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Do ephedra-free diet supplements work? Part II

Because of skyrocketing insurance premiums and the threat of legal action, several of the larger supplement companies have discontinued production of supplements containing ephedrine and caffeine.

In the first of this two-part series, you learned how to evaluate the claims made about the various ingredients found in the latest crop of ephedra-free diet supplements. In part two, we’ll take a closer look at the contents (such as green tea extract, 7-Keto™, synephrine, alpha-lipoic acid and forskolin) in the most popular ephedra-free products.

Fat cells

If you could take a slice of fat from your body and look at it under a microscope, you'd see lots of tiny fat cells. Your body has billions of these fat cells. They expand to many times their original size in order to store fat. They also shrink when they release stored fat.

Fat is stored inside these fat cells as triglycerides. A triglyceride contains three fatty acids. That's where the tri- in triglyceride comes from. To lose fat, these triglycerides must be broken down — a process known as lipolysis (pronounced lie-pol-a-sis).

In simple terms, lipolysis describes the process of stored fat being broken down and prepared for use as energy. The fat is then transported to the working muscle, where it's used to provide energy [34].

Each fatty acid consists of many carbon atoms joined together. When these fatty acids are burned for energy, the carbon atoms (together with their associated hydrogen atoms) are removed two at a time. Once the component atoms of a fatty acid have been broken from each other and combined with oxygen to form carbon dioxide and water, it is said to have been oxidized. Essentially, the terms "fat oxidation" and "fat burning" both mean the same thing.

Diet supplements

For a diet supplement to be effective at making weight loss faster and easier, it would need to increase lipolysis and/or fat oxidation. Some products are also supposed to reduce your appetite. With that in mind, let's take a closer look at the main ingredients in Xenadrine®-EFX™, Metabolic Thyrolean™, Lean System 7 and Hydroxycut, to see if they really are viable alternatives to ephedrine and caffeine...

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