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Calocurb
Calocurb

ScienceMay 14, 2018

I took NZ weight loss pill Calocurb and the side effects were… disturbing

Guest writer
Calocurb
Calocurb

Developed by New Zealand plant scientists and funded in part by a $20 million MBIE grant, Calocurb is being marketed as a major step forward in appetite-control treatment. But is it all it’s cracked up to be? Weight loss industry expert Andrew Dickson gave it a try.

Calocurb was launched here in New Zealand in early April this year; it is due to ‘go live’ in the American market in the next few weeks. The PR hype surrounding the New Zealand launch easily captivated me and almost immediately I purchased a bottle ($60 for a one month supply) and gave it go.

Why did I buy it? Why did I try it? It would be easy for me to claim I did so as a kind of auto-ethnographic research project, using myself as a test case and then writing about it for academic purposes. But it is far more complicated – and more personal – than that. The truth is that I am feeling really vulnerable to diet industry hype at the moment; this is how my anxiety tends to show itself. 2018 has been a rough year so far, with tumultuous family revelations, work frustrations, and issues with ACC and special needs education. Calocurb appeared in the middle of this and it provoked some familiar feelings in me: both compulsion and revulsion. And so, as with so many diet ‘supplements’ before, I had a crack.

What got me particularly about this product was the suggestion of clever Kiwi-based science. The so-called ‘bitter brake’ compound Amarasate, a trademarked extract of hops, is the key to Calocurb. Supposedly Amarasate triggers satiety signalling via the release of certain hormones – there is a nifty little video about it here. I grabbed a particularly compelling screenshot of one image:

Here you can see the red and blue dotted lines going up, supposedly signaling your brain to stop eating. What it doesn’t show, however, are the dotted lines going down. And they’re important, because for me, Calocurb’s ‘bitter brake’ was for me more like a gastrointestinal accelerator.

It appears that I am not alone in experiencing digestive distress after taking Calocurb. In a now deleted blog post (you can find a cached version here) the people at Calocurb responded to the most common questions from customers, including one about possible side effects:

“The side effects that some customers might experience are generally associated with a laxative effect…”

Tell me about it, Calocurb! I had a similar experience after eating unpasteurized milk products in Calcutta. To be fair, while the diarrhoea lasted for a few days in India, it was only an issue for a couple of hours after my fourth dose of Calocurb. But in both cases I sat upon the porcelain throne wondering if the people in the stall beside me would think I was attempting to run a deep bath.

Calocurb’s solution to such delicate issues? “To start with, avoid taking calocurb on a completely empty stomach…”

Wait, what?

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Calum Henderson
— Production editor

So in order for their calorie-restricting chemical to take effect, you need to first ingest calories, in order to avoid blowing your intestinal system into smithereens. OK. As an American colleague of mine commented, “cholera is also a superb weight loss intervention. What will they think of next?”

To be fair to the Calocurb scientists they suggest that this ‘side effect’ passes as your body gets used to the Amarasate compound.

When you dig down, the details of Calocurb are actually really interesting – and paradoxical. On one hand, there is the elegance of science, the process of painstaking lab research looking for particular compounds, and then the detailed work of figuring out how and why they might be effective. New Zealand taxpayers partially funded this research to the tune of $20 million via the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. It ultimately produced two things – the Amarasate compound itself, and a ‘patented capsule’ (one of the type that has actually been in use for some time) that allows the Amarasate to be delivered closer to the small intestine than a normal capsule would. It does this by taking longer to release its contents, the aim being the targeted delivery of the compound to where it is ‘most effective’.

On the other hand is the familiar crass consumerism of the diet industry. Calocurb is being sold using classic diet industry rhetoric with just a hint of all-natural marketing hype:

“Goodbye craving, hello you”

“It’s time to meet the new you”

“Here are your little capsules of willpower”

“Go au naturel with just three plant-based ingredients”

My research career is all about the weight-loss industry, which I have renamed the ‘weight-anxiety industry’. Calocurb fits squarely into this multi-billion dollar enterprise. Its website (Calocurb is only sold online) is light on important details, it’s backed by only one incredibly preliminary research trial which is yet to be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, and as far as I can tell there has been little or no consideration of long-term efficacy or safety, aside from relying on safety data from other hops extracts. This is characteristic of diet industry magic pills – they catch you with outlandish claims, like those above, and ask you to trust them, because… Science!

