Nutratech, a supplement brand based in Houston, has been in business for about four years. CEO Jeremy Danvers said the company’s new line capitalizes on an ongoing need in the marketplace.
Even if some weight loss products have overpromised and underdelivered in the past (remember all those “targets belly fat” commercials?), people still want to lose weight.
Continued potential
“We have a complete line of supplements for men and women, but we thought the potential in the weight loss category is huge,” he said.
The baseline demographics certainly augur well for future sales. The national and worldwide obesity statistics continue to trend up. According to 2013-2014 NHANES data, more than 70% of US adults are now considered to be overweight or obese. About 8% of adults fell into the extreme obesity category. Obesity rates climbed in every state in the 2000-2017 time frame. For example, even in Colorado, considered to be the ‘thinnest’ state in the nation, obesity rates climbed from 6.9% in 2000 to 22.6% in 2017.
“We’ve had a lot of people in the past going to doctors getting prescription drugs that worked but had a lot of side effects,” Danvers said. “We wanted to provide them with herbal equivalents of the things that they were formally getting by prescription.”
The new Nutratech line features 10 products in capsules and liquids that include a number of tried and true weight loss ingredients including Irvingia gabonensis (African mango), Phaseolis vulgaris (white bean extract) and Garcinia cambogia.
Mood support as target
Some of the products are aimed at sleep support and managing inflammation and include ingredients such as melatonin and curcumin. But the lion’s share of the line is built around the reliable stimulant ingredient caffeine.
The company has also included phenylethylamine, a naturally occurring substance in the body that has potential cognitive health effects.
“The reason we did that was a few years ago we were selling pills that were mostly based on a stimulant and an appetite suppressant. Then we started including ingredients like phenylethylamine that also affected mood. People who are suppressed eat more, and when we started including those ingredients, the products have sold better,” Danvers said.
Changing face of retail
Nutratech sells its products direct to consumers via its own website as well as on Amazon. Danvers said the company is considering brick and mortar distribution by way of diversification, but it’s not the wave of the future, he said.
While the reach of Amazon and other online platforms in the supplement space is still relatively small, he expects that to change rapidly.
“Eighty percent to 85% of sales are still done in retail stores, but that number will decline year after year. And the margins at retail are very small,” he said.
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We are all aware of the fact that slimming is a mega-dollar industry. With millions, if not billions of people of all ages struggling to lose weight, and very few pharmaceutically effective medications available to assist them, the desperate public will literally clutch at straws.
Every week sees the launch of a new “miracle” diet pill or potion and a “surefire” diet guaranteed to help believers shed kilos like magic.
Recently Garcinia cambogia became the flavour of the year. If you search the internet for information on this exotic fruit extract you will be assured that this is finally the miracle we have all been waiting for, which will produce dramatic weight loss. Endorsements by various TV personalities and other luminaries have added to the allure of Garcinia cambogia slimming products.
According to a recent local study from the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) “this small fruit, reminiscent of a pumpkin in appearance, is currently most popularly used and widely advertised as a weight-loss supplement”.
The good side
But just how effective is this plant for shedding the kilos?
The comprehensive overview from TUT suggests that studies have shown that “the extracts as well as (-)-hydroxycitric acid (HCA), a main organic acid component of the fruit rind, exhibited anti-obesity activity”. It also regulates the serotonin levels related to satiety, leading to reduced food intake.
“According to clinical trial reports, Garcinia extracts were beneficial to obese individuals in many cases. In addition, studies on the toxicity and observations during clinical trials indicate that Garcinia is safe to use. Most of the negative reports have been related to cases where multi ingredient formulations were consumed and the effect could not be attributed to a specific ingredient.”
The research does, however, caution against an increase in serotonin, especially in people who take medicines that are already increasing serotonin levels, such as SSRIs. Research into these effects has not been conducted.
“Moreover, regulatory authorities should provide and enforce legislation requiring the compulsory basic safety demonstration of supplements pre-marketing and develop post-marketing surveillance systems,” the study concluded.
