From ‘magic’ weight-loss coffee beans to red onion stopping cancer: Dr Oz’s history of baseless medical claims

A decade ago, Dr Mehmet Oz was hauled in front of a Senate subcommittee where he was grilled over false claims he had been peddling about diet and weight loss on TV.

“The scientific community is almost monolithic against you,” then-Senator Claire McCaskill said, referring to products he had been touting as “miracle” weight loss cures.

Oz trained as a surgeon before he was a regular guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the early 2000s.

He went on to host his own program, The Dr Oz Show, where he spouted other dangerously misleading claims ranging from “magic” coffee beans to spur weight loss and selenium supplements to prevent cancer.

A 2017 paper published by the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics called him “a dangerous rogue unfit for the office of America’s doctor.”

Now, he is preparing to serve in Donald Trump’s second administration as lead of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), working alongside vaccine-sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr.

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Some of his past baseless medical claims include:

In a 2012 episode of The Dr Oz Show, Oz claimed that selenium supplements – a mineral found in certain foods – was “the holy grail of cancer prevention.”

But a 2014 National Library of Medicine study concluded there was “no convincing evidence” to date that “suggests that selenium supplements can prevent cancer in humans.”

Rather, it found that “extremely high intakes of selenium can cause severe problems, including difficulty breathing, tremors, kidney failure, heart attacks, and heart failure.”

The TV doctor also said on his show that red onion, endive and sea bass could reduce the risk of ovarian cancer by up to 75 per cent. The claim prompted a group of researches to publish a paper in the journal Nutrition and Cancer titled Reality Check: There Is No Such Thing as a Miracle Cure.

“Nutritional scientists and epidemiologists should be cognizant of the public health messages that are taken from their individual studies and not sensationalize the findings of a single study,” they warned.

Some of Oz’s claims were read aloud to him in the 2014 Senate subcommittee hearing on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Insurance. The focus of the hearing, where Oz was one of six experts testifying, was false advertising in the diet and weight-loss industry.

McCaskill read out one of his most absurd claims: “You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight loss cure for every body type: It’s green coffee extract.”

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“When you call a product a miracle, and it’s something you can buy, and it’s something that gives people false hope, I just don’t understand why you need to go there,” McCaskill told Oz.

The company behind the green coffee extract was forced to settle with the Federal Trade Commission in 2015, which found that it used fake news sites to make “misleading, deceptive and unsupported claims” about the product.

Other unsubstantiated weight loss claims from Oz included raspberry ketone being the “number-one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat” and the herbal weight loss product garcinia cambogia, which has been reported to cause liver damage in rare cases.

During the Senate hearing, Oz tried to defend his claims.

“I actually do personally believe in the items I talk about in the show. I passionately study them,” he said, The Atlantic reported at the time. “I recognize oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact, but nevertheless, I would give my audience the advice I give my family.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Oz became an informal health adviser to Trump.

Appearing on Fox & Friends, Oz said that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could be an effective treatment against Covid-19.

“There’s no question it’s not proven to be beneficial in the large clinical trials we expect in America, and certainly the FDA and medical societies would desire,” Oz said. “But these have been supported with case studies.”

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The FDA issued a safety warning about the drug at the time and since then, World Health Organization experts have discounted its use. Earlier this year, a new scientific study found that thousands of patients may have died as a result of taking the drug, which was prescribed to patients “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits.”

The French study estimated that 16,990 patients in the US, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Turkey may have died as a result of the drug.

Trump, who called the drug “the biggest game-changer in the history of medicine,” admitted at the height of the pandemic that he was taking the drug as a preventative measure.

“All I can tell you is so far I seem to be OK,” Trump told reporters at the time.

“I get a lot of tremendously positive news on the hydroxy,” Trump added, before asking: “What do you have to lose?”

On his show in 2011, Oz profiled testing by a New Jersey lab that he said had found “troubling levels of arsenic” in brands of apple juice.

The FDA was quick to carry out its own tests, which found no evidence to support Oz’s claims.

“There is no evidence of any public health risk from drinking these juices. And FDA has been testing them for years,” the agency said in a statement at the time.

And, while not dangerous, Oz also suggested putting a bar of lavender soap between the sheets to help with cramps.

“I know this sounds crazy,” Oz said in 2010. “But people put it under their sheets. We think the lavender is relaxing and maybe itself beneficial.”

While the scent is relaxing, there is no scientific research to back up the claim itself.