shakran

Bullshit #1.

OK, so it's not a system, and they're putting whatever crap they can legally get away with in the country they're selling it and calling it the same thing. If peanuts are illegal in Canada I can't stuff grapes in a jar and call it peanut butter.

Bullshit #2.

Synephrine raises your blood pressure. You do not want to be messing with something that screws with your circulatory system.

The site also fails to mention that this citrus extract also contains Octopamine, which is a relative of Synephrine. Both have been shown to be effective at burning a specific kind of fat in lab tests on dogs. This fat is called brown adipose tissue. Unfortunately, adult humans do not have brown adipose tissue, so unless you're giving it to your fat dog, it's not going to do any good.


Bullshit #3.

That study is the only one that has been done on 7-keto. It was a two month study in which the people taking 7-keto were significantly more overweight than the control group that was not taking 7-keto. That changed the experiment. Instead of "will the drug make people lose weight faster," the question changed to "can fatter people lose more fat than thinner people?" Rhetorical questions are not generally condusive to scientifically valid experiments.

Bullshit #4.

This statement shows that this kid isn't scientifically reviewing anything he tests. He's going based on perception. If you're willing to put your health and possibly your life on the line based on what some dude posting to the internet thinks he might notice about the drug, well, there's not much help for ya then.

Bullshit #5.

This is like the guy who says "I can get yellow paint by mixing white and pink paint together" and then when he goes to prove it he says "of course it won't work unless I put a bunch of yellow in there too."

Diet and exercise will cause you to lose weight whether you take some magic pill or not. Therefore the magic pill is not necessary, even if it does have a small effect. (if it had a better than negligible effect, do you really think a real drug company wouldn't have noticed this, patented it, and now be selling it to you for $200 a bottle?).

Bullshit #6.

That study was done by the Minnesota Applied Research Center. MARC is a business which specializes in "testing" dietary supplements. It's affiliated with Health Strategy Consulting LLC, which is a marketing company specializing in helping supplement companies sell their products. MARC's clinical trial department is not run by a doctor. It is run by a nurse who has had physician assistant training (but has not actually gotten the creds to be a PA).

And this lack of competence from the top down shows in their study. They started with 47 subjects. 35 completed the study. This is an appallingly low number of subjects. It is laughable that they would even try to justify applying this to the entire human race.

This is the same study I mentioned above. The big thing they point out in this study is the reduction in hip circumference comparison between the control and the LS7 group. As I mentioned above, of course a fatter person will shrink more than a thinner person. They have more to shrink. They make sure to point out that there are no "statistically significant differences in any other outcome variable" but they specifically fail to mention input variables. In other words, they're trying to cover up the fact that they got a bunch of fat people to take LS7 and compared them to a bunch of less-fat people. To use technical terms, the entire study is suspect. To use frank terms, the entire study is bullshit.



Now that I've dissected some (not all) of the bullshit (oh there's LOTS more bullshit, but only so many minutes in a day to type it all out) hopefully you'll see that you are about to fall victim to a marketing ploy. And that's what these guys are banking on.

Countless ads in magazines and on TV tout the results of "clinical trials" to prove their product is effective at whatever they're claiming. An ad like that is relying on your gullability to sell the product. The questions that should immediately pop into your head when you see an ad like that is "what clinic? What were the parameters of the experiment? What are the qualifications of those conducting the experiment? Is there financial motivation to have the experiment come out a certain way?"

They can claim clinical trials all they want. They can even invent fancy names like "Applied Research Center." But all that fancy pseudo-scientific claptrap does not change the fact that it is a marketing firm getting paid to sell a product. Once you realize that, you hopefully will take these claims with a very large grain of salt.

(here comes a bit of a rant. Consider yourself warned.)

And regarding the diet pill industry in general, I mentioned the phrase "magic pill" above. And that's exactly what people are looking for. They want that magic pill that will turn them into a lean muscle machine without actually having to work hard for it. I know you say you're going to diet and exercise but if that's true then why on earth do you need a pill? If the diet and exercise are going to result in you being thin and muscular, then a pill which makes you thin and muscular would be overkill. The real issue here is that you (and about a kajillion other people) are looking for that magic pill that will reduce the amount of effort you have to put out in order to achieve your goal. It all goes back to good old American values. Everything has to be easy. Hell even exercise machines are sold as being easy to work out on. Why the hell would you want an easy work out? If it's not easy, Americans don't want it. And this idiotic value system is a GOLDmine for advertisers and inventors. Roll up windows were too HARD to work in cars so they went to electric. But someone decided it was just too HARD to hold that button until the window went down so they made it so you only have to hit the button once for the window to go all the way down.

Someone decided making peanut butter sandwiches for the kids is too hard so they came out with this PB&J in a tortilla prepackaged abomination that looks like an albino hockey puck and tastes about the same, and costs as much as 5 good PB&J sandwiches. Why? Because it's so much easier to take a pre-made thing and throw it in the kid's lunch box. Actually doing something about making his lunch would be too HARD and that goes against our value system. Go wander through a store some time and look at the boxes. A great many of them will have something somewhere on the product that tells you how easy or simple it is to do whatever the product is for.

And this value system is especially a goldmine in the diet industry because 1) losing weight is genuinely hard, unlike making peanut butter sandwiches and 2) the diet industry is prety much unregulated by any government agency, so they can get away with telling you anything they want, and putting anything they want in the product.

Let's look at how this and clever advertising works with this product.

With this specific pill they can put a tiny amount of the active ingredient, and then tell you that the active ingredient is in there. That's true, so they won't get nabbed by the federal trade commission for false advertising. Then they tell you the active ingredient's been shown to burn fat. That's also true (they cleverly avoid mentioning that it's only been shown to burn fat in dogs, and that it only burned a kind of fat that dogs have and people do not).

Then they say in their advertising (lifted from their site) "can help you safely burn bodyfat faster than you ever imagined!"

Let's dissect that.

CAN HELP you. . .

Those two words negate the rest of the sentence. They want you to think that you'll lose weight by taking this pill, but what they're really saying is something entirely different. A bottle of water CAN HELP you put out a forest fire, but in reality you won't notice the effects at all.

"faster than you ever imagined"

And exactly how fast is that? How fast do YOU imagine you can burn body fat? I bet it's different than how fast I imagine I can burn body fat. This is a statement that's considered so obviously exaggerated that they can get away with using it, even though it means nothing at all.

So now all we have left in the sentence is "safely." That's the only word they have to stand by because every other phrase is modified by something that negates it, or the phrase negates itself.

So as long as this pill doesn't actually kill you, they're in the clear from a truth in advertising standpoint.

I know this is kind of long, but you're falling into the same trap that people fall into all the time with advertising. It's a trap that no one needs to stumble into as long as they read the ad critically and figure out what the ad is really saying.

And what all these ads are saying is basically "hey, take this pill and we promise it won't kill you." Not exactly something I'd recommend you waste money on.