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Does eating a banana with every meal improve weight loss?

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300 adults are selected for this study, ages 20 to 60, 188 males 112 females. They are already in the process of losing weight.

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We had individuals sign up at a local gym.  The subjects were coming in for a workout and we asked them to be part of the study.  We made sure that their current goal was to lose weight, so most were coming to the gym for cardio.  They must agree to participate for the entire month and will be given a $50 gift card to the restaurant of their choice for participating.

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We will have 150 of the participants eat an organic banana with every meal (3 per day) and the other 150 agree not to eat any bananas during the study.

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Whether an individual was in the banana or non-banana group will be our explanatory variable.

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At the end of the one month time period, all participants will weigh in. The average weight loss from the start to the end of the study will be our response variable.

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We will randomize all individuals in terms of which treatment group they are placed in, so that 150 are in each group. Lurking variables that we can't control in this study may be the initial weight of the participants, how much they eat other than bananas, and how hard they work out.

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We do not have a placebo, but our control group is the group that is NOT eating bananas. They are participating normally without a treatment.

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Ideally, subjects wouldn't know their treatment, but ours know whether or not they are eating a banana. There is a partial blind, because they don't know what else we are studying, but they are not really blind. No double-blind is possible, because the research team is small and we know who is in which group.

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We decided to block by gender for this study, since men and women burn calories at different rates and bananas may affect them differently.  So  we have two groups blocked by gender. (94 men in banana group, 94 control, 56 women in banana group, 56 control)

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With 300 people in our sample, we have a margin of error at 5.77%. This means our results could be off by around 6%. More people could be included to lower this margin of error.

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We plan on replicating this experiment the next month, with a new group of 300 individuals at a different gym. This will allow us to be more confident in our results and reduce the margin of error.

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The average weight loss for men over the one month period was 3.5 pounds in the banana group and 2.2 pounds in the non-banana group. For the women, the average weight loss in the banana group was 4.1 pounds and the control group average was 2.6 pounds.

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We randomized our results and the greatest improvement in weight loss we could generate was 0.5 pounds, which is significantly less than the actual difference of 1.3 pounds for men and 1.5 pounds for women.  Thus we declare our results to be statistically significant.

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We offered all 300 participants a $50 gift card for participation in the study, which comes to $15,000.  Our small team of three researchers were given a single payment of $600 for their work in the study which is $1800.  The gym did not charge us.  We provided bananas for all participants, 21 bananas (15 cents each) per week for 150 people for 4 weeks, so bananas cost us $1890.  Our total cost is $18,690.

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Our results were published in a local North Valley magazine by a nutritionist. As a result, local grocery stores were out of bananas for several weeks, but just like resolutions, the popularity of the 'Banana Diet' died down eventually. Unfortunately, many people are continuing to try to lose weight without potassium on their side.