Is this being sold to people who care if it works?

The Marlborough Express has a story today that begins

Kaye Nicholls tried every diet in the book without success but a fat-busting capsule produced by a Blenheim company has proved the catalyst for her weight loss.

The 54-year-old has shed a whopping 13.5 kilograms in eight weeks as part of the company’s “fat mates” trial in Blenheim.

It’s presumably no coincidence that this story appears on January 2nd, ready to exploit the New Year’s Resolution wave of dieters.

As you will have guessed, Ms Nicholls weight loss wasn’t typical. We aren’t told what the average weight loss was, just

“Tuatara Natural Products director Neil Charles-Jones said half the people on the trial lost an average of 5kg and the top 25 per cent shed more than 7kg.

That is, the average was 5kg loss among the 50% who lost the most — as far as we can tell from the story, the loss averaged over everyone could be zero.

Not only are we not told the average, the trial was uncontrolled, which makes it hard to tell how much of any benefit was due to the pill and how much just to starting a weight loss program.  The company does know that this is a problem, and so does the journalist, because the story actually says

Weight loss results were being sent to a bio-analyst to compare the capsule with the placebo effect and conclusions would be drawn by mid January.

You might wonder how they’re doing the comparison. The best way would be to look at how much weight is lost in people trying new, ineffective, weight loss products in uncontrolled trials. Slightly less good would be to use data from the placebo arm of controlled trials — it wouldn’t be as good, because we’re trying for a fair comparison, and this wasn’t a controlled trial.

However the analysis is being done, it is being done. The results will be available in a couple of weeks. If you cared about whether these pills really work, that would be the time to report the results.

If this were a medicine, controlled trials would be needed before it could be advertised and sold: the FDA criteria are weight loss of at least 5% persisting for at least a year.  It would also be illegal to use testimonials in advertising it. As it is, I’d guess a paper would think twice about accepting this story if it were a paid ad.

What’s really upsetting about the story is that this isn’t just pseudoscience. Tuatara Natural Products has public funding through both Plant & Food and Callaghan Innovation. Their product has a sensible mechanism (inhibition of α-amylase in the gut to slow down carbohydrate absorption). They should be interested in doing better.

(note: JohnPickering has a grumpier post about the same story)