RetraBurn Ingredients: What Is in Each Dropperful

A Supplement Facts panel can name a botanical in one word or in four, and the difference decides whether a reader can check anything. Four words is the useful version: the common name, the Latin binomial in brackets, the part of the plant, and then the word extract.

This panel does that eleven times over. Maca is given as Lepidium meyenii root extract. Grapefruit is given as Citrus paradisi seed, which is a different preparation from grapefruit juice and has a different literature behind it. Cayenne is given as Capsicum annuum fruit extract. Anyone holding the bottle can take those names to a database and read what has been published on that exact material.

Ten further entries need no plant part because they are not plants. They are amino acids, a licorice salt, a signalling molecule and an aroma compound, and a chemical name is already as specific as a name can get.

One row on this panel is printed differently from the rest, and it is worth noticing before anything else. Chromium is given as chromium picolinate, with a microgram figure and a percentage beside it. That row can be checked against a reference intake without leaving the bottle.

Everything below it is printed as one line: Proprietary Blend, 15.47 mg, followed by 21 names in a continuous string. The federal rule for a panel of this kind, set out in the labelling regulation for Supplement Facts, asks a proprietary blend to list its members in descending order of weight and to declare the total. This label does both.

That ordering is a small thing that carries real information, and it is why the list below is reproduced in the panel's own sequence rather than alphabetically. Maca is first because there is more maca in the blend than anything after it.

Read off the printed panel. Twelve plant entries, eleven of them naming the part in brackets; ginseng is given as a root extract without a bracketed part because the binomial already settles it.

Three of those rows repay a second look, because the part chosen is not the part a buyer would assume.

Grapefruit seed is not grapefruit. The interaction that made grapefruit famous belongs to the juice and the pulp, and seed extract is a separate preparation with a separate problem of its own: analytical work on commercial grapefruit seed extract found synthetic preservatives in the products tested rather than the plant compounds on the label.

Eleuthero is not ginseng, despite the name it used to be sold under. It is a different shrub in the same family, with a randomised trial on oedema and lymphatic function and one on alcohol hangover making up most of its human record. Panax ginseng, twelve rows further down, is the true one, and the NCCIH summary is the plain-language account of what has been looked at.

Grape seed is the pressing left over from winemaking rather than the fruit. Its human work is cardiovascular: a dose-response meta-analysis and sixteen pooled trials on flow-mediated dilation and blood pressure.

Two small symbols sit at the end of most names in this blend, and the panel footnotes both. One says the material was sourced from a concentrate with a 20 to 1 extract equivalent. The other says 10 to 1. A name carrying neither was not concentrated, because there was nothing to concentrate.

The same asterisk shape does two jobs on this label: it also marks the chromium row's Daily Value, where its footnote reads that percentages are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.

A 20 to 1 concentrate means twenty parts of dried leaf, root or seed were reduced to one part of the powder that went into the bottle. It is a genuine manufacturing fact and a useful one, because it is how a quantity of plant material that would fill a teaspoon is made to fit inside a dropper.

It is also frequently misread. A ratio describes what happened upstream of the bottle. It multiplies the raw material standing behind a given weight; it does not multiply the weight itself, and the weight is what the panel declares. That distinction is the subject of the how it works page and is set out in full there.

After ginseng the list changes character. Nothing that follows is a plant extract, which is why nothing that follows carries a concentration mark. Eight are amino acids or close relatives, one is an aroma compound, and one is a salt of the sweet principle in licorice root.

Order as printed, which on a compliant panel is descending weight. Raspberry ketones sit above all eight amino acids on this label.

Underneath the panel the label prints its other ingredients line: water, natural flavors, potassium sorbate, stevia, xylitol, citrus extract. Six items, and between them they account for almost the whole volume of the bottle.

As printed on the label, in the label's own order.

Everything above is what the bottle contains. This section is the one place on this page where the amounts are weighed, and it is short on purpose.

15.47 mg is the declared weight of all 21 blend members together. The panel gives no split, so no single ingredient above can be sized from the label. What the total does give is a ceiling, and a ceiling is enough for the comparison that matters: whatever the split, no botanical or amino acid in this bottle exceeds 15.47 mg.

Against that ceiling, three of the figures on this page are worth restating. The forskohlii trial used 500 mg of extract a day for twelve weeks. The gymnema trial used 600 mg a day. The guarana range topped out at 500 mg. Each of those is a single ingredient at a weight the whole blend does not reach.

Set against that, the chromium row is exact and it is honest. 7 mcg is 20% of the 35 microgram Daily Value and the arithmetic checks to the decimal. It is a nutritional amount, which is a respectable thing for a label to carry, and the panel describes it as one by printing a percentage beside it.