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14.11.2014

Slimming effect of Green Coffee Bean: study was fake

Sometimes you post a blog entry that you later regret. Sometimes you realise in retrospect that the tone of an article totally missed the mark. That's what happened to us with the post on the slimming effect of Green Coffee Bean extract that we wrote in the summer of 2013. We had serious doubts about the credibility of the stuff, but we chose to write in an understated and only mildly critical style. We now deeply regret this: we should have shot the fraudsters down in flames.

Imposters
Our post discussed a study that had been published in 2012 in Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity: Targets and Therapy. The website of this journal published a short announcement recently: "The sponsors of the study cannot assure the validity of the data so we, Joe Vinson and Bryan Burnham, are retracting the paper", it states. [dovepress.com 16 October 2014] Vinson and Burnham are the first authors of the study.

That the researchers have retracted their study is not as heroic as it sounds. They had no choice. Six weeks earlier the American Federal Trade Commission announced that the sponsor of the unlikely study was guilty of fraud [ftc.gov September 8, 2014] and had paid a settlement of 3.5 million dollars. The company in question is the Texas-based Applied Food Sciences, a manufacturer of Green Coffee Bean.

Cooking the figures
Below we've reproduced a few excerpts from the FTC report on the study that Applied Food Sciences commissioned in India. The researchers made such a mess of the first version of the study that no journal was willing to publish it.

Applied Food Sciences then hired in Joe Vinson and Bryan Burnham to brush up the report. On top of that, the researchers in India also massaged their data again. And again. And again. And...

GCA = Applied Food Sciences' Green Coffee Bean. We've added underlining and highlighting.

Yep, you read it right. "The study either was never conducted or suffers from flaws so severe that no competent and reliable conclusions can be drawn from it."

Dr Oz
The whole affair received a lot of attention in the US and UK media because Mehmet Oz promoted the research that Applied Food Sciences had funded in his Dr. Oz talk show. [cbsnews.com October 20, 2014] [dailymail.co.uk 21 October 2014]

In the summer of this year Oz defended his promotion of slimming supplements in his shows at a US Senate hearing on diet scams [cbsnews.com June 17, 2014], saying that he doesn't sell supplements, doesn't accept money from manufacturers and that websites and supplements labels using his name to promote their products are illegal.

Source:
FTC.gov September 8, 2014.

More:
Green Coffee Bean extract makes weight loss diet more effective 18.09.2013