Green tea Phytosome - thoughts?

lisaepell
lisaepell Posts: 103 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Someone tried to sell me a product yesterday, Thermofight X, which seems like every other supplement on the market. But I looked at the ingredients, for mere intellectual curiosity and came across an article about Green Tea Phytosomes that was done by NIH - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848081/ - which seemed to indicate that when combined with a lower calorie diet and regular exercise, the supplement seemed to help the study participants lose more weight and had other health benefits as well.

Has anyone heard anything about this supplement? There are Green Tea Phytosome supplements on the market without caffeine and other additives, while the more commercial ones, like Thermofight, have caffeine, etc.

For the haters, I firmly believe in CICO and strength training and I'm not looking for a quick fix, I'm just curious.

Replies

  • MichelleSilverleaf
    MichelleSilverleaf Posts: 2,027 Member
    Not sure if 50 participants is indicative of a good study.
  • lisaepell
    lisaepell Posts: 103 Member
    mph323 wrote: »
    "Someone tried to sell me a product yesterday". This is always a giant red flag, and congratulations on going straight to researching the product.

    Studies like this one are virtually useless in isolation. There are too many uncontrolled variables to be able to point to one component being the cause of any changes observed in the subjects. Almost all of these studies involve weight loss as well as whatever item is under test, and weight loss alone can result in positive results. If you look, you will see infinite studies conducted in exactly the same way, all testing different substances and all resulting in weight loss and improved labs. The take-away, in my opinion, is that in such small studies so many other factors can be at play that affect the outcome that unless there are multiple other studies confirming the result, the information is useless.

    Thanks for the insight!
  • Maxxitt
    Maxxitt Posts: 1,281 Member
    So it's an interesting and well designed study, but it's only one, it's small, and there wasn't any information on how the study was funded (conflicts of interest? we don't know). If you're interested enough, you can see what other work has been done since that 2013 study, but my guess is that if the supplement were really the "magic bullet" there would have been a boat load of publicity about it by now.
  • earlnabby
    earlnabby Posts: 8,171 Member
    Maxxitt wrote: »
    So it's an interesting and well designed study, but it's only one, it's small, and there wasn't any information on how the study was funded (conflicts of interest? we don't know). If you're interested enough, you can see what other work has been done since that 2013 study, but my guess is that if the supplement were really the "magic bullet" there would have been a boat load of publicity about it by now.

    and more confirmation studies
  • Johnd2000
    Johnd2000 Posts: 198 Member
    Isn’t that the Green Tea extract that can cause liver and kidney failure?
  • 1BlueAurora
    1BlueAurora Posts: 439 Member
    I think the weight you lose will be from your wallet.
  • PWRLFTR1
    PWRLFTR1 Posts: 324 Member
    lisaepell wrote: »
    Someone tried to sell me a product yesterday, Thermofight X, which seems like every other supplement on the market. But I looked at the ingredients, for mere intellectual curiosity and came across an article about Green Tea Phytosomes that was done by NIH - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848081/ - which seemed to indicate that when combined with a lower calorie diet and regular exercise, the supplement seemed to help the study participants lose more weight and had other health benefits as well.

    Has anyone heard anything about this supplement? There are Green Tea Phytosome supplements on the market without caffeine and other additives, while the more commercial ones, like Thermofight, have caffeine, etc.

    For the haters, I firmly believe in CICO and strength training and I'm not looking for a quick fix, I'm just curious.

  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,865 Member
    Johnd2000 wrote: »
    Isn’t that the Green Tea extract that can cause liver and kidney failure?

    I think you're thinking of garcinia cambogia.

    As to the OP, my only thought would be that all of the participants had metabolic syndrome which is an inflamatory conditions. My dad ended up with it and had a hell of a time losing weight. Green tea, and green tea extract are very well known for the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties so perhaps this helped to lose weight a little easier by bringing that inflammation down. That said...and maybe I'm not reading this right, but in looking at the numbers, they don't seem significantly different from the control group and the test group.
  • janejellyroll
    janejellyroll Posts: 25,763 Member
    cwolfman13 wrote: »
    Johnd2000 wrote: »
    Isn’t that the Green Tea extract that can cause liver and kidney failure?

