Bio-Strath is at it again

It's examination time in South Africa and the purveyors of products that are supposed to help children improve their results are targeting parents with aggressive marketing campaigns. One of these is Bio-Strath. Their advertising budget must be enormous. We've seen half-page colour advertisements in a number of Sunday newspapers and heard sponsored talks on a dozen radio stations. Their incredible claims are backed by anecdotes and vague references to research. I won't waste time on the anecdotes, but let's look at the claims and the presented evidence.

Bio-Strath generally claims improvement in the cognitive performance of young and old. In this case, they base their claim on a so-called biometric analysis of a cohort of 390 children, Bio-Strath claims 85% improvement in concentration, 88% improvement in resistance (whatever that may be) and 90% improvement in study fatique. These are extraordinary claims and surely require extraordinary evidence (Carl Sagan). So what evidence does Bio-Strath offer? I have had to do some searching and eventually found the abstract, which I have re-produced below:

Is this extraordinary evidence? Hardly. It is a simple survey of feedback reports from parents of children who took Bio-Strath. There is no indication of just how the parents evaluated improvement in concentration, resistance and fatique. Surveys like this are subject to sampling and confirmation bias. As research they are of little value. To use the survey so prominently in an advertisement and to represent it as research is to put it mildly, questionable.

In my opinion Bio-Strath supplies very little evidence to support its extraordinary claims. It's been seventeen years since the survey in question. Had the product performed as claimed, there should have been solid evidence by now.

My previous post on Bio-Strath was entitled Bio-Strath for ADD/ADHD and critically evaluated another deficient Bio Strath study.