The burgeoning field of complementary medicines, including weight-loss products, is now a billion-dollar industry. Every year, more people are spending disposable income on complementary and alternative medicines that may prove to have no benefit for our health.
Garcinia Cambogia is one such example. Marketed as a weight-loss pill, it has had an exponential rise in sales since it was featured on the Doctor Oz show.
Garcinia cambogia is the former scientific name of a native Southeast Asian plant, belonging to the family Clusiaceae, that bears a pumpkin-shaped fruit. The skin of the fruit contains the active ingredient, hydroxycitric acid (HCA). HCA inhibits an enzyme that produces fatty acid, thus suppressing fatty acid and the processing of cholesterol.
But does this mode of action translate to the weight-loss claims associated with it? Or is it just clever marketing convincing us this product helps us lose weight?
Double-blinded, randomised controlled trials are the gold standard of clinical study and whenever possible should be conducted to test the effectiveness of a treatment compared to a placebo. Weight-loss products should be assessed for a minimum of six months, with a further six-month follow-up period (12 months total).
There has never been a long-term study investigating the efficacy of Garcinia Cambogia. Most of the studies have been conducted in animals.
In fact, the majority of well-designed trials investigating the effect of this product on weight loss have found no effect that is of clinical relevance. In a 12-week double-blind, placebo-controlled trial conducted in humans, people receiving 3000mg of Garcinia Cambogia extract (1500mg of the active component HCA) per day lost the same amount of weight as the control group.
Another 12-week study with a four-week follow-up (16 weeks total) also found no greater weight-loss effect than for a placebo control group. For those studies where a statistically significant effect was reported, the weight loss was around one kilogram more than for those receiving a placebo pill.
Positive and greater weight losses were found in some studies, but this effect is suppressed when looking at all of the studies combined.
With respect to other health benefits from taking this supplement, the evidence to suggest it can improve blood cholesterol levels is lacking.
Most importantly, the product safety profile of Garcinia Cambogia has been adequately tested and there appear to be no issues.
Some complementary medicines have been found to contribute to improved health outcomes, through increased efficacy and cost-effectiveness. However, if there is to be a role for such complementary and alternative weight-loss products and medicines, we must build upon the evidence to investigate whether these increasingly popular products are a viable treatment option.
A recent Obesity Australia and Price Waterhouse Coopers report found obesity cost Australia A$8.6 billion in 2011-2012, with the indirect costs far higher. We must establish whether complementary medicines have a role to play in preventing and treating obesity. If we take no action to reduce obesity rates, an additional 2.4 million people will become obese at a cost of $87.7 billion over 10 years.
Please visit this website if you’re interested in taking part in our clinical weight-loss trials on Garcinia Cambogia and other weight-loss supplements.
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12:35 PM ET Fri, 1 March 2019CNBC.com
Thanks to fake reviews on sites like Amazon and Yelp, it can be hard to trust what you read. Now however, the US government has begun cracking down on fake user reviews posted on Amazon.
On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced its first-ever charges against a company that paid to have fake reviews posted online. The company in question, New York-based Cure Encapsulations, paid the third-party website amazonverifiedreviews.com to write and post positive reviews that appeared to come from consumers for a weight-loss supplement product on Amazon.com, according to the FTC.
“Please make my product … stay a five star,” Cure Encapsulations owner Naftula Jacobowitz told amazonverifiedreviews.com, according to the FTC. Jacobowitz’s company paid for reviews falsely describing its product, the supplement garcinia cambogia, as a “powerful appetite suppressant” that “literally blocks fat from forming,” the FTC says.
The FTC “does not comment about what future actions it may or may not take,” a spokesperson told CNBC Make It. But the fact that the FTC brought the case has already sparked speculation that the case sets the precedent that the federal government is now willing to bring charges against companies that pay for fake reviews making misleading claims.
Fake online reviews are a common problem on e-commerce sites like Amazon and have also shown up on online review platforms like Yelp. Still, roughly 86 percent of consumers still regularly read online reviews, and a majority of people say that positive reviews make them more likely to use a local business, according to a BrightLocal survey.
Cases like the FTC’s settlement with Cure Encapsulations should make it easier for consumers to trust online reviews on sites like Amazon, according to Paul Alan Levy, an attorney who works for the consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen.
“I think it gives consumers more reason to place trust in what they see on these review sites, certainly,” Levy tells CNBC Make It.
“The administrative agencies, like the FTC and state attorneys general, are in an excellent position to do investigations and figure out when there are false positive [reviews] out there, and it’s good that the FTC is doing that, because it creates a sort of pressure on avoiding false positive reviews,” he tells CNBC Make It.
