You’re all individuals
The Herald is at least showing some scepticism about Italian-style patisserie that is supposed to make you lose weight (they include green tea and guarana, ie, caffeine). The manufacturer isn’t willing to give any numbers
But she said it was not possible to measure how much eating the treats would help boost the metabolism because ‘everyone is different’.
Of course, this is a pretty transparent excuse. If the fact that everyone is different made measurements impossible, medical science would be in a bad way. We can measure the average effect. We can measure the variability in the effect. We can measure the proportion of people helped. And we do all these things. For example, we’ve known for years that angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors reduce blood pressure on average by about 10mmHg. More recently, some Sydney researchers reanalyzed the data from the randomized trials to look at how much person-to-person variation in effect there was, and found it was extremely small.
The story goes on to say
Registered public health nutritionist Charlotte Stirling-Reed said that consumers should always look for evidence before making purchases based on health claims.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »