"The #1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat."

My post for this week focuses around a topic that has been brought to my attention quite frequently over the past few weeks at the community pharmacy I work at, and that is the topic of Raspberry Ketones. When I first took a phone call from a customer asking if our store carried Raspberry ketones, I was a bit lost because I had never heard of such a thing, until the patient told me that she had heard about them on Doctor Oz. Doctor Oz stated on one of his episodes that Raspberry Ketones are, "The #1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat." Having never watched Dr. Oz and only having heard about him recently I wasn't sure whether or not he was trustworthy or even a valid source of information, so I talked with my pharmacist about it, and then looked up raspberry ketones to let other patients know the pro's and con's of taking them.

Once Dr. Oz announced this on his show, vitamin stores everywhere started to increase their inventory on this product, and had a hard time keeping it in stock with everyone wanting to by them.

So what are Raspberry Ketones? They're one of the compounds in raspberries and include anthocyanins, vitamin C and beta carotene, along with being an antioxidant. Their chemical structures are very similar to that of synephrine and capsicum which are two main ingredients in many weight loss drugs, and probably why chemists and doctors correlate this new product to weight loss.

The following article talks about the episode of Dr. Oz and goes on to tell the different studies that he based his information off of.

http://supplement-geek.com/raspberry-ketones-weight-loss-review-side-effects/

Many different websites are leading patients astray saying that raspberry ketones suppress appetite, when there is really no clinical research and studies done to prove this, and yet people are eating it up.
Some other false statements that are in the media are that these can boost your total daily energy, and even decrease the rate of aging, again backed by no research.
Other facts: Raspberry Ketone vitamins contain increased caffeine doses and can be contraindicated in some people.

The information that people should be looking at is this:

"When given to mice in very high doses (up to 2% of body weight), raspberry ketone has been shown to prevent high-fat-diet-induced elevations in body weight^. However, no effects on body weight were observed with doses up to 200 times greater than the estimated intake in humans.The high dose effect is reported to stem from the alteration of lipid metabolism, increasing norepinephrine induced fat breakdown. Although products containing this compound are marketed for weight loss, there is no clinical evidence for this effect in humans."


So when my patients come into the pharmacy asking about these raspberry ketones I'm going to give them the option but let them know that there is no clinical significance that this actually do produce weight loss in humans and that there are many more efficient routes that they can take, not to mention less expensive.