The bad side
Dr Ingrid van Heerden, a registered dietitian, is of opinion that we should be cautious of Garcinia, since it has not undergone rigorous testing. What follows is reviewed information from her pen, including her final verdict:
Often, once a person who wants, or needs to lose weight, is hooked on the promise of a slim, sexy figure, they are sucked into the deception. If the drops, wafers or powders don’t work, well then it is the fault of the user who did not adhere to one or other often impossible instruction such as “stick to a 500 kcal/day diet” or “drink 5 litres of water a day”, never that of the diet pill.
When eventually science and legislation catch up with the manufacturers, they calmly take product A off the market, change their formulation slightly, change the name to product B, and then blithely sell product B using the same advertising gambits as before, raking in the money and pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes all over again.
In keeping with the ever-changing slimming product ranges, there are what one can call “ingredients of the year” (sometimes an ingredient lasts for only three to six months, but some have longer life spans, and then of course some are resurrected every two to three years).
We have had apple cider vinegar (which has made many a comeback over the years), green tea (which has earned some merit in scientific studies), hoodia (which just does not manage to produce the research results that will make it a front-runner), willow bark (or salicylic acid which is good for aches and pains but not as efficacious for slimming), and good old caffeine (which has a diuretic effect thus helping you lose weight until you replenish the water in your body, and also a stimulant effect when taken in large quantities that can be potentially dangerous), to name but a few.
While it is perfectly possible that more extensive and well controlled scientific studies will reveal that an extract of Garcinia cambogia which contains a chemical called hydroxycitric acid (HCA) will assist weight loss, we are at present not yet sure how this tamarind or brindall berry or brindleberry or Garcinia gummi-gutta works, what side-effects it may or may not have and what dosage is required to achieve really significant weight loss.
But I hear you say: “For once we have a number of scientific studies that were carried out with Garcinia cambogia, so what’s the problem?”
Well some of the studies did not show any weight loss differences between patients who took Garcinia pills and those who took dummy pills, while other studies did show differences in weight loss with the subjects taking pills containing Garcinia losing slightly more weight than those that did not (Marquez et al, 2012).
Some of these weight loss differences were not exactly exciting either, so we can’t say for sure that Garcinia cambogia does promote weight loss. It also seems likely that this is not the wonder pill it is made out to be.
In addition, many of the studies conducted to date have been flawed (Critchley, 2013) . What that means is for example that in one study the control and experimental subjects were not well matched (i.e. they did not have the same starting weight, age, percentage of body fat etc.), while in other studies too few subjects were used for the results to be significant.
For the results of studies to be plausible one has to compare “apples with apples” (i.e. well-matched subjects and controls) and you need more than just a handful of subjects to produce the same result.
On the positive side, we can say that there is some evidence that Garcinia cambogia products may aid weight loss over a period of 12 weeks. No studies have been conducted for longer periods as yet (Marquez et al, 2012), which is also regarded as a drawback.
Safety issues
There is also at present an argument about the safety of pills containing Garcinia cambogia – one group of researchers slates the pills as dangerous and hepatotoxic (causing liver damage) (Kim et al, 2013), while another group refutes this (Clouatre Preuss, 2013). Marquez and his coworkers (2012) state that “at the doses usually administered, no differences have been reported in terms of side effects or adverse events (those studied) in humans between individuals treated with G. cambogia and controls.”
Ano Lob (2009), a public health consultant in the United States has published a warning regarding the hepatotoxicity of a weight loss product called “Hydroxycut”, which contains Garcinia cambogia. The author collected case reports of patients who developed liver toxicity associated with the above mentioned weight loss product.
Evidently approximately one million units of this hydroxycitric acid product are sold per year in the USA. The patients who developed hepatotoxicity reported symptoms of fatigue, nausea, vomiting, cramps, fever, chills, abdominal pain, and jaundice.
While the number of hepatotoxicity cases reported were very few, Lob points out that monitoring of adverse events associated with dietary supplements such as these weight loss products is woefully inadequate in America (as is the case in many other countries, including South Africa), with the FDA only receiving about 1% of these negative reports.
According to Lob (2009), the Poison Control Centres in the USA are more likely to receive reports of adverse events associated with dietary supplements but are not equipped to coordinate such findings.
