SodaSlim Ingredients: the five names and what each one is for

The first name on the bottle's own graphic and the anchor of the formula. Anhydrous simply means dried, so this is ordinary caffeine in powder form rather than a different compound.

What it does is well established. A crossover in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition measured whole-body energy expenditure after a single drink carrying 77 mg of caffeine with 615 mg of catechin and recorded a rise in cold-induced thermogenic capacity. A placebo drink with 82 mg of caffeine alone produced a smaller response, which is the clearest illustration available that caffeine and catechins do different jobs in the same glass.

Appetite is the second half. A controlled trial in Appetite gave beverages containing soluble fibre, caffeine and green tea catechins and recorded lower hunger and less energy eaten at the next meal.

The number to hold on to is the ceiling. Health Canada’s review of caffeine and human health concluded that up to 400 mg a day is not associated with adverse effects in healthy adults, and set 300 mg for women of reproductive age. Since this label gives no figure, the capsule has to be counted as an unknown against that budget.

Green coffee is ordinary coffee that has not been roasted. Roasting destroys much of the chlorogenic acid in the bean, so an unroasted extract is the way to deliver it, and chlorogenic acid rather than caffeine is what this row is on the label for.

A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis pooled randomised trials of green bean coffee extract and concluded that chlorogenic acid at 500 mg a day lowers body weight. That is the figure worth carrying: not a quantity of extract, but a quantity of the active inside it, and most commercial extracts are standardised to somewhere near half chlorogenic acid by weight.

The older evidence is weaker and should be described as such. The 2011 pooled analysis found a mean difference of 2.47 kg against placebo across three trials, and its own authors judged every included study to be at high risk of bias and called for more rigorous work.

Two further reviews look at what else the extract does: a review of cardiovascular risk factors and a dose-response analysis of blood pressure and heart rate. Neither is a reason to take the capsule, and both are worth a glance by anyone who already watches their blood pressure.

This is the name on the label with the widest gap between reputation and evidence, and the honest thing to do with it is say so plainly and then explain why.

Raspberry ketone is the aroma compound that gives raspberries their smell. It is a food flavouring with a long history of safe use at flavouring amounts. What it does not have is a human trial of its own. Searching the published literature for a study that gave raspberry ketone to people, on its own, at a stated dose, returns nothing.

The two human papers that name it both tested it inside multi-ingredient products. An eight-week trial used a product containing eight ingredients alongside it, and a later exercise and diet trial did something similar. Neither can tell you what the ketone contributed, because neither was designed to.

The single-ingredient work is in animals. A 2017 study in Food & Function fed raspberry ketone to mice on a high-fat diet and found it failed to reduce adiposity beyond the effect of the animals simply eating less. That is a real finding, and it points at appetite rather than at fat metabolism.

So: a pleasant, safe, food-grade compound with a good story and no human dose behind it. It is on this label, this desk is not going to pretend otherwise, and nobody should buy this capsule for this row.

Garcinia is the rind of a small tropical fruit, and hydroxycitric acid is the compound extracted from it. The proposed mechanism is competitive inhibition of an enzyme involved in turning carbohydrate into fat, which is a neat story and has been told for thirty years.

The definitive trial is a 1998 randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in JAMA. It ran twelve weeks, randomised 135 overweight adults, gave hydroxycitric acid at 1,500 mg a day against placebo with a high-fibre, low-energy diet in both arms, and found no difference in body weight or fat mass. That is a properly powered negative result