No one wants to diet, everyone wants a miracle pill, and that is why supplements are a $35 billion industry in America, despite being mostly placebos. Weight loss therapies, even those with side effects, are all the rage with thin culture - because they work.

Still, who wouldn't want to stay thin without a shot in the butt?

A pilot study was created because those behind it believe their supplement can mimic fasting, and it invokes all the usual antioxidant mumbo-jumbo. The paper, including two chemists as authors, gave five men four metabolites - spermidine, nicotinamide, palmitoylethanolamide (PEA), and oleoylethanolamide(OEA) - and then measured their presence in blood. They were higher. From that they suggest that because those metabolites are also higher during fasting, and people lose weight while fasting, maybe their pill can lead to benefits without diets.

The authors claim their supplement mimics the a 36-hour fast, and is the first "fasting pill", and reduces oxidative stress. Science doesn't work that way.  If it did, a diet of fish and cheddar cheese would prevent aging. That's the niacin or b3 of nicotinamide, while spermidine is only correlated to longevity because it declines with age. If palmitoylethanolamide was enough of an anti-inflammatory, doctors wouldn't prescribe pain medication, they'd tell you to eat egg yolks. Maybe they included it to offset the headaches from the oleoylethanolamide, the thing that may actually do something for weight loss, even if FDA has not validated that yet.

The point is, increasing those metabolities is not why people lose weight while fasting and have better health, that is more like a homeopathic belief. They lose weight because they burn more calories than they take in. If you take OEA and don't feel like eating, you will lose weight.

That is the science, in 100% of clinical trials. Eat less and exercise more.

So will the supplement do anything to improve health? The metabolites may be elevated but that doesn't mean they cause a cardioprotective state. Epidemiologists have created "suggest" "linked to" papers saying it might but epidemiology is also why journalists rushed to declare both red wine and chocolate as health foods, even though science knows both of those form the tripod of lifestyle cancers, with cigarettes being the third leg.

It's a pilot study, and it's actually pretty good despite lacking a plausible biological foundation. They excluded women, for example, and were right in doing so (menstruation), and had manageable boundaries for participants so results weren't guaranteed. It's the press release touting "groundbreaking evidence" that is problematic.



For 25 years, anti-vaccine proponents had progressives on the US coasts convinced that vaccines cause autism using "groundbreaking evidence" and the whole gluten-free fad in non-celiacs claimed "groundbreaking evidence" and those were both small studies invoking epidemiology. Left-wing science deniers and the lawyers encouraging them still claim "groundbreaking evidence" that a weedkiller gives mice cancer and humans too.

By all means do pilot studies, and if you can get rich selling a supplement to people who believe it works, yayyyy capitalism, but don't claim you have groundbreaking evidence. You don't. FDA will let you know when you do.