He cites the truly sobering example of a product called “Metabolife 356″ which was sold as a weight loss supplement in America. Lob’s states that the manufacturers received 14 000 reports over a period of five years that documented “serious adverse events associated with their ephedra-containing product” which included heart attacks, strokes, convulsions and fatalities.
The manufacturers did not inform the FDA or any other US government authority of these reports. As astounding as this may sound, manufacturers of dietary supplements are not required to meet any of the specifications that are strictly enforced when it comes to food and pharmaceutical products (medicines), so they can use this “ethical loophole” not to publish reports of negative and harmful events.
Eventually these events came to light and ephedra-containing products for slimming and other uses were banned in the USA.
The implication contain in Lob’s warning is that HCA or Garcinia cambogia extract may also be potentially toxic unless sufficient, reliable evidence to the contrary is made available.
Conclusion
At the present moment, we do not know enough about slimming products that contain Garcinia cambogia extract or HCA to freely recommend its use. I tend to agree with Astell and coworkers (2013) who conducted a systematic review of double blind randomised controlled clinical trials to assess the evidence available on the efficacy of current dietary supplements used to control appetite and/or weight.
These authors concluded that “According to the finding from this systematic review, the evidence is not convincing in demonstrating that most dietary supplements used as appetite suppressants for weight loss in the treatment of obesity are effective and safe.”
While we wait for more extensive and conclusive evidence obtained with larger numbers of well-matched test subjects treated for longer periods with the “gold standard” of double blind randomised controlled clinical trials, rather avoid using any weight-loss supplement that has not been tested thoroughly.
References: (Astell KJ et al (2013). Plant extracts with appetite suppressing properties for body weight control: a systematic review of double blind randomized controlled clinical trial. Complement Ther Med, 21(4):407-16; Clouatre DL Preuss HG (2013). Hydroxycitric acid does not promote inflammation or liver toxicity. World J Gastoenterol. 19(44):8160-2; Crtichley G (2013). Garcinia cambogia – is it really a miracle weight loss supplement?; Lob A (2009). Hepatotoxicity associated with weight-loss supplements: A case for better post-marketing surveillance. World J Gastoenterol. 15(14):1786-1787; Marquez F et al (2012). Evaluation of the safety and efficacy of hydroxycitric acid or Garcinia cambogia extracts in humans. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr, 52(7):585-94)
We are all aware of the fact that slimming is a mega-dollar industry. With millions, if not billions of people of all ages struggling to lose weight, and very few pharmaceutically effective medications available to assist them, the desperate public will literally clutch at straws.
Every week sees the launch of a new “miracle” diet pill or potion and a “surefire” diet guaranteed to help believers shed kilos like magic.
Recently Garcinia cambogia became the flavour of the year. If you search the internet for information on this exotic fruit extract you will be assured that this is finally the miracle we have all been waiting for, which will produce dramatic weight loss. Endorsements by various TV personalities and other luminaries have added to the allure of Garcinia cambogia slimming products.
According to a recent local study from the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) “this small fruit, reminiscent of a pumpkin in appearance, is currently most popularly used and widely advertised as a weight-loss supplement”.
The good side
But just how effective is this plant for shedding the kilos?
The comprehensive overview from TUT suggests that studies have shown that “the extracts as well as (-)-hydroxycitric acid (HCA), a main organic acid component of the fruit rind, exhibited anti-obesity activity”. It also regulates the serotonin levels related to satiety, leading to reduced food intake.
“According to clinical trial reports, Garcinia extracts were beneficial to obese individuals in many cases. In addition, studies on the toxicity and observations during clinical trials indicate that Garcinia is safe to use. Most of the negative reports have been related to cases where multi ingredient formulations were consumed and the effect could not be attributed to a specific ingredient.”
The research does, however, caution against an increase in serotonin, especially in people who take medicines that are already increasing serotonin levels, such as SSRIs. Research into these effects has not been conducted.
“Moreover, regulatory authorities should provide and enforce legislation requiring the compulsory basic safety demonstration of supplements pre-marketing and develop post-marketing surveillance systems,” the study concluded.
