This review provides health care professionals with evidence-based data on the quality and efficacy of dietary supplements and alternative therapies purported to cause weight loss. Despite the high usage of these products, our data suggest a dearth of high-quality RCTs evaluating weight loss outcomes. 12 Popular Effective Fat Burning Supplements of 2022 Published studies are of small sample sizes, short study follow-up, and poor study design, and they often lead to inconsistent conclusions and reported results. Our findings underscore the need for well-designed and well-powered trials to minimize bias and provide definitive clinical efficacy.
This evaluation specifically focuses on the impact of supplements on weight and weight-related measures in adult patients with overweight and obesity. Society-based statements are dated as are two high-quality reviews published more than 15 years ago. These authors limited their scope to double-blind randomized trials, did not use PRISMA, and limited their analysis to specific compounds. A separate review of reviews excluded combination supplements ; however, it included only nine reviews of individual supplements and it too is more than 9 years old. Although several reviews on individual compounds are available, few in fact evaluated a spectrum of supplements as ours does.
Trials were published from different geographical regions of the world, with some dietary supplements or alternative therapies favoring certain regions over others. Despite this variation, it would be important to embrace cultural treatments using vigorous scientific inquiry. This includes increasing the sample size and study duration but also evaluating both homogeneous and heterogeneous ethnic and age-appropriate cohorts. Our evaluation suggests the importance of conducting appropriate statistical analyses for their design and oversight. Other studies assessed changes within but not across each arm. Others suggested statistically significant changes when there were none, or, in our assessment, incorrect evaluation methods were applied. In those that did use appropriate methods or were of high quality, few were statistically significant, with findings not clinically significant. The methodological inconsistencies observed provide considerable opportunities for future research endeavors.
High-quality evidence is needed prior to embracing products within clinical practice. Natural Gym Fat Burner Supplement By following PRISMA, we applied the Cochrane Bias Review to our articles and observed that the majority of articles were classified as being of low quality. Much is due to the challenges in study design. Many of the included articles had small sample sizes, failed to control for key confounding variables, and had different doses and formulations of each compound, making the interpretation rather difficult. Although key weight loss studies such as the Diabetes Prevention Program or the Look AHEAD study) lasted a year or more, very few of the included trials in this review lasted a year or longer. Longer-term trials are needed to ascertain their impact on weight loss. Our evaluation highlights the importance of the efforts put forth by the Office of Dietary Supplements to advance the science of nutritional supplementation and a need for high-quality research.
This review provides contemporaneous evaluation that can provide a scientific basis for practicing clinicians. Each supplement is listed in the dietary supplement label database. The use of research librarians enhanced the validity of our process and approach . Our team used the major medical databases rather than complementary databases because they felt that this approach consisted of higher-integrity journal articles , despite the publication and location bias that may exist in other databases . A substantial amount of the integrated care literature in PubMed is not discoverable in its MeSH-indexed subset, signifying that a search relying on MeSH terms only will miss nonindexed but highly relevant content. We also recommend the addition of Embase to a PubMed search if the emerging topics often to be found in conference abstracts are of interest.
There are a number of limitations to this study. Studies reviewed were heterogeneous and participants may not necessarily be representative of the typical patient presenting for weight loss. Although our initial intentions were to include observational studies, the volume of studies, their design and outcomes, and the importance of limiting to RCTs, made this impossible. Furthermore, the extensive heterogeneity of patient populations, interventions, outcomes, and lack of statistical comparisons prevented us from conducting a formal meta-analysis. Many of the compounds consisted of different doses, formulations, or were combined with other supplements. We acknowledge these limitations and attempted to group as best as we could. The majority of full-text studies had intragroup comparisons rather than intergroup comparisons over time. What Fat Burning Supplements For Athletes Although the Cochrane tool attempts to standardize quality assessments, this may be prone to subjectivity and/or interpretation of the articles. We attempted to mitigate this through trained evaluators and adjudicators.