German Scientists Have Found That Many Food Supplements For Weight Loss Are No Better Than Placebo

German Scientists Have Found That Many Food Supplements For Weight Loss Are No Better Than Placebo.
A weighty copy of weight-loss supplements don't appear to slave any better than placebos (or fake supplements) at helping men and women shed pounds, a new study has found. German researchers tested placebos against weight-loss supplements that are dominant in Europe. The supplements were touted as having these ingredients: L-Carnitine, polyglucosamine, cabbage powder, guarana provocation powder, bean extract, Konjac extract, fiber, sodium alginate and non-fluctuating plant extracts.

So "We found that not a single product was any more effective than placebo pills in producing bulk loss over the two months of the study, regardless of how it claims to work," said researcher Thomas Ellrott, chairperson of the Institute for Nutrition and Psychology at the University of Gottingen Medical School in Germany, in a advice release from the International Congress on Obesity in Stockholm, Sweden. The researchers tested the products and placebos on 189 paunchy or overweight people, of whom 74 percent finished the eight-week study.

The Placebo Effect Is Maintained Even While Informing The Patient

The Placebo Effect Is Maintained Even While Informing The Patient.
Confronting the "ethically questionable" drill of prescribing placebos to patients who are unknowing they are taking reprint pills, researchers found that a group that was told their medication was fake still reported significant symptom relief. In a analysis of 80 patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a control group received no therapy while the other group was informed their twice-daily pill regimen were placebos. After three weeks, nearly enlarge the number of those treated with dummy pills reported adequate symptom relief compared to the hold back group.

Those taking the placebos also doubled their rates of improvement to an almost equivalent level of the effects of the most authoritative IBS medications, said lead researcher Dr Ted Kaptchuk, an associate professor of medication at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. A 2008 deliberate over in which Kaptchuk took part showed that 50 percent of US physicians privately give placebos to unsuspecting patients.

Kaptchuk said he wanted to find out how patients would react to placebos without being deceived. Multiple studies have shown placebos make use of for certain patients, and the power of positive thinking has been credited with the suspect "placebo effect. This wasn't supposed to happen," Kaptchuk said of his results. "It undeniably threw us off".

The test group, whose average age was 47, was on the whole women recruited from advertisements and referrals for "a novel mind-body management study of IBS," according to the study, reported online in the Dec 22, 2010 appear of the journal PLoS ONE, which is published by the Public Library of Science. Prior to their indefinite assignment to the placebo or control group, all patients were told that the placebo pills contained no realized medication. Not only were the placebos described truthfully as lackadaisical pills similar to sugar pills, but the bottle they came in was labeled "Placebo".