The bad side
Dr Ingrid van Heerden, a registered dietitian, is of opinion that we should be cautious of Garcinia, since it has not undergone rigorous testing. What follows is reviewed information from her pen, including her final verdict:
Often, once a person who wants, or needs to lose weight, is hooked on the promise of a slim, sexy figure, they are sucked into the deception. If the drops, wafers or powders don’t work, well then it is the fault of the user who did not adhere to one or other often impossible instruction such as “stick to a 500 kcal/day diet” or “drink 5 litres of water a day”, never that of the diet pill.
When eventually science and legislation catch up with the manufacturers, they calmly take product A off the market, change their formulation slightly, change the name to product B, and then blithely sell product B using the same advertising gambits as before, raking in the money and pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes all over again.
In keeping with the ever-changing slimming product ranges, there are what one can call “ingredients of the year” (sometimes an ingredient lasts for only three to six months, but some have longer life spans, and then of course some are resurrected every two to three years).
We have had apple cider vinegar (which has made many a comeback over the years), green tea (which has earned some merit in scientific studies), hoodia (which just does not manage to produce the research results that will make it a front-runner), willow bark (or salicylic acid which is good for aches and pains but not as efficacious for slimming), and good old caffeine (which has a diuretic effect thus helping you lose weight until you replenish the water in your body, and also a stimulant effect when taken in large quantities that can be potentially dangerous), to name but a few.
While it is perfectly possible that more extensive and well controlled scientific studies will reveal that an extract of Garcinia cambogia which contains a chemical called hydroxycitric acid (HCA) will assist weight loss, we are at present not yet sure how this tamarind or brindall berry or brindleberry or Garcinia gummi-gutta works, what side-effects it may or may not have and what dosage is required to achieve really significant weight loss.
But I hear you say: “For once we have a number of scientific studies that were carried out with Garcinia cambogia, so what’s the problem?”
Well some of the studies did not show any weight loss differences between patients who took Garcinia pills and those who took dummy pills, while other studies did show differences in weight loss with the subjects taking pills containing Garcinia losing slightly more weight than those that did not (Marquez et al, 2012).
Some of these weight loss differences were not exactly exciting either, so we can’t say for sure that Garcinia cambogia does promote weight loss. It also seems likely that this is not the wonder pill it is made out to be.
In addition, many of the studies conducted to date have been flawed (Critchley, 2013) . What that means is for example that in one study the control and experimental subjects were not well matched (i.e. they did not have the same starting weight, age, percentage of body fat etc.), while in other studies too few subjects were used for the results to be significant.
For the results of studies to be plausible one has to compare “apples with apples” (i.e. well-matched subjects and controls) and you need more than just a handful of subjects to produce the same result.
On the positive side, we can say that there is some evidence that Garcinia cambogia products may aid weight loss over a period of 12 weeks. No studies have been conducted for longer periods as yet (Marquez et al, 2012), which is also regarded as a drawback.
Safety issues
There is also at present an argument about the safety of pills containing Garcinia cambogia – one group of researchers slates the pills as dangerous and hepatotoxic (causing liver damage) (Kim et al, 2013), while another group refutes this (Clouatre Preuss, 2013). Marquez and his coworkers (2012) state that “at the doses usually administered, no differences have been reported in terms of side effects or adverse events (those studied) in humans between individuals treated with G. cambogia and controls.”
Ano Lob (2009), a public health consultant in the United States has published a warning regarding the hepatotoxicity of a weight loss product called “Hydroxycut”, which contains Garcinia cambogia. The author collected case reports of patients who developed liver toxicity associated with the above mentioned weight loss product.
Evidently approximately one million units of this hydroxycitric acid product are sold per year in the USA. The patients who developed hepatotoxicity reported symptoms of fatigue, nausea, vomiting, cramps, fever, chills, abdominal pain, and jaundice.
While the number of hepatotoxicity cases reported were very few, Lob points out that monitoring of adverse events associated with dietary supplements such as these weight loss products is woefully inadequate in America (as is the case in many other countries, including South Africa), with the FDA only receiving about 1% of these negative reports.
