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Choosing A SupplementChoosing A Metabolism Supplement: Seven Checks
Seven questions settle most of what a label can tell you, and all seven can be answered in a minute with the bottle in your hand. They are printed first as a method you can carry anywhere, then applied to the product this website sells, which passes three, half-passes two and fails two of them.
A reading method rather than a verdict, and the verdict on this product is at the foot of it.
Why a checklist beats a comparison table
Seven questions you answer yourself, in the order that saves the most time.
Comparison tables on supplement websites are written by whoever is selling one of the columns. The rows are chosen so that a particular product wins them, and a reader has no way to tell which rows were left out.
A checklist is different because you fill it in yourself, in front of a label, and it gives the same answer whoever wrote it. The seven below are ordered by how much they tell you, so a label that fails the first two is usually not worth working through the other five.
None of them is about whether an ingredient works. That question belongs to the research and is covered in the companion guide. These seven are about whether a label gives you enough to ask the question at all.
The seven checks
Seven questions, each answerable from the bottle and the seller's own terms.
1. Is an amount printed beside every ingredient?
The best labels print a milligram figure against every active. The next best print a total for a proprietary blend. The weakest print a list of names and nothing else, and on those no comparison with any published study is possible.
2. Do the printed amounts reach what the research used?
Look up two or three of the headline ingredients and find the dose their trials ran at. Hundreds of milligrams and grams are the usual range. A label declaring tens of milligrams for a whole blend is a long way below that, and the distance is the finding.
3. Is every ingredient named, in declared order, with its plant part?
A compliant blend is printed in descending order of weight, so the order is information. Naming the plant part matters because root, leaf and seed are different materials with different literatures behind them.
4. Are the extract ratios footnoted rather than floating?
A caret or a symbol beside an ingredient should lead to a footnote explaining it: a 20:1 concentrate, a standardisation marker, a percentage. A mark with no footnote under it has been redrawn by somebody who did not understand it.
5. Can you work out a day and a bottle from the panel?
Serving size, servings per container, and the instruction. Those three give you the cost a day, the length of a bottle and whether the pack you are being sold matches the time the ingredients were studied over.
6. Is there a caution, an age limit and a storage line?
Their presence is a sign that somebody took the label seriously. Their absence is the commonest feature of the labels that turn out to have other problems, and it costs nothing to check.
7. Does the refund policy match the seal on the pack?
Read the seal, then read the terms. A seal reading one hundred per cent with no period on it, against a policy of thirty days excluding carriage, is the commonest mismatch in this category and it is always worth knowing about before you buy rather than after.
RetraBurn scored against all seven
Seven rows, filled in against the printed label and this desk's own published terms.
| Check | Result | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1. An amount beside every ingredient | Half | Two amounts are printed: chromium at 7 mcg, and 15.47 mg for a blend of 21. A total is better than the nothing most of this shelf prints, and it is not a split. |
| 2. Do the amounts reach the research? | Fails | Godard used 500 mg of forskolin extract a day. The arginine meta-analysis found 4 g and up. The glutamine pilot used 30 g. The whole blend here is 15.47 mg. |
| 3. Named, in order, with the plant part | Passes | All 21 are named in descending order of weight, from maca root extract to L-carnitine HCl, and the plant part is given for every botanical that has one. |
| 4. Extract ratios footnoted | Passes | 10 entries carry a 20:1 mark and African mango carries a 10:1 mark. Both are footnoted under the panel, in words. |
| 5. A day and a bottle computable | Passes | Serving size 1 ml, 30 servings a container, one a day. A bottle is a month and the cost a day follows from the pack price. |
| 6. Caution, age limit and storage | Passes | All three are printed: the caution verbatim, an 18 limit, and a storage line about heat, light and humidity. |
| 7. Seal matches the policy | Fails | The seal reads 100% MONEY BACK GUARANTEED and carries no period. The published policy runs 60 days from shipment and excludes carriage both ways. |
Four passes, one half and two failures. The scorecard is the same one printed above, applied without adjusting a row to improve the result.
Four clean passes out of seven puts this label above the middle of its category, and the two failures are the two that matter most to a buyer deciding whether to spend money.
That is not a contradiction. Checks three to six are about whether a label was produced carefully, and this one was. Check two is about whether the contents can do what the category claims, and check seven is about whether the promise on the pack matches the promise in the terms.
The two failing rows, in detail
Both failures set out with the figures they rest on, and both checkable.
A failing row printed without its reasoning is just a number, so both are set out here at length.
Check 2: the amounts against the research
This is the substantial one and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. The whole declared blend weighs 15.47 mg. The forskolin trial used 500 milligrams of extract a day for twelve weeks. The L-arginine blood-pressure meta-analysis found 4 grams a day and above. The glutamine pilot used 30 grams a day.
Even if the entire blend were one single ingredient, it would sit far below every one of those figures. Twenty-one ingredients sharing it sit further below still, and the split is not published so the individual distances cannot be calculated at all.
