Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Saturday 22 January 2011

Holland and Barrett are flogging Cho Yung tea for weightloss

Very quick post to jot some thoughts down; another one for Trading Standards I think.

Recently I was briefly surprised to see Holland and Barrett selling a weight loss tea product (surely that's too silly even for them) but a quick trawl on Google indicates that even the affiliate marketers to be found in the MoreNiche forum are avoiding it (although see below for Proactol), and it's appeared on the MoneySavingExpert forum being highlighted as a scam as well.

Cho Yung weight loss tea

As with all these weight loss teas it's quite difficult to find the company's actual website in among all the review sites (these exist solely to route visitors towards a purchase while taking up the top pages of all google searches for the product). I'm not sure if http://choyung.net/ is the original website because the writing tone suggests a certain distance between the author and the product (but that could just be a bit of dissembling) - anyway they seem to think the product has been taken off the market and are instead advertising Proactol which is yet another weight loss tea.

As always, I wonder what the evidence is for these weight loss tea products.

Right at the bottom of the Proactol page (redirected from Cho Yung) there's a rather amusing graph where they struggle to spell in vitro. I'm not sure how good a model of dietary fat absorption an in vitro test is, but there are hints of pilot data in humans but no indication of where this is published. Tellingly, the page is almost entirely filled with supportive statements from doctors (these are as meaningless as patient testimonials).

Not surprisingly, it's yet another site which is using the same Nottingham telephone number 0115 979 8449 and a quick search of the MoreNiche site shows that Proactol is being flogged by their members too.

Strangely enough, when I closed the Proactol tab there was a small warning message asking me if I really wanted to close the page. While I was reading, the page behind the popup message changed to advertising Tava Tea, another weight loss product (this time from Roduve Healthcare solutions) for which I've not found any evidence either, nor their weight loss patch which I previously blogged about. Their number is 0115 979 8437.

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