#1

The following is a pretty comical case of the kind of low rent tomfoolery going on in the supplement space “research” in bodybuilding. If you are looking for some low key entertainment, here you go:

First Human Study Using MY Turkesterone || Turk Builder

#2

Oh yeah, this space is absolutely nuts. The published Turkesterone study is a bit crap, but that’s typical in the field. Tiny number of untrained subjects, using rubbish metrics (group strength), short time frame etc etc. And I actually do kinda agree with Greg that this guy bought a few bottles of the product, and published the negative study partly as revenge. There’s no other logical reason for him to do that IMO.

But, in the screenshots, the emails from the Antonio guy look pretty reasonable, and he’s obviously annoyed with these guys trying to badger him into testing their product on the company’s terms, without 3rd party testing etc. The guy asking for Greg to actually fund the study isn’t dodgy at all. Research costs money, no shit. I feel kinda sorry for the researcher who is being thrown under the bus by a dude on social media with a big platform.

On the other side, you have crazy positive studies like this: The effects of 12 weeks of beta-hydroxy-beta-methylbutyrate free acid supplementation on muscle mass, strength, and power in resistance-trained individuals: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study | European Journal of Applied Physiology

After 12 weeks of training, HMB-FA supplementation resulted in strength increases of 25 % for the squat, 12 % for the bench press, 16 % for the deadlift, and 18 % for total strength

Participants had a starting bench press of 112kg - pretty strong, and not beginners. After 12 weeks, the supplement boosted it to 125kg, vs 116kg in the placebo. Deadlift from 170 to 198kg. That would be insane for 1g of testosterone per week, and it’s straight-up unbelievable for an amino acid. It’s especially improbable when you see that the two groups had freakishly similar starting strength (Table 1); their bench, deadlift, squat, Wingate power etc are all literally identical. I don’t know where you could find 9 people and 11 people with exact same bench press and squat strengths to one decimal place. Plus, the authors re-used the same control group for 3 studies, reporting different baselines parameters for each… straight up fraud, lol, yet paper isn’t retracted.

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#3

It’s comical. But hardly surprising. Bodybuilding supplements are a huge business, no wonder there’s so much fraud. Then again, this is pretty much the case for most supplement studies in general.

And yet, the Greg guy makes a good point: sh|tty studies happen in regular pharma drug trials too, where negative studies used to be not reported, and you kept going until you got a positive result by hook or by crook, p-hacking, data slicing, subgroup selection, dropping negative responders and on and on. When it costs billions to develop and market a drug, the incentives to bend the data are irresistable to many.

I just though it comical how low rent were the shenanigans in these marginal supplement cases. What they’re clearly counting on is the public just reading the “conclusion” in the abstract and nothing more. And sadly that’s what happens with the vast majority.

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#4

The standard pharmaceutical company operations.

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#5

I don’t think the public even look at the paper. I think the company usually just writes “clinical proven” all over their marketing material.

For clinical trials, I would say that they’re at least overseen by data safety monitoring boards, and should have professional statisticians etc. So there should be less blatant dodgy behaviour happening - though of course sometimes the data may never see the light of day and there’s publication bias.

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