    I think you're thinking of garcinia cambogia.

    As to the OP, my only thought would be that all of the participants had metabolic syndrome which is an inflamatory conditions. My dad ended up with it and had a hell of a time losing weight. Green tea, and green tea extract are very well known for the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties so perhaps this helped to lose weight a little easier by bringing that inflammation down. That said...and maybe I'm not reading this right, but in looking at the numbers, they don't seem significantly different from the control group and the test group.

    Green tea extract has also been linked to liver problems: https://www.shape.com/blogs/shape-your-life/when-green-tea-bad-thing

  • hypocacculus
    hypocacculus Posts: 68 Member
    edited February 2019
    I'd take it with an enormous pinch of salt, including that very convincing looking scientific article. It is illegal (in the UK at least) to promote a substance as any kind of health aid until you have a full suite of clinical trials demonstrating efficacy and safety and you've jumped through various legislative hoops. However, it is not illegal to sell a substance that makes no claims on the packet, but then quietly go off and write a book, or learned looking articles, easily found on the internet, claiming that said substance has a desirable effect. This approach sells almost every alternative supplement on the planet that cannot make it through the clinical trials. (What do you call an alternative therapy that actually works? Medicine!)

    The fact that the article uses the trade name of the supplement strikes me as a red flag; normally, just the generic name of the active ingredient under scrutiny would be given, with the actual brand used tucked in an appendix somewhere. The article came from a journal called "Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine". A quick sniff around produced this: "One of the founding editors, Professor Edzard Ernst, has described the journal as "useless rubbish", primarily due to ineffective peer review."

    https://edzardernst.com/2016/05/ebcam-an-alt-med-journal-that-puzzles-me-a-great-deal/

    Now Professor Ernst himself is often under fire for his attacks on alternative medicine, or bizarrely, sometimes for not attacking it enough. There is a war of words out there. Who do we believe?

    The problem (or absolutely fantastic thing, depending on your point of view) is that anybody can write a scientific paper, and anybody can publish a journal and anybody can publicise the results; for this reason in any branch of science, there tends to be a pecking order of journals, ranging from the top journals which publish potentially Nobel prize winning work and are peer reviewed by the best in the field, through to obscure journals published by shady organisations and peer reviewed by the editors dog. The value of any piece of published research is determined by being scrutinised very carefully by other scientists and further trials done to see if the results can be replicated. Peer review is at the heart of science. Nothing is taken on face value. The more extraordinary the claim, the more solid the evidence has to be. In this case, if the peer review of the journal is as worthless as claimed, nothing it publishes can be believed. It's not a perfect system but it's the best we have.

    The bottom line is that one published scientific article does not the truth make. Wait until there is a slew of peer reviewed research before parting with your hard earned.

    If you actually read this far, please accept the undying gratitude of a very jaded scientist.
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 9,282 Member
    N= 50 over 6 months is a very small study.
    Each group ie control and test group, will only have 25 people. Small numbers are very subject to statistical anomaly.

    Have just been to a seminar looking at results of a study ( about COPD medication effectiveness ) and study had 70,000 patients over 12 month period.

    All variables had to be accounted for - ie double blind ( neither participants nor administrators of each side know who is getting treatment vs placebo or, in cases where treatment cannot safely be stopped, who is getting new treatment vs existing standard treatment)

    Curious as to whether participants and administrators in this study were subject to that. Ie control group are getting some 'fake green tea' placebo that neither they nor the administrators know is not the real thing.
    Or did one side just have green tea and the other not - which isn't a real control as is subject to drinking or not drinking the tea changing the behaviour of the participants and that behaviour being the real difference rather than the tea.

    Just some interesting thoughts.

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