According to Lob (2009), the Poison Control Centres in the USA are more likely to receive reports of adverse events associated with dietary supplements but are not equipped to coordinate such findings.
He cites the truly sobering example of a product called “Metabolife 356″ which was sold as a weight loss supplement in America. Lob’s states that the manufacturers received 14 000 reports over a period of five years that documented “serious adverse events associated with their ephedra-containing product” which included heart attacks, strokes, convulsions and fatalities.
The manufacturers did not inform the FDA or any other US government authority of these reports. As astounding as this may sound, manufacturers of dietary supplements are not required to meet any of the specifications that are strictly enforced when it comes to food and pharmaceutical products (medicines), so they can use this “ethical loophole” not to publish reports of negative and harmful events.
Eventually these events came to light and ephedra-containing products for slimming and other uses were banned in the USA.
The implication contain in Lob’s warning is that HCA or Garcinia cambogia extract may also be potentially toxic unless sufficient, reliable evidence to the contrary is made available.
Conclusion
At the present moment, we do not know enough about slimming products that contain Garcinia cambogia extract or HCA to freely recommend its use. I tend to agree with Astell and coworkers (2013) who conducted a systematic review of double blind randomised controlled clinical trials to assess the evidence available on the efficacy of current dietary supplements used to control appetite and/or weight.
These authors concluded that “According to the finding from this systematic review, the evidence is not convincing in demonstrating that most dietary supplements used as appetite suppressants for weight loss in the treatment of obesity are effective and safe.”
While we wait for more extensive and conclusive evidence obtained with larger numbers of well-matched test subjects treated for longer periods with the “gold standard” of double blind randomised controlled clinical trials, rather avoid using any weight-loss supplement that has not been tested thoroughly.
References: (Astell KJ et al (2013). Plant extracts with appetite suppressing properties for body weight control: a systematic review of double blind randomized controlled clinical trial. Complement Ther Med, 21(4):407-16; Clouatre DL Preuss HG (2013). Hydroxycitric acid does not promote inflammation or liver toxicity. World J Gastoenterol. 19(44):8160-2; Crtichley G (2013). Garcinia cambogia – is it really a miracle weight loss supplement?; Lob A (2009). Hepatotoxicity associated with weight-loss supplements: A case for better post-marketing surveillance. World J Gastoenterol. 15(14):1786-1787; Marquez F et al (2012). Evaluation of the safety and efficacy of hydroxycitric acid or Garcinia cambogia extracts in humans. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr, 52(7):585-94)
Do you feel your shape look like a pumpkin or a potato? Do you feel ashamed looking at the mirror? If your answers to both these questions is a nod vertically (that means a YES) then it’s time you finally have to do something about this. Obesity is an interminable issue around the globe. At times, it is in our genes or hereditary else, the blame should be put our lifestyle.
One thing is certain that everybody continues to attempt distinctive answers for disposing of the aggregated fat. Detecting this criticalness, there are various supplements that have been formulated to battle fat gathering and we have listed a few of them below:
It is an organic product that helps in shedding a few pounds. The admission of these organic products will diminish your weight with no symptoms. Also, it controls stress, depression mood swings and feelings of anxiety. These really limit your craving for food and so you don’t wind up eating more than usual.
It is a standout among the most well-known weight reduction supplements around. It contains a few ingredients including caffeine and a couple of plant extracts that assist you to get thinner. Research demonstrated that it decreased more than 9 kg in 3 months time span.
Green Coffee extracts are found in India and are a sheltered normal weight reduction items. These are the typical espresso beans which are not yet simmered. It is produced using the concentrates of espresso. Caffeine is known as an eating routine suppressant, it controls the admission of sustenance into the body. It very well may be utilized with no reactions. It is somewhat costly yet is great. There are two substances inside which are caffeine and chlorogenic corrosive. The chlorogenic corrosive moderates the breakdown of sugars in the gut. This combo in an enhancement frame influenced individuals to lose up to 3 kg more than foreseen.
As of late it is found that Green Tea Extract works ponder similarly when weight reduction is concerned. It expands the movement of norepinephrine, a hormone which causes you to consume fat proficiently. Research demonstrates that this hormone expands fat consuming around the paunch territory (stomach). This is one of the fundamental reasons you see individuals tasting green tea 2-3 times each day.