However we simple consumers have a bit of power here in the form of Medsafe, which protects us by determining the safety of the medicines we take. And Calocurb has already come to its attention – last week Medsafe warned that someone had experienced a ‘life-threatening’ allergic reaction after taking it. There is no mention of Calocurb on the Food Safety NZ register for compounds Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS). This despite the following claim on Calocurb’s FAQs page:

“A panel of five independent scientists recognised calocurb as GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe)”

I asked Calocurb about this, and to their credit they sent me the paperwork which does indeed show that five scientists agreed that Amarasate was GRAS as a food additive or supplement. However there is no mention in the report of Calocurb itself, or the ‘patented capsule’ by which the Amarasate gets delivered directly to your unsuspecting small intestine.

None of the five independent scientists are from New Zealand; most are based in the US. It may be the case that Calocurb never had any intention of getting regulatory approval in New Zealand at all, because they have decided that the product can be categorised as a dietary supplement – and our regulatory processes for dietary supplements are pretty minimal.

My personal opinion is that Calocurb is not a dietary supplement, because it clearly has “a stated or implied therapeutic purpose” and should therefore be subject to the Medicines Act 1981. But that is obviously not my call. Over to you, Medsafe.

The reality of the weight-loss industry

The sad part of all this is that for the average consumer, there’s basically no health benefit associated with weight loss attempts. I know! It seems crazy doesn’t it? But the evidence is now clear: the majority of people who attempt to lose weight by dieting or using weight loss pills will regain that weight and their health will not improve in the long-term; more likely it will suffer.

Is Calocurb a game-changer in terms of weight loss? I doubt it, because we know that biological appetite and hunger are not the same. It may well be possible to impact appetite – certainly the diet industry have been claiming the ability to do this for years – but hunger is an altogether different beast. Hunger is love, it is desire; we eat for people, to please them, to care for them. We eat to belong, to comfort ourselves or to celebrate. That isn’t appetite.

I do however think that Calocurb has the potential to make lots of money, because weight-anxious consumers will try almost anything.

Perhaps there is a miracle obesity cure out there in the plant kingdom – something that will level the bell curve of human body mass and create a world of people all with BMIs neatly between 20 and 24.9. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

More Reading

Instead I hope that the scientists involved at least pause for thought here as they read the words of a colleague of theirs from the social sciences. Perhaps it is time to let go of the weight loss fantasy; we have so many pressing societal problems that your scientific knowledge and skills could be better utilised trying to solve.

How Calocurb consumers can get involved

There is a wonderful group based at Otago University called the Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring (CARM). Calocurb also mention them on their ‘health professionals’ page. If you or anyone you know has had an adverse reaction to Calocurb then send them an email (carmnz@otago.ac.nz) and let them know. I’ve done it. We need better data on the side effects of this drug, because it seems to me we cannot rely on Calocurb to gather it and make it freely and easily available.

The Spinoff’s science content is made possible thanks to the support of The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, a national institute devoted to scientific research.

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Old damaged vintage Car on the street of old Havana, Cuba

ScienceMay 14, 2018

Eight reasons to slam the door on your car commute, based on the science

Guest writer
Old damaged vintage Car on the street of old Havana, Cuba

Commute week: The arguments for ditching your four-wheel addiction are overwhelming, writes public health expert Caroline Shaw

Commuting to work, study or school bookends most people’s days. Love it or hate it, it takes time. According to the NZ Time Use Survey we spend on average 46 minutes per day traveling  to work and 52 travelling to education or training  (this is national data and a bit old now, so probably doesn’t capture the pain of current Auckland commutes). This is apparently about the same amount of time as we spend on household cleaning and personal hygiene and grooming.  But only slightly more than we spend on pet care (my cat is definitely suffering from neglect).

Most of us (82%) commute by car; we often don’t have a choice. Thanks to New Zealand being generally quite awesome at collecting data, we can see on the graph below that there has been a long term pattern of decreasing walking, cycling and taking public transport to work. I didn’t put cars on this graph as it dwarfs everything else, but car trips to work increased from 62% in 1971 to 82% in 2013.

Source: Census 1971-2013

We should care about this because there are a heap of really good reasons why we ought to ditch car commuting and instead walk, cycle, e-bike, take buses, trains, light rail, push or e-scooters, skateboard, or take ferries.

