Healthy Eating & Diet
Hydroxycitric Acid (Hydroxycut)
Editor's Note: The FDA is warning consumers to immediately stop using Hydroxycut products by Iovate Health Sciences USA Inc. The agency has received reports of serious health problems such as liver damage, seizures, and cardiovascular disorders. Iovate has agreed to recall Hydroxycut products from the market.
Hydroxycitric acid is an ingredient in the fruit rind of Garcinia cambogia, a tree native to Southeast Asia.
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In Asia, people have used Garcinia for centuries as a food preservative and flavoring in curries and other dishes. It has a reputation for making foods feel more filling. It's also believed to be a "carminative," meaning it helps you pass gas after eating.
Experiments in the 1970s showed that adding large amounts of hydroxycitric acid (HCA) to the diets of mice caused them to eat less. It wasn't long before American supplement manufacturers began to mass-produce HCA as a weight loss product.
Weight loss supplements containing HCA include Hydroxycut, CitriMax, Super CitriMax, Citrin, and Super Garcinia.
How Does Hydroxycitric Acid Work?
Hydroxycitric acid acts on a crucial step in carbohydrate and fat metabolism. We'll spare you the chemistry lesson, but these are the high points:
Extra carbs in our diets get turned into fat. One main enzyme turns carbs into fatty acids. The fatty acids then get bundled together to make fat.
Citrate, a natural chemical in our bodies, slows down the enzyme that makes fatty acids out of carbs. And hydroxycitric acid is chemically almost identical to citrate. In fact, HCA slows down the fat-making enzyme even more than natural citrate does.
HCA also stimulates the liver to release glucose (sugar) into the blood. These higher sugar levels may cause the suppressed appetite seen in the mice studies.
Sounds simple enough: Take a product containing HCA, eat less, make less fat?
Not so fast. These metabolic processes are extremely complex. Experts debate how HCA works in mice. They downright disagree on whether HCA works at all to stimulate weight loss in people.
Is Hydroxycitric Acid Safe?
At the doses found in Hydroxycut and similar weight loss products, hydroxycitric acid appears to be nontoxic and safe.
In the numerous studies on hydroxycitric acid, it caused no significant ill effects. People taking HCA had no more side effects than those taking a placebo.
HCA is chemically very similar to natural citrate, known to be safe. In toxicity tests, mice fed amounts of HCA far higher than maximum human doses suffered no harm.
At one time, Hydroxycut and other weight loss supplements contained the herb ephedra, a natural stimulant. The FDA banned ephedra after the herb was linked to deaths and heart problems. No diet supplement contains ephedra today.
Research and Expert Opinions on Hydroxycitric Acid
So, does HCA work or not?
There's no question that hydroxycitric acid works to suppress appetite and induce weight loss -- in mice.
WebMD Medical Reference
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