captain coincidence strikes again (1)

So earlier this week I wrote about Ben Goldacre - who has a pet peeve against suspect nutritional advice in general and "superfoods" in particular. Yesterday I received an email from a friend inviting me join a "multi-level marketing"* scheme involving a goji berry energy drink - from a company he told me would be the nutritional equivalent of Microsoft (cue: lots of gags about bloatware & obesity). I like my friend, he is one of the nicest guys in town. He is also pretty damn smart. I wondered if I had lost my mind.

He did assure me that there were over 100 "solid gold" clinical studies on PubMed. I had a look (using the Latin term "Lycium barbarum") - and it brought back 103 papers. From what I could see, most of them dealt with in vitro experiments or tests on lab rats. Now if I was a bunch of cells on a glass dish or, indeed, a rat (steady), this might be handy. The only clinical study on humans (outside China - they seem to be keen on the berries) was carried out by... a major distributor of goji products.

I should say that the goji berry energy drink had less sugar in it that other energy drinks (yay!) - but also had caffeine in it. Which makes me wonder if goji berries are so gosh darn great, why the caffeine?

*This is not a pyramid scheme - as one Brisbane newspaper found out to its cost. However I did look at the compensation scheme for "marketing executives" on their web site and was completely confused. Nine pages of points, ranks, numbers, uplines, downlines and I was no clearer at the end as to how much money I would get. Maybe their compensation system requires you to have had your brain boosted by goji berries before you get it.