It is an Ayurvedic item which is fabricated from natural ingredients. It is protected in light of the fact that it has zero dimension of reactions. It helps in boosting the metabolic rate of the body. It fixes a great deal of scatters, for example, corpulence. It helps in the reduction of lethal metabolic deposits and along these lines, enhances the safe arrangement of the body.
These are just a few to be listed. Apart from these also, there are many supplements that would aid you in your weight loss journey.
Do you feel your shape look like a pumpkin or a potato? Do you feel ashamed looking at the mirror? If your answers to both these questions is a nod vertically (that means a YES) then it’s time you finally have to do something about this. Obesity is an interminable issue around the globe. At times, it is in our genes or hereditary else, the blame should be put our lifestyle.
One thing is certain that everybody continues to attempt distinctive answers for disposing of the aggregated fat. Detecting this criticalness, there are various supplements that have been formulated to battle fat gathering and we have listed a few of them below:
It is an organic product that helps in shedding a few pounds. The admission of these organic products will diminish your weight with no symptoms. Also, it controls stress, depression mood swings and feelings of anxiety. These really limit your craving for food and so you don’t wind up eating more than usual.
It is a standout among the most well-known weight reduction supplements around. It contains a few ingredients including caffeine and a couple of plant extracts that assist you to get thinner. Research demonstrated that it decreased more than 9 kg in 3 months time span.
Green Coffee extracts are found in India and are a sheltered normal weight reduction items. These are the typical espresso beans which are not yet simmered. It is produced using the concentrates of espresso. Caffeine is known as an eating routine suppressant, it controls the admission of sustenance into the body. It very well may be utilized with no reactions. It is somewhat costly yet is great. There are two substances inside which are caffeine and chlorogenic corrosive. The chlorogenic corrosive moderates the breakdown of sugars in the gut. This combo in an enhancement frame influenced individuals to lose up to 3 kg more than foreseen.
As of late it is found that Green Tea Extract works ponder similarly when weight reduction is concerned. It expands the movement of norepinephrine, a hormone which causes you to consume fat proficiently. Research demonstrates that this hormone expands fat consuming around the paunch territory (stomach). This is one of the fundamental reasons you see individuals tasting green tea 2-3 times each day.
It is an Ayurvedic item which is fabricated from natural ingredients. It is protected in light of the fact that it has zero dimension of reactions. It helps in boosting the metabolic rate of the body. It fixes a great deal of scatters, for example, corpulence. It helps in the reduction of lethal metabolic deposits and along these lines, enhances the safe arrangement of the body.
These are just a few to be listed. Apart from these also, there are many supplements that would aid you in your weight loss journey.
Ahh, Valentine’s Day! That beautiful day that brings out the romance in all of us. It’s a day for romantic dinners, flickering candles, expensive wine, roses, chick-flicks, and free icon sets!
To celebrate Valentine’s Day we have a free icon collection for you (you can share them with your significant other if you like) from Freepik. There are 50 icons in the set, and they come in both SVG and PNG formats, and of course, you can use the set in both your personal and commercial projects.
The Valentine's Day Toolbox for Designers Unlimited Downloads: 500,000+ Print Templates, Mockups, Scene Generators & Design Assets
Courtesy of our friends from Freepik.com, we have an amazing freebie for you this week! Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we have an enormous (25mb) selection of professionally designed vector banners that you can use on your websites!
The banners package contains the 9 different design styles you can see from the preview below and also comes with the 9 popular banner sizes (120x600px, 160x600px, 200x200px, 250x250px, 300x250px, 300x600px, 336x280px, 468x60px & 728x90px) you can also see. This all means there a grand total of 81 banners! The files come in both AI & EPS formats and, this is the best thing about them, you can also use these banners in both your commercial and personal projects freely.
Scroll down to download all of the vector banners.
The Valentine's Day Toolbox for Designers Unlimited Downloads: 500,000+ Print Templates, Mockups, Scene Generators & Design Assets
We are all aware of the fact that slimming is a mega-dollar industry. With millions, if not billions of people of all ages struggling to lose weight, and very few pharmaceutically effective medications available to assist them, the desperate public will literally clutch at straws.