The chromium row is the exception and it is worth naming as one. 7 mcg is 20% of the 35 mcg Daily Value and the arithmetic checks exactly. As a nutrient declaration it is correct. It is roughly a twenty-eighth of the smallest dose the Cochrane review assessed, which is a different question and a different answer.
Check 7: the seal against the terms
The pack carries a gold seal reading 100% MONEY BACK GUARANTEED. It names no period, no conditions and no exclusions, because a seal has no room for them.
The policy behind it runs 60 days from the date of shipment, includes opened bottles, and excludes outbound shipping on the smallest pack as well as the return postage. Sixty days is generous by the standards of this category and opened bottles are genuinely unusual.
The failure is the mismatch rather than the policy. One hundred per cent with no time limit on it describes something broader than what is actually offered, and the full conditions are on the refund policy page where a buyer has to go and find them.
A fourth mark on the same pack fails a related test. The Good Manufacturing Practice roundel names no certifying body, no certificate number and no date, and the testing and quality page audits all four marks one at a time.
The four passing rows, and why they are not a formality
Four rows that a large part of this category would fail.
It would be easy to treat the passing rows as filler between the two failures. They are not, because each of them is a thing a large part of this shelf does not do.
All 21 names, in declared order. The rule requires it and compliance is far from universal. Reading a blend list to the end is also the best single check against a counterfeit, because a full list in the right order is the hardest part of a panel to reproduce from memory.
Both extract ratios footnoted in words. A great many labels print a symbol and no footnote. Two marks here lead to two footnotes explaining a 20:1 and a 10:1 concentrate, which tells a reader what kind of material is in the bottle even though it does not tell them how much.
A computable day. Serving size 1 ml, 30 servings, one a day. From those three figures and a pack price, anyone can work out the cost a day and whether a two-bottle pack covers the eight weeks the seller's own reviewers report at.
Caution, age limit and storage. All three printed, with the storage line carrying real weight on a water-based liquid with one preservative in it.
The pattern across the seven is consistent: this label was typeset by somebody who took the labelling rule seriously, and the contents are a long way below what the research used. Those two facts are both true and neither cancels the other.
Using the same seven checks on anything else
Three ways the checklist behaves differently from how it reads.
The scorecard is built to be filled in twice, and comparing two labels on the same seven rows is a more useful exercise than reading either one's marketing.
Three warnings about how the checks behave in the wild.
A label can pass every row and still be a poor product. These checks measure disclosure rather than effect. A carefully typeset panel describing an ineffective formula passes six of seven, and that is exactly what check two is for.
A label can fail row one and still be honest about it. Some sellers print nothing because they have been told not to disclose a formulation. The distinction worth drawing is between a label that declines to print an amount and a website that implies an amount which is not on the label.
Row seven is about the seller, not the bottle. It is the only check in the seven that can be answered without holding the product, and it is frequently the most informative. A guarantee with a telephone number behind it and a written procedure is worth more than a seal.
Sources behind the seven checks
Nine public references: the labelling rule the checks are built on, the three trial doses row two rests on, and the category context.
- Nutrition labeling of dietary supplements. 21 CFR 101.36. Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, Office of the Federal Register. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-101/subpart-F/section-101.36
- Tian H, Guo X, Wang X, et al. Chromium picolinate supplementation for overweight or obese adults. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2013;2013(11):CD010063. PMID 24293292. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24293292/
- Godard MP, Johnson BA, Richmond SR. Body composition and hormonal adaptations associated with forskolin consumption in overweight and obese men. Obes Res. 2005;13(8):1335-43. PMID 16129715. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16129715/
- Shiraseb F, Asbaghi O, Bagheri R, et al. Effect of l-arginine supplementation on blood pressure in adults: a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials. Adv Nutr. 2022;13(4):1226-1242. PMID 34967840. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34967840/
- de Souza AZ, Zambom AZ, Abboud KY, et al. Oral supplementation with L-glutamine alters gut microbiota of obese and overweight adults: a pilot study. Nutrition. 2015;31(6):884-9. PMID 25933498. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25933498/
- Maunder A, Bessell E, Lauche R, et al. Effectiveness of herbal medicines for weight loss: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Diabetes Obes Metab. 2020;22(6):891-903. PMID 31984610. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31984610/
- White CM. Continued risk of dietary supplements adulterated with approved and unapproved drugs: assessment of the US Food and Drug Administration's tainted supplements database 2007 through 2021. J Clin Pharmacol. 2022;62(8):928-934. PMID 35285963. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35285963/
- Questions and Answers on Dietary Supplements. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. https://www.fda.gov/food/information-consumers-using-dietary-supplements/questions-and-answers-dietary-supplements
- Using Dietary Supplements Wisely. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Institutes of Health. https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/using-dietary-supplements-wisely
Order RetraBurn with the scorecard in front of you
Four passes, one half and two failures, every one of them checkable against the printed panel and this desk's own published terms. Packs from $49 a bottle with 60 days from shipment.
Two bottles $158 · six bottles $294 · 60-day money-back guarantee
Order RetraBurn On The Official Website1 ml a day · 30 servings a bottle · lot RET-26/TH-2877
