Obesity is a panepidemic and no longer a western society/US phenomenon. Obesity is an interesting field of research engaging and concerning more and more researchers worldwide searching to find easy solutions that might help. Thus, every new promising substance such as CLA is of great interest. The fact that our study is one of the first clinical studies done with CLA and that CLA interest is still growing probably explains the high citation rate.

The methodology used in the study is not new, on the contrary, the study was performed following the guidelines and the conventions agreed upon for clinical studies. However, the findings are promising and therefore the paper opens a new field.

We had at that time only one small pilot study in humans. However, the animal data were quite extensive. The CLA effects observed both in the pilot study and in animal models were considerable, so it was worthwhile looking more closely into these effects. Therefore we designed this study with overweight and obese people that we anticipated were the target population for CLA treatment. Grants for this project and CLA product were provided by Natural ASA Inc.

Obesity research too often reports BMI and weight while forgetting the body composition. The paper shows that body fat mass is reduced, whereas the muscle mass is maintained or slightly increased in a dose dependent manner. A substance that can improve the body composition opens promising perspectives for the quality of any weight reduction regimen and may help weight maintenance.