Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Ceylon cinnamon also helps lower blood pressure https://www.webmd.com/diet/health-benefits-ceylon-cinnamonby t1234s
- The funny thing is, I've read countless meta-analyses on various mainstream drugs, where total n=hundreds of thousands, and I still don't know if they work at all or not.by catigula
- Fun fact: in Soviet Union a common drug which people believe might reduce chance of a heart attack or stroke in high-stress/panic situation was Validol.
What people don't know is that it was just peppermint oil + glucose. I.e. a mint candy in a pill form.
Perhaps it actually did help people just acting as a placebo / distracting from their panic. "I did something now I should get better".
But a concept of a panic attack was not widely known. I guess doctors believed it's easier to prescribe Validol which "prevents heart attack" than to explain people that their panic attack symptoms are caused by their brain
by killerstorm - Garbage study.
The placebo was literally peppermint oil (they say what it is in the study). [1]
They claim it didn't have peppermint oil in it because it's not listed in the ingredients... but the ingredients have a catch all "flavorings" listed.
I highly doubt Coca Cola is getting a peppermint flavor by using anything other than peppermint oil. It's an incredibly cheap and easy oil to extract.
So you had 2 groups drinking roughly the same thing and one did better than the other. The only real difference is one got sugar water and the test group got unsweetened water.
by cogman10 - There are two types of peppermint supplements being sold: mentha pipereta that this study looked at, and mentha arvensis.
I wonder if mentha arvensis has the same effect. Supplements vs mint tea would be another interesting thing to study in future.
by yumraj - a single RCT of 40 people is about middle-of-the-range when it comes the hierarchy of evidence and is at best a 'that's neat, I'll wait a few years for there to be more studies' if you don't want to do any more thinking about it, a 'I need to see it in context of other studies' if you want a lot of work, or a 'I sure hope there's a meta/review' if you don't have the time but still want to remain skeptical
that said, there is a GRADE-assessed systematic review and meta on mint (PMC11587584) and this linked study's results are 7x the pooled effect size (SBP -8.5mmHg vs -1.2mmHg) of the other RCTs. the review also concludes that more high quality RCTs are needed before anything approaching clinical significance
the wildly disproportionate effect size indicates to me that this is one going to be one of those outlier studies that future reviewers will either likely omit or clearly state that it is an outlier result and if they're super duper honest they'll provide the new pooled results with and without this outlier study
by paimapi - Whenever I see a study like this I assume that the researchers won the p<0.05 lotteryby jrflo
- Noticing that the waist circumference on average went down on the peppermint group (85.17 -> 84.61) while the placebo group it went up (88.33 -> 88.65)? Also the resting heart rate dropped for the peppermint group. My initial suspicion is that the peppermint group coincidentally was also the 'got in better shape' group. Maybe the peppermint helped, but for relatively small groups that also seem to be improving waist circumference and heart rates likely due to good diet and exercise, I'm not convinced the peppermint did jack shit. More investigation needed! Would be awesome if it helped though!by jeffnv