Every week sees the launch of a new “miracle” diet pill or potion and a “surefire” diet guaranteed to help believers shed kilos like magic.
Recently Garcinia cambogia became the flavour of the year. If you search the internet for information on this exotic fruit extract you will be assured that this is finally the miracle we have all been waiting for, which will produce dramatic weight loss. Endorsements by various TV personalities and other luminaries have added to the allure of Garcinia cambogia slimming products.
According to a recent local study from the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) “this small fruit, reminiscent of a pumpkin in appearance, is currently most popularly used and widely advertised as a weight-loss supplement”.
The good side
But just how effective is this plant for shedding the kilos?
The comprehensive overview from TUT suggests that studies have shown that “the extracts as well as (-)-hydroxycitric acid (HCA), a main organic acid component of the fruit rind, exhibited anti-obesity activity”. It also regulates the serotonin levels related to satiety, leading to reduced food intake.
“According to clinical trial reports, Garcinia extracts were beneficial to obese individuals in many cases. In addition, studies on the toxicity and observations during clinical trials indicate that Garcinia is safe to use. Most of the negative reports have been related to cases where multi ingredient formulations were consumed and the effect could not be attributed to a specific ingredient.”
The research does, however, caution against an increase in serotonin, especially in people who take medicines that are already increasing serotonin levels, such as SSRIs. Research into these effects has not been conducted.
“Moreover, regulatory authorities should provide and enforce legislation requiring the compulsory basic safety demonstration of supplements pre-marketing and develop post-marketing surveillance systems,” the study concluded.
The bad side
Dr Ingrid van Heerden, a registered dietitian, is of opinion that we should be cautious of Garcinia, since it has not undergone rigorous testing. What follows is reviewed information from her pen, including her final verdict:
Often, once a person who wants, or needs to lose weight, is hooked on the promise of a slim, sexy figure, they are sucked into the deception. If the drops, wafers or powders don’t work, well then it is the fault of the user who did not adhere to one or other often impossible instruction such as “stick to a 500 kcal/day diet” or “drink 5 litres of water a day”, never that of the diet pill.
When eventually science and legislation catch up with the manufacturers, they calmly take product A off the market, change their formulation slightly, change the name to product B, and then blithely sell product B using the same advertising gambits as before, raking in the money and pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes all over again.
In keeping with the ever-changing slimming product ranges, there are what one can call “ingredients of the year” (sometimes an ingredient lasts for only three to six months, but some have longer life spans, and then of course some are resurrected every two to three years).
We have had apple cider vinegar (which has made many a comeback over the years), green tea (which has earned some merit in scientific studies), hoodia (which just does not manage to produce the research results that will make it a front-runner), willow bark (or salicylic acid which is good for aches and pains but not as efficacious for slimming), and good old caffeine (which has a diuretic effect thus helping you lose weight until you replenish the water in your body, and also a stimulant effect when taken in large quantities that can be potentially dangerous), to name but a few.
While it is perfectly possible that more extensive and well controlled scientific studies will reveal that an extract of Garcinia cambogia which contains a chemical called hydroxycitric acid (HCA) will assist weight loss, we are at present not yet sure how this tamarind or brindall berry or brindleberry or Garcinia gummi-gutta works, what side-effects it may or may not have and what dosage is required to achieve really significant weight loss.
But I hear you say: “For once we have a number of scientific studies that were carried out with Garcinia cambogia, so what’s the problem?”
Well some of the studies did not show any weight loss differences between patients who took Garcinia pills and those who took dummy pills, while other studies did show differences in weight loss with the subjects taking pills containing Garcinia losing slightly more weight than those that did not (Marquez et al, 2012).
Some of these weight loss differences were not exactly exciting either, so we can’t say for sure that Garcinia cambogia does promote weight loss. It also seems likely that this is not the wonder pill it is made out to be.
In addition, many of the studies conducted to date have been flawed (Critchley, 2013) . What that means is for example that in one study the control and experimental subjects were not well matched (i.e. they did not have the same starting weight, age, percentage of body fat etc.), while in other studies too few subjects were used for the results to be significant.
