Chris Shugart
Fat-Burners, Redefined
Ephedra is long gone. Luckily, the new wave of fat burners is effective and much healthier.
Once upon a time, a chubby kid named Chris decided he didn't want to be chubby anymore. He soon discovered that anti-chubby substances existed. One of them was something called an ECA stack: a combination of ephedrine, caffeine, and aspirin. Bodybuilders whispered about it, calling it their secret weapon.
This was before you could just go to the mall and buy the stuff at GNC. Back then, you had to make the ECA stack yourself. Caffeine and aspirin were easy to source, but ephedrine was trickier. To get it, you had to go to the local truck stop. The stimulant was sold over the counter to keep truckers awake.
Soon, the fat-burning effects of ephedrine trickled down to the mommy-market. Women took it to lose weight but soon got hooked on the energy. The product was called Metabolife 365, and the MLM company that made it was founded by a guy on probation for producing and distributing methamphetamine.
Around this same time, the bodybuilding supplement industry discovered ephedrine. Fat burners containing it made billions. They stuck it in everything, even protein powders. But in 2006, the FDA spoiled the fun. All ephedrine alkaloids were banned, including ephedra and ma-huang, the "natural" versions. Too many adverse events, they said.
The fat burner market never really recovered. Replacements were found, but nothing had the same impact as ephedrine and its variants. Fat burners, as a category, fizzled.
Today, mass-market consumers are different. People still want to lose fat faster, but most aren't willing to risk a heart attack. Here at Biotest, we still get calls from customers asking if our supplements contain "that dangerous ephedra stuff."
So, do effective fat burners still exist? Yes, but they work through very different (and much healthier) mechanisms of action.
What is a "Fat Burner" Anyway?
"Fat burner" is an unspecified term, mainly because we don't really "burn" fat, we breathe it out and excrete it. Fat burners containing ephedrine alkaloids worked by stimulating the sympathetic nervous system (releasing norepinephrine to boost fat metabolism), increasing lipolysis (the breakdown of stored triglycerides), and increasing thermogenesis (the process by which the body generates heat).
The old-school fat burners also worked by blunting appetite. And of course, dieters jacked up on ephedra were less likely to skip their cardio sessions.
Looking back at all the studies, ephedra/caffeine supplements modestly boosted fat loss. Dieters using them typically lost two more pounds per month than dieters using placebos, at least in the short term. As we discovered, they didn't work for long, but they were a nice boost⦠if you could tolerate the heart palpitations and the inevitable crash.
The New "Fat Burners"
Some supplement makers still try to produce fat burners, but most are just glorified caffeine pills. They get the energy part right, but their stuff doesn't do much for fat loss, aside from caffeine's mild thermogenic effects.
The new "fat burners" work differently; they're more like fat-loss facilitating agents. Rather than artificially (and somewhat ham-handedly) forcing your body to release fat, they correct the underlying issues that cause easy fat gain and hamper fat loss. At the same time, they nudge the body to create a trend: natural fat loss is easier while storing fat is more difficult. It's healthy and sustainable.
Here are three non-stimulant ingredients backed by science:
1. Cyanidin 3-glucoside (C3G)
C3G shrinks fat cells and limits fat storage while increasing and enhancing calorie-burning, metabolically active brown adipose tissue. It increases insulin sensitivity by enhancing glucose uptake by myotubes, causing muscle fibers to preferentially burn calories instead of being stored as fat. (It's a nutrient partitioning agent.) C3G raises adiponectin levels, which regulates glucose and increases fatty acid breakdown.
Users notice they can eat more carbs and get leaner. But beyond increased energy expenditure and other body composition effects, C3G reduces systemic inflammation and protects against oxidative stress-induced DNA damage. It's anticarcinogenic and even improves cognition. It's really healthy stuff and could be marketed as a longevity supplement.
C3G works under one condition: you have to get enough of the good stuff into your body. Most C3G products are underdosed and don't use a delivery system to enhance bioavailability. You need about 300 mg derived from black rice. Indigo-3G (Buy at Amazon) checks all the boxes.
2. Beta Glucan
Regular fiber itself has some fat-loss benefits. But beta glucan is a very special kind of soluble fiber, and algal beta glucan is the most effective form. When tested against other types of fiber in studies, beta glucan...
- Caused subjects to lose fat (or to stop gaining fat when they were overfed on purpose).
- Improved overall metabolic health.
- Improved insulin sensitivity and stabilized blood glucose levels.
- Increased production of short-chain fatty acids, such as butyrate, known for their beneficial effects on gut health and metabolism.
Most of these effects come from beta glucan's ability to increase and diversify beneficial gut bacteria/flora. Your gut microbiome basically controls your metabolism, among other things.
Most people take algal beta glucan for its immunity-boosting benefits, but it's also an effective non-stimulant "fat burner." Just be sure to take the type derived from Euglena gracilis algae, such as Biotest's Beta Glucan Immune-Boosting Fiber (Buy at Amazon). It's much more bioavailable than beta glucan derived from oats or yeast.
3. Forskolin Carbonate
If you use the right form, forskolin improves body composition in two ways: it "burns" fat by raising thyroid hormone and helps you build muscle by boosting testosterone. Remarkably, in studies, it works even on people who aren't working out.
Forskolin stimulates an enzyme called adenylate cyclase, which increases cellular concentrations of cyclic AMP, or cAMP, which interacts with different types of cells. When you raise cAMP, you increase thyroid hormone secretion and speed up lipolysis (fat burning).
Not only does this increased thyroid production turn up fat loss, but increased levels of cAMP activate protein kinase, which activates hormone-sensitive lipases involved in the breakdown of triglycerides β the building blocks of fatty tissue.
Forskolin 1,9-carbonate (the carbonate ester of forskolin) works best, and Carbolin 19 High-Performance Forskolin (Buy at Amazon) uses a delivery system for enhanced absorption and action duration. Take 200 to 400 mg per day.
