, low dose GCA, and placebo. The subjects were divided into 3 even smaller groups, but not by treatment: instead, each group took all 3 treatments, for 6 weeks at a time, with a 2-week rest period in between. The only difference between groups was the order of the treatments (high-dose/low-dose/placebo).

Subjects in all 3 groups lost about the same amount of weight. What was the difference? Well, the authors claimed that the amount of weight loss during the periods when the subjects were taking GCA was greater than when they weren't, even though they lost weight even during placebo treatment.

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