For the results of studies to be plausible one has to compare “apples with apples” (i.e. well-matched subjects and controls) and you need more than just a handful of subjects to produce the same result.
On the positive side, we can say that there is some evidence that Garcinia cambogia products may aid weight loss over a period of 12 weeks. No studies have been conducted for longer periods as yet (Marquez et al, 2012), which is also regarded as a drawback.
Safety issues
There is also at present an argument about the safety of pills containing Garcinia cambogia – one group of researchers slates the pills as dangerous and hepatotoxic (causing liver damage) (Kim et al, 2013), while another group refutes this (Clouatre Preuss, 2013). Marquez and his coworkers (2012) state that “at the doses usually administered, no differences have been reported in terms of side effects or adverse events (those studied) in humans between individuals treated with G. cambogia and controls.”
Ano Lob (2009), a public health consultant in the United States has published a warning regarding the hepatotoxicity of a weight loss product called “Hydroxycut”, which contains Garcinia cambogia. The author collected case reports of patients who developed liver toxicity associated with the above mentioned weight loss product.
Evidently approximately one million units of this hydroxycitric acid product are sold per year in the USA. The patients who developed hepatotoxicity reported symptoms of fatigue, nausea, vomiting, cramps, fever, chills, abdominal pain, and jaundice.
While the number of hepatotoxicity cases reported were very few, Lob points out that monitoring of adverse events associated with dietary supplements such as these weight loss products is woefully inadequate in America (as is the case in many other countries, including South Africa), with the FDA only receiving about 1% of these negative reports.
According to Lob (2009), the Poison Control Centres in the USA are more likely to receive reports of adverse events associated with dietary supplements but are not equipped to coordinate such findings.
He cites the truly sobering example of a product called “Metabolife 356″ which was sold as a weight loss supplement in America. Lob’s states that the manufacturers received 14 000 reports over a period of five years that documented “serious adverse events associated with their ephedra-containing product” which included heart attacks, strokes, convulsions and fatalities.
The manufacturers did not inform the FDA or any other US government authority of these reports. As astounding as this may sound, manufacturers of dietary supplements are not required to meet any of the specifications that are strictly enforced when it comes to food and pharmaceutical products (medicines), so they can use this “ethical loophole” not to publish reports of negative and harmful events.
Eventually these events came to light and ephedra-containing products for slimming and other uses were banned in the USA.
The implication contain in Lob’s warning is that HCA or Garcinia cambogia extract may also be potentially toxic unless sufficient, reliable evidence to the contrary is made available.
Conclusion
At the present moment, we do not know enough about slimming products that contain Garcinia cambogia extract or HCA to freely recommend its use. I tend to agree with Astell and coworkers (2013) who conducted a systematic review of double blind randomised controlled clinical trials to assess the evidence available on the efficacy of current dietary supplements used to control appetite and/or weight.
These authors concluded that “According to the finding from this systematic review, the evidence is not convincing in demonstrating that most dietary supplements used as appetite suppressants for weight loss in the treatment of obesity are effective and safe.”
While we wait for more extensive and conclusive evidence obtained with larger numbers of well-matched test subjects treated for longer periods with the “gold standard” of double blind randomised controlled clinical trials, rather avoid using any weight-loss supplement that has not been tested thoroughly.
References: (Astell KJ et al (2013). Plant extracts with appetite suppressing properties for body weight control: a systematic review of double blind randomized controlled clinical trial. Complement Ther Med, 21(4):407-16; Clouatre DL Preuss HG (2013). Hydroxycitric acid does not promote inflammation or liver toxicity. World J Gastoenterol. 19(44):8160-2; Crtichley G (2013). Garcinia cambogia – is it really a miracle weight loss supplement?; Lob A (2009). Hepatotoxicity associated with weight-loss supplements: A case for better post-marketing surveillance. World J Gastoenterol. 15(14):1786-1787; Marquez F et al (2012). Evaluation of the safety and efficacy of hydroxycitric acid or Garcinia cambogia extracts in humans. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr, 52(7):585-94)
