Bogus Green Coffee Extract Claim

We would like to alert our readers to a bogus green coffee extract claim. In 2012 we published an article entitled, Lose Weight with Coffee Bean Extract.

A chemist in Pennsylvania reports that when sixteen volunteers lost weight when they took a gram of green coffee bean extract daily for five months. According to the study report the volunteers were in their twenties and all overweight. These folks did not change their diets or the amount of exercise that they did, or didn’t, engage in. According to researchers there were no ill effects on the volunteers’ blood pressure readings or heart rate. The average weight loss in this study was just over ten pounds.

In 2013 we wrote about organic green coffee extract.

What Joy Is There in Taking a Pill?

Health benefits aside most folks drink coffee because they like the aroma and taste as well the wake up effect. There is a degree of sadness to distilling the benefits of coffee into a pill to be taken once, twice, or three times a day. After all one can buy caffeine pills to stay awake. Truckers and college students have been doing this for years. Our vote is obviously for the hot cup of freshly roasted organic coffee or even the lukewarm coffee in a thermos over popping a pill. There are a lot of folks selling organic green coffee extract. If you do go this route, look to see if they are certified. It is easy to claim to be organic but they need to have the USDA seal to show that their product is organic from start to finish!

Trusting in the researchers we published these articles. OOPS!

Bogus Green Coffee Extract Claim

The Federal Trade Commission has levied a fine of $3.5 million on Applied Food Sciences, the company that sponsored the study claiming that green coffee extract resulted in weight loss. Here is a quote from the FTC.

…the study’s lead investigator repeatedly altered the weights and other key measurements of the subjects, changed the length of the trial, and misstated which subjects were taking the placebo or GCA during the trial. When the lead investigator was unable to get the study published, the FTC says that AFS hired researchers Joe Vinson and Bryan Burnham at the University of Scranton to rewrite it. Despite receiving conflicting data, Vinson, Burnham, and AFS never verified the authenticity of the information used in the study, according to the complaint.

Despite the study’s flaws, AFS used it to falsely claim that GCA caused consumers to lose 17.7 pounds, 10.5 percent of body weight, and 16 percent of body fat with or without diet and exercise, in 22 weeks, the complaint alleges.

The point of all this is that researchers in India fudged the results of their study and no one followed up. This was a bogus green coffee extract claim and should be ignored. If you purchased any green coffee extract for the purpose of losing weight you may want to ask for, or demand, your money back.




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