Levy notes that, in the past, e-commerce companies and review sites have sometimes taken matters into their own hands when looking to squash fake reviews. Amazon itself has filed numerous lawsuits in recent years against sellers who post false reviews, as well as third-party companies that sell the service of posting fake reviews. Amazon estimated last year that “less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic” on the site.
“We welcome the FTC’s work in this area,” an Amazon spokesperson told The Verge. “Amazon invests significant resources to protect the integrity of reviews,” but “even one inauthentic review is one too many.” (The company also announced a new program, called Project Zero, targeting counterfeit goods on the site on Thursday.)
Yelp also has its own Consumer Alerts program that tries to catch businesses that post fake reviews.
Of course, Levy also points out that consumers should still take online reviews with a grain of salt.
“The wisdom of the crowd on review sites has value for consumers,” he says, “[but] you should never take a single review as gospel, whether it be a five-star review or a one-star review.” Instead, he says, look for a pattern of reviews.
The FTC filed its complaint against Cure Encapsulations last week, after finding that the company had paid for the fabricated reviews, which purported to be written by actual customers and which made “false and unsubstantiated claims” about its products. While the extract garcinia cambogia is often claimed to be effective for weight-loss, the National Institutes of Health has noted that there is “no convincing evidence” that it can help you lose weight.
Cure Encapsulations has already reached a settlement with the FTC in which the company has agreed to never again make “weight-loss, appetite-suppression, fat-blocking, or disease-treatment claims” for any product without substantiating those claims with “competent and reliable scientific evidence,” the FTC says. The settlement also prohibits the company from misrepresenting endorsements, including reviews that falsely claim to come from an actual customer.
“People rely on reviews when they’re shopping online,” Andrew Smith, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “When a company buys fake reviews to inflate its Amazon ratings, it hurts both shoppers and companies that play by the rules.”
Correction: This article was revised to correct Cure Encapsulation’s location. The company is headquartered in New York.
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Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/01/ftc-cracking-down-on-fake-amazon-reviews.html
The post Interview with Jeremy Lindblom appeared first on Voices of the ElePHPant.
Website builders have been around for years. But the latest generation takes advantage of many useful features and capabilities that were not available in the past.
There is a beauty in this new generation of website and page builders. They can help individuals, teams, and businesses. They can help to build anything from the most straightforward site to a professional one. They can easily create single pages to complete websites without the need for a developer.
Professional web designers typically seek out the best website builders. Beginners should as well. But since they often don’t know where to look, we’ve solved that problem. Here are seven popular options:
Elementor is already considered the best website builder for WordPress professionals. The product reached 2 million active installs worldwide, and they keep on climbing.
It’s really easy to use. If you can imagine it – you can design it. From beginners to high-end pros, Elementor makes every aspect of web design more efficient.
It’s not your average Drag & Drop builder. You can fully customize each pixel and element, and that’s why it should be your weapon of choice. It allows you to focus purely on the design, with no coding needed. Although you can add custom CSS and even add your own extensions since it’s an open source project.
Elementor also has powerful, unmatched features: Theme Builder, WooComerce Builder, Parallax, Pop-ups, Pixel perfect design, animation, and much more, you’ll have everything inside. Now you can do the design, development, and marketing simultaneously, save production cost and time.
Because Mobirise is an offline builder, it brings with it several advantages not found with most other website-building tools. Most notably, you’re not tied to a particular platform, you have total control over how you use this website builder to create your site, and you can host it anywhere.
Since Mobirise is based on Bootstrap 4 or Google AMP technology your site is guaranteed to be crazy-fast and user-friendly. Everything is based on drag and drop so it’s easy to work with and no coding is required. Better yet, Mobirise is free to use for both personal and commercial purposes.
The package includes an attractive and trendy selection of more than 1,500 website-building templates and blocks and a library of 850 Google fonts, 7,000 icons, and a whopping 500,000 free images.
This online website-building tool is an ideal choice for creative professionals and anyone else looking to create a good-looking website featuring an outstanding portfolio. Portfoliobox is not theme-based so you can use it with any theme, it’s flexible and effortless to use, and no coding is required.
Two plans are available. With either one, you can create a professional-looking website in a few hours.
The free plan provides hosting for 50 images, ten pages, and 10 products. With the Pro plan, you can host up to 1,000 images and an unlimited number of pages and products. The Pro plan also features website hosting with your personal domain, custom CSS/JS, and Google Analytics. The complete set of Portfoliobox’s design templates are provided in both plans.
A free student plan with all the Pro features and functions except for the custom domain is also available.
WP Page Builder is a real-time front end website-building tool featuring a modern, user-friendly interface and a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art design elements that will give you a whole new site-building experience.
