Anyone who’s tried to lose weight knows there’s no shortage of products or fad foods out there that will supposedly speed up your slimming. One such advertised food, apple cider vinegar, will have less credibility behind it now, as a clinical trial claiming to show its weight loss success has just been yanked by the publisher.
BMJ Group announced the retraction of the study this afternoon. Originally published last year, the small trial purportedly showed that people who drank apple cider vinegar daily lost more weight than controls over a three-month period. The publisher cited several factors, including implausible data, as reasons to yank the study.
“Tempting though it is to alert readers to an ostensibly simple and apparently helpful weight loss aid, at present the results of the study are unreliable, and journalists and others should no longer reference or use the results of this study in any future reporting,” said Helen Macdonald, Publication Ethics and Content Integrity Editor at BMJ Group, in a statement from BMJ.
Too good to be true
Researchers in Lebanon conducted the study, first published in March 2024 in the journal BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health. The trial reportedly involved 120 teens and young adults who were overweight and obese. The volunteers were randomly assigned to one of four groups: three groups were asked to drink different doses of apple cider vinegar (diluted in water) once a day in the morning, while the fourth was asked to drink a placebo liquid.
The trial reportedly ran for 12 weeks, and by the study’s end, the researchers claimed that people drinking apple cider vinegar lost significantly more weight than those on the placebo. On average, people taking apple cider vinegar were said to have lost between 13 and 17 pounds, and those who drank the most apple cider vinegar also tended to lose more weight than the other groups—a potential sign that the ingredient was truly improving people’s odds of weight loss (in medicine, this is called a dose-response effect). People on the apple cider vinegar diet were also said to have improved their levels of blood glucose, triglycerides, and cholesterol as well.
It wasn’t long before outside scientists began to raise red flags about the statistical analysis underpinning the study’s findings, however. The BMJ Group initially saw fit to publish some of these critiques alongside the study itself, a common practice in science. But after further review, they determined that this wasn’t a mere disagreement about some figures here and there, but something more concerning. They enlisted statisticians to examine the raw data and to try replicating the study results from said data.
Ultimately, the outside experts were not able to replicate the authors’ analyses; what’s more, they identified other sketchy stuff. They determined that the data contained “implausible values” and found potential evidence that participants were not truly randomized into their group as claimed. The authors also failed to proactively register their trial prior to performing it—a common precaution against later data tweaking that’s required by the BMJ Group—and didn’t explain their methods thoroughly enough, the publisher determined.
The study authors, according to the BMJ, maintain that the statistical oddities were only honest mistakes in how they presented, exported, or calculated the data. But they’ve nonetheless agreed with the publisher’s decision to retract the work.
Gizmodo reached out to the study authors for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
The weight loss takeaway
Even before this retraction, though, there really wasn’t much evidence to suggest that apple cider vinegar—or any single food, for that matter—can supercharge your weight loss attempt.
Yes, people can certainly lose weight, even lots of it, through healthy changes in their diet and lifestyle. The much harder part is maintaining this weight loss for a sustained period of time, which is why many, if not most, people eventually regain the weight back. Newer options like GLP-1 therapies have made it easier to treat obesity, though these too aren’t miracles with no drawbacks.
Unfortunately, long-term successful weight loss still remains a challenge, and no amount of apple cider vinegar will change that reality.
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