SNR #224: Kurtis Frank - Understanding The Placebo Effect & Supplement Misconceptions

Sigma Nutrition Radio

Danny Lennon

Sigma, Dietetics, Evidencebased, Nutrition, Training, Health & Fitness, Science, Diet, Fitness, Evidence, Bodybuilding, Health

4.8 • 626 Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2018

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kurtis Frank graduated from the University of Guelph with a bachelor's degree in Applied Human Nutrition. During his undergraduate studies in human nutrition, he co-founded the website Examine.com to gather and present as much evidence-based information on dietary supplements as possible in as unbiased a manner as possible.

To that end, Kurtis worked tirelessly for seven years to make Examine the premier resource on the Internet for learning about the science of supplementation. Today, it boasts guides on over 500 supplements containing over 41,000 scientific citations.

Kurtis then became Director of Research for Legion Athletics, a company that produces evidence-based supplements. There, he takes an active role in managing the scientific advisory board, creating new and improving existing formulations, writing informative articles on our blog, and generally guiding the scientific direction of the company.

In This Episode We Discuss
What is an accurate way to think about the placebo effect?
How the placebo effect and actual drug effect are not mutually exclusive
Should coaches actively “placebo their clients”?
The nocebo effect
People using supplements to “reduce inflammation”: do they have a reason?
What anti-inflammatory compounds actually work?
Supplements for joint pain and joint health: what works and what doesn’t?
Supplements that help with sleep quality and sleep onset

Transcript

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0:00.0	Because basically you can titrate and control the placebo effect.
0:13.0	We actually see that in the field of homeopathy a lot, which anyone listening probably has a thousand reasons to mock homeopathy and rightfully so it's stupid
0:24.5	but homeopathy could be interesting to research simply because it is an entire demographic
0:31.6	basically saying how can we maximize and control the placebo effect for the people taking the useless compounds.
0:40.3	And what we learned in homeopathy very welcome to the podcast
1:14.6	if this is your first time listening or you're of course very welcome back if you are one of
1:19.3	the show's regular listeners. Off the back of last week, a huge episode for those of you who
1:25.4	missed it, we had Professor Christopher Gardner of Stanford University on talking about the very recent Diet Fits randomized trial, which had a lot of publicity behind it based on the kind of discussions and results coming out from that.
1:39.2	So if you want to go and check that out, I would highly recommend it actually hearing from the lead author of
1:44.7	the study to get the real breakdown of that particular trial. A lot of great feedback from you
1:49.9	guys. So thank you for that. On to today's episode, we're going to be talking with Curtis Frank,
1:57.3	who is one of the most intelligent people you will come across.
2:02.0	Curtis, while he has his background in applied human nutrition from his undergraduate degree,
2:08.5	actually was one of the co-founders of Examine.com, which I know many of you will be very
2:13.7	familiar with, essentially probably the best resource online for looking anything to do
2:19.3	with dietary supplements everything evidence based every different compound and supplement you
2:24.6	can think of broken down and showing the trials behind them examine dot com is a fantastic uh resource that
2:31.9	i've mentioned before and curtis was the guy that was behind pretty much the large, large majority of the research
2:40.1	behind all of that going in.
2:42.0	So spent years coming and putting that stuff together.
2:46.6	And now he is currently the director for research at Legion Athletics, which is a supplement
2:52.5	company that produces evidence-based supplements and only those with high-quality ingredients
	...

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