WP Page Builder is 100% drag and drop, no coding or design skills are necessary to use it, it’s an incredibly flexible tool, and it’s compatible with any theme.
8b is another fresh and futuristic website builder with a super-simple UI that’s fun to use and provides an excellent software solution to your 2019 website-building project needs. 8b’s package includes 250+ website sections and 16 starter templates.
Because this software tool is Google AMP-based you can expect your site to be super-fast and 100% mobile friendly. The 8b website builder is yours for free during its initial launch phase.
Webflow is an all-in-one tool that enables you to design, build, and launch a completely customized, responsive website with a client-friendly CMS and super-fast hosting — without all the hassles of setup, or any need for coding.
Webflow also features prototyping tools, e-commerce website-building solutions, and easily implementable animations and interactions – again without coding. Start a project from a blank canvas, from a template, or from any one of a number of community-created UI kits. And it’s free to get started.
Quix is responsive first visual page builder for Joomla comes with real-time SEO analyzer. With Quix’s theme builder you can design any Joomla page and 3rd party component page visually. Built-in image compression gives you the greatest page speed and SEO boost.
Quix comes with a comprehensive collection of icons and Google fonts and more than 100 design blocks and layouts.
These 7 top tools for building pages and websites have many things in common. Such as modern and futuristic designs and freedom from annoying theme design constraints. They have no need for coding, and they are easy to use. Several are free or offer free options.
It’s simply a matter of finding what best fits your needs. There are no poor choices. Each is designed to make your 2019 page and website creations better than ever.
The post 7 Tools for Building Pages & Websites Worth Taking a Look At appeared first on Speckyboy Web Design Magazine.
The stock of NUTRAFUELS INC (OTCMKTS:NTFU) registered a decrease of 32% in short interest. NTFU’s total short interest was 8,500 shares in March as published by FINRA. Its down 32% from 12,500 shares, reported previously. With 78,600 shares average volume, it will take short sellers 0 days to cover their NTFU’s short positions.
The stock increased 0.63% or $0.0011 during the last trading session, reaching $0.175. About 6,925 shares traded. NutraFuels, Inc. (OTCMKTS:NTFU) has 0.00% since March 5, 2018 and is . It has underperformed by 4.37% the SP500.
NutraFuels, Inc. manufactures and distributes oral spray nutritional and dietary products to retail and wholesale outlets. The company has market cap of $18.60 million. The companyÂ’s products include sleep spray to support a healthy sleep cycle and improve the quality of restful sleep; energize spray to enhance energy, and restore vigor and vitality; and garcinia cambogia spray, an appetite and weight management spray. It currently has negative earnings. It also offers NRG-X extreme energy spray to enhance energy and stamina; headache and pain spray to relieve headaches and pain; and hair, skin, and nails spray to nourish and encourage hair, skin, and nail growth.
More news for NutraFuels, Inc. (OTCMKTS:NTFU) were recently published by: Globenewswire.com, which released: “Freedom Leaf Inc. Announces National Distribution Agreement Other OTC:FRLF – GlobeNewswire” on February 28, 2018. Marketwired.com‘s article titled: “NutraFuels (NTFU) Files its Application to Up List to the OTCQB OTC Market – Marketwired” and published on January 29, 2018 is yet another important article.
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WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline). — The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has reached a settlement in its first-ever case regarding a dietary supplement manufacturer’s alleged use of “fake paid reviews” to market a weight-loss supplement.
According to a Feb. 26 FTC press release, Cure Encapsulations Inc., and its former owner Naftula Jacobwitz, allegedly made deceptive claims about its Garcinia Cambogia supplement to help suppress appetite, block fat and produce weight loss.
Cure Encapsulations also paid a third party to write “fake reviews” that were posted on amazon.com, the FTC says. Jacobwitz specifically told the third-party website operator to give the supplement a 4.3 out of five stars in order to produce sales, according to the FTC.
“People rely on reviews when they’re shopping online,” FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection director Andrew Smith said in a statement. “When a company buys fake reviews to inflate its Amazon ratings, it hurts both shoppers and companies that play by the rules.”
The settlement prohibits Cure Encapsulations and Jacobwitz from using any further weight loss, appetite suppression, fat blocking or disease-treatment claims without human clinical testing evidence, the FTC said. The defendants are also banned from misrepresentations concerning its endorsements and must e-mail notices to consumers who purchased its Garcina Cambogia product to notify them of the FTC’s allegations as well as notifying amazon.com, the FTC said.
Article source: https://legalnewsline.com/stories/511912491-ftc-reaches-settlement-in-first-case-regarding-dietary-supplement-fake-paid-reviews
