Isagenix Study Is Not Convincing Posted by Harriet Hall on December 11, 2012 Isagenix is a wellness system sold by multilevel marketing. It consists of a suite of products to be used in various combinations for “nutritional cleansing,” detoxification, and supplementation to aid in weight loss, improve energy and performance, and support healthy aging. It allegedly burns fat while supporting lean muscle, maintains healthy cholesterol levels, supports telomeres, improves resistance to illness, reduces cravings, improves body composition, and slows the aging process. And makes millions for distributors who got on the bandwagon early and are high on the pyramid. I have written about it before and have been roundly criticized by its proponents. It generated my all-time favorite insult: “Dr Harriet Hall is a refrigerator with a head.” My biggest concern with Isagenix was that it had not been clinically tested. They claimed that clinical tests were in progress (funded by Isagenix). An e-mail correspondent recently told me I should take another look at Isagenix, since a clinical study had been completed. It had not yet been published, and I asked her to get back to me when it was. Ask and you shall receive (but you may be sorry!). She contacted me when the study by Kroeger et al. was published in the journal Nutrition and Metabolism. The full study is available online and I urge readers to click on the link and look at Table 2, which I will be referring to later. The journal is peer-reviewed but, as will become painfully obvious, the peer reviewers did not do a competent job. It is an open-access online journal with a low impact factor. The authors had to pay to get their article published: it cost them $1805. Methods Now, if you were going to design a clinical study of Isagenix, how would you go about it? You probably wouldn’t want to study telomere support or “improved energy” first, or try to establish that “detoxification” had occurred. Since the most common use of Isagenix is for weight loss, it seems to me the logical place to start would be to study weight loss on the Isagenix program compared to weight loss with a diet providing an equal number of calories, ideally a nutritious diet with a similar proportion of fat, carbs and protein. For some inscrutable reason, these researchers elected to study 54 obese women age 35-65 (no men or younger women or overweight but non-obese women) on a one-day-a-week intermittent fasting (IF) program. They compared a calorie-restricted diet with a liquid meal replacement for 2 meals a day (using only one component of the Isagenix system, Isalean shakes) to a diet with the same number of calories provided by regular food. For the first two weeks, they established a baseline by having patients simply try to maintain their weight. Then for weeks 3-10 they were randomized to the liquid meal replacement Isalean group or the regular food group; and weight, intake, lipids, adipokines, and other factors were measured at weeks 3 and 10. Why intermittent fasting? In their Introduction, they say that IF has been growing in popularity and that it “may” be effective for weight loss and coronary risk reduction. The references they provide do not show that intermittent fasting offers any advantage over constant calorie restriction. And IF is not a part of the Isagenix program. Why did they choose to incorporate it into their study? Doesn’t it just add another unnecessary complication? The researchers themselves pointed out a serious limitation of their study. It did not control for food intake. The dinner meal for the Isalean group and all meals for the food group were left up to the subjects after instruction by a dietitian. The goal was to limit breakfast and lunch to 240 calories each and dinner to 400-600 calories, with
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 01:02:22 +0000
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