SlimSet Ingredients

Coffee seed that has never been roasted. Roasting is what destroys most of the chlorogenic acids in a coffee bean, which is why an unroasted extract is the form this category uses. Robusta is named on the panel rather than the commoner arabica, and the two species differ in both acid and caffeine content.

The literature runs in two directions. The 2011 pooled analysis of weight trials reported a difference against placebo while judging every study it included at high risk of bias, and the trial that made the ingredient famous has since been recorded by PubMed as retracted. The cleaner work is elsewhere: a twelve-week blood pressure trial used 140 mg of chlorogenic acid a day, and an eight-week trial in metabolic syndrome used 400 mg of extract.

A single aroma compound, 4-(4-hydroxyphenyl)butan-2-one, responsible for the smell of a ripe raspberry and used as a flavouring long before anyone suggested it did anything else. Extracting it from fruit is uneconomic at supplement scale, so commercial material is generally synthesised; the label does not say which this is, and neither statement would change the compound.

Its reputation rests on a ten-week mouse-feeding experiment in which raspberry ketone made up half a per cent to two per cent of the animals’ entire diet. The one controlled human study tested a product containing several ingredients at once, so no result in it can be attributed to the ketone. This row is declared at a real figure and nothing more is claimed for it here.

Rind from a small Southeast Asian fruit, standardised to hydroxycitric acid, which is the compound every garcinia trial has measured. Sixty-five milligrams is what this row delivers.

This is the ingredient with the cleanest result in the whole category, and the result is negative. A 1998 randomised trial gave 135 people 1,500 mg of HCA a day for twelve weeks and could not separate them from placebo. The later pooled analysis found a small difference and called its clinical relevance uncertain. What the safety literature adds is set out on side effects, where it belongs rather than here.

Caffeine with the water removed, which makes it a fine powder that can be weighed into a capsule to the milligram. Chemically it is the same molecule a coffee delivers; the difference is that this one states its amount and a cup does not.

It is also the only row on this panel that arrives at a quantity the published research used. A 1989 study measured resting metabolic rate after 100 mg, and a dose-response study a year later ran 100, 200 and 400 mg and found the effect scaled with the amount given. At 138 mg this row sits inside that span, which is the honest positive on this label.

The most heavily specified row here, and the only one on which a reader can calculate four separate quantities. Forty-five per cent of 130 mg is 58.5 mg of epigallocatechin gallate, sitting inside 97.5 mg of total catechins.

The thermogenesis work behind green tea used EGCG at 300 mg in a single dose and at 300 mg a day over a fortnight, roughly five times what this row delivers. The broader picture is cooler still: a Cochrane review of twelve and thirteen-week trials reported a mean difference of −0.04 kg outside Japan. The under-3-per-cent caffeine figure is the genuinely useful number on this row, because it bounds what the capsule can carry.