1. It will make you happier

Getting out of cars can make you happy! Public transport can be a very social activity, bringing you in contact with more people than just sitting alone in your car listening to Mike and his dire views on the world. Making even small connections with people in your neighbourhood or on your commute is important for a sense of belonging and your health and wellbeing.  The physical activity that goes along with cycling and walking is really good for mental health. People who are regularly active are less anxious and less depressed. For people who have depression or anxiety vigorous physical activity, like running, fast walking and cycling, may be as effective as anti-depressants.  We have a mental health crisis in this country. Getting out of our cars may an ingredient in the secret sauce of a mentally well New Zealand.

2. You will be healthier

Increasing your physical activity through active commuting (bikes, brisk walking etc) or the walking associated with taking public transport can decrease your chance of getting (and in some cases dying from) some cancers, heart disease, diabetes, strokes and dementia. The reduction is somewhere between 10 to 40% depending on the study (as these are common conditions these reductions are potentially pretty large in the scheme of research findings). The best thing is, it doesn’t matter what age you take it up, you get health benefits from the increased activity. Also, even if you already have conditions such as high blood pressure, or diabetes, or if you are a smoker, if you are physically active you will have less chance of dying early  than those who have those things but are not active.

3. Clean up your lungs

Moving to public transport, cycling or walking results in less air pollution in cities. Rather depressingly NZ research shows that at least 250 people a year die from air pollution that comes from cars. Babies and older people are most at risk from dying from air pollution, so even if you are not producing the pollution you can still suffer the consequences of it. Sometimes people are concerned that if they take up cycling or walking they will be more exposed to air pollution (from breathing hard while riding or walking next to dirty diesel buses).  However a clever bit of work recently showed that for a half hour of cycling a day the PM2.5 (that’s a very small particle of pollution that causes health problems) level would need to be 95µg/m3 for the risks of air pollution to outweigh the benefits of PA. Even the more polluted towns in NZ do not have levels anywhere near this.

4. Save the planet

Getting out of cars and onto other forms of transport, particularly public transport, decreases carbon emissions. Even if the public transport is powered by fossil fuels it is still, (assuming you have a reasonably full bus), a less carbon intensive way to travel than a car. If Auckland had the same levels of cycling, walking and public transport use as Wellington, light vehicle carbon emissions would decrease by about 20%.  When the Productivity Commission says we need to have more cycling and walking and public transport as part of our response to climate change, you know these are not political issues; they are shared human ones that need acting on.

5. Spend less time in A&E

Riding to work is 530 times safer than playing rugby and 4-5 times safer than skiing in terms of getting an injury that you need to go to hospital for. And if we all get out of our cars and walk, cycle or take public transport we will all be safer.

6. Your jeans will remain comfortable

There is some very recent research that shows that cycling to work keeps your weight stable or, if you take it up, may cause you to lose a modest amount of weight. Conversely, if you change from cycling to driving a car you better prepare to buy a larger pair of jeans.

7. Feel ‘the flow’ at work more (maybe)

This one is a bit more speculative but people who cycle to work may have less sickness absence than those who don’t. You can certainly see a persuasive argument that if people have less diabetes or less asthma that sickness absence may decrease and productivity increase.

8. Make your neighbourhood nicer

Let’s be honest, neighbourhoods with fewer cars are nicer. No-one ever said ‘what this street/suburb needs to make it more attractive and nicer to live in is more cars’. Fewer cars mean more space for trees, parks, and places to socialise for children and adults. It’s probably no coincidence that Wellington, with the highest level of public transport use and walking, has the lowest level of households that own multiple cars.

Many of you will have noticed that quite a lot of the good things about getting out of your cars are related to physical activity. I can hear people saying why don’t they just go to the gym? Or play rugby? Because these things are hard to fit into our busy lives. Only half of us manage to meet the guidelines for physical activity each week (which really are the bare minimum for health) and that number has not improved for almost 2 decades (see below). If the gym or club sports really worked they would have done so by now. Cunningly though, what we do have is that 46 minutes per day we spend commuting and we know that people who cycle or walk to work are much more likely to meet these physical activity guidelines. (And, no, people who take up this form of transport don’t tend to offset it by reducing other physical activity.)

Source: NZ Health Survey 2002-2017

Cars are a really useful technology, and there are some situations for some people where they are really essential. But we have got to the point where cars (and their space needs) are controlling us and our cities, instead of us controlling them.  Commuting without cars is fun and healthy for us and the environment.  We need to be given a real choice to skateboard, bike, walk, take the bus (or whatever) and do more of it, not just to be forced to use cars because it is too hard to do anything else.

Disclosure: I own a car and use it, including sometimes for commuting. I also walk or bike to work some days. Biking is the quickest way to get to work, even accounting for the Wellington wind.