It was a surprising choice among many other decisions that have been announced about the incoming Government. This week, President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is so famous for his nickname United States doctor as well as for the number of questionable health claims he has made from that position over the years.
Maybe it shouldn’t have been surprising. After all, Trump supported Oz in his failed 2022 Senate bid, and in 2016 Trump appeared on Oz’s show to undergo a “surreal” on-air physical exam, rather than share his medical history with the public. Plus, Melania Trump likes him.
Currently on his website, Oz calls himself a global advisor and shareholder of online supplement and wellness retail brand iHerb; Their Instagram page also includes a link to the iHerb store. Although that may change.
“Under federal law, you would be prohibited from making decisions that could affect your financial interests,” explained Kedric Payne, vice president, general counsel and senior ethics director at the nonprofit, nonpartisan government watchdog group Campaign Legal Center. “That means that, as director of CMS, he would have to let go of those interests if he makes decisions related to this.”
In another important way, Oz’s selection is also puzzling to Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“This position has traditionally relied on someone with deep experience in health insurance and health policy to lead very complex programs,” Besser explained. CMS provides health care to more than 100 million Americans, including low-income people and people with disabilities. “Dr. Oz has a career as a surgeon and television doctor. “His focus on television has really been on the role of the individual in their health, and the person in this position really needs to make sure that our Government is meeting the needs of our entire country.”
In fact, many of the individual actions Oz recommended on his television show over the years were based on questionable scientific evidence, Besser noted. In a 2014 BMJ study, for example, researchers evaluated health claims made in 40 randomly selected episodes of The Dr. Oz Showa syndicated daytime television show that aired from 2009 to 2022. They found that about half of the recommendations made on the show were not supported by scientific evidence.
Oz’s team did not respond to a request for comment. Trump’s transition team argued in favor of Oz’s qualifications. “He is an eminent physician, cardiac surgeon, inventor and world-class communicator who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition, said in a statement. “Dr. Oz has many accomplishments and will do great work in President Trump’s second Administration to make America healthy again.”
In his own defense, Oz argued in an exclusive interview with NBC News in 2015 that his television show was “not a medical show.” It also denied any conflict of interest and said it had not sold any products “outside the program.” He added that he would refrain from using words like “miracle,” and even said that “there are segments that I did that I wish I could take down.”
But it is difficult to withdraw an idea once it has been widely advertised on television. Here are eight health claims, with little to no scientific evidence to back them up, that Oz made over the years.
Green coffee extract, the “magic cure for weight loss”
In 2014, Oz went to Washington to seek support against internet sellers who were using his name and image to sell weight loss products. But senators suggested he was part of the problem, and they later questioned him about the many dietary supplements he had promoted on his show.
“When you feature a product on your show, you create what is known as the ‘Dr. Oz Effect’: it dramatically increases sales and causes scammers to appear overnight using false and misleading ads to sell questionable products,” then-Senator Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., told Oz at the Senate hearing.
Senators gave several examples from Oz’s own show, but much of the hearing focused on his claims about green coffee bean extract.
“You may think magic is all fantasy, but this little pimple has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight loss cure for every body type… This miracle pill can burn fat fast,” Oz said in an episode of 2012.
“I don’t understand why you need to say these things if you know they’re not true,” McCaskill said. “So why, when you have this incredible megaphone and this incredible ability to communicate, do you want to cheapen your program?”
Oz responded: “I actually personally believe in the topics I talk about on the show; I study them passionately. I recognize that they often do not have the scientific strength necessary to present them as facts.”
Later that year, a company that sold the green coffee extract promoted by Oz paid the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) $3.5 million in a settlement over a complaint that it had “used the results of a problematic study to make unsubstantiated weight loss claims” to retailers, according to the FTC.
Also that year, researchers retracted their study that supposedly showed that green coffee bean pills led to weight loss. “The sponsors of the study cannot ensure the validity of the data, so we, Joe Vinson and Bryan Burnham, retract the article,” read a statement that appeared on the website of the open-access scientific journal that had published the article. The retraction was first reported by Retraction Watch.
In October 2014, The Washington Post reported that Oz’s website had been “scrubbed of nearly all mentions” of green coffee bean extract; The episode had also been removed from YouTube, citing a “copyright lawsuit” as an explanation.
Supplements and the “holy grail of cancer prevention”
Oz’s claims about green coffee extract garnered big headlines, but it’s not the only weight loss supplement he promoted on his show. He once called raspberry ketone “the number one fat-burning miracle in a bottle” and, in a 2013 episode, called Garcinia Cambogia “the simple solution you’ve been looking for to get rid of your body fat for good.” “, according to Vox.
Writing for Science-Based Medicine, Dr. Harriet Hall admitted that Garcinia cambogia “may play a role in helping patients lose weight by motivating and eliciting placebo effects,” but the data at the time did not show a “clinical advantage.” relevant” about traditional diet and exercise.
The 2014 BMJ study found that most of Oz’s health recommendations concerned nutrition and dietary advice. In a 2011 episode, she said that human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone produced during pregnancy, could cause weight loss when combined with a diet restricted to 500 calories per day. (Research shows no evidence that HCG is an effective weight loss tool.)
According to The Washington Post, in a 2012 episode, Oz touted the cancer-preventing benefits of selenium, a mineral found in soil that is responsible, among other things, for protecting the body against damage caused by a serious viral infection, according to the National Institutes of Health.
According to the NIH, research suggests that people with selenium deficiency (which is very rare in the United States) may have a higher risk of developing certain types of cancer, such as colon, rectum, prostate, lung, bladder, skin , esophagus and stomach; However, it is “unclear” whether selenium supplements reduce cancer risk. Additionally, selenium supplements can interfere with other medications, and excessive consumption of this mineral is linked to health risks. “Extremely high intake of selenium can cause serious problems, such as difficulty breathing, tremors, kidney failure, heart attacks, and heart failure,” the NIH states.
In a 2011 episode, Oz suggested to his audience that endive, red onion, and sea bass are anti-cancer foods that could reduce the risk of ovarian cancer by up to 75%.
Three years later, Nutrition and Cancer magazine revisited those claims in a 2014 article titled “Reality Check: There’s No Such Thing as a Miracle Food.” The authors noted, for example, that while kaempferol (a flavonoid found in endive) had shown cancer inhibition in laboratory studies, it was unclear whether those findings would translate to people consuming endive in “usual dietary amounts.” ”. They warned their peers to “be aware of the public health messages drawn from your individual studies.”
Apple juice and arsenic
Oz suggested in a 2011 episode that apple juice contained dangerous levels of arsenic, citing evidence from a New Jersey lab. The Food and Drug Administration conducted its own testing and found “no evidence of any public health risk from drinking these juices.”
The FDA further said that Oz did not note whether he was referring to organic or inorganic arsenic, a crucial point since organic arsenic is unlikely to cause harm, while inorganic arsenic can be potentially dangerous. In response, a spokesperson for “The Dr. Oz Show” at the time, Tim Sullivan, told CBS News: “We don’t think the show is irresponsible.”
Sullivan said: “We believe the public has the right to know what is in their food. The program position is that the total arsenic should be lower.”
A Consumer Reports study published several months later found that some juice samples had high levels of arsenic, most of which the study said was inorganic.
Lavender soap for restless legs syndrome
“I know this sounds crazy, but people hide it under the covers,” Oz said in a 2010 episode of his show, according to Business Insider. “We think lavender is relaxing and can be beneficial in itself.”
A comparatively innocuous claim, to be sure, but still, the suggestion that placing a bar of lavender soap under the sheets can help relieve restless legs syndrome is dubious and was debunked by “Life’s Little Mysteries,” a sister site of LiveScience.”
