Dr Oz admits to selling quackery

19 June 2014 - 14:43 By Times LIVE
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The US Senate scolded Dr Oz for all the "miracle" weight loss supplements he pushed on daytime TV, products which had little scientific evidence of them working.

The daytime TV star rose to prominence as a guest on Oprah Winfrey's talk show, eventually managing to get his own spin-off series.

He is noted for often promoting fad diet products, including saffron extract, raspberry ketones, forskolin, and African mango seed.

While most of those products have little evidence backing them, it was his endorsement of green coffee extract which landed him in hot water with the Senate according to IFLScience.

The largest test done on the product involved 117 men, and even that wasn't even published when Oz claimed it was “the magic weight loss cure for every body type” in the spring of 2012.

Oz, the host of "The Dr. Oz Show," said the products gave people hope to keep trying to lose weight. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, and he said the No. 1 topic asked about on his website was weight loss according to Reuters.

He admitted, however that many of the products he promoted “don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact”.

"You've been trained in science-based medicine... I don't get why you need to say this stuff when you know it's not true. When you have this amazing megaphone, why would you cheapen your show?... With power comes a great deal of responsibility,” said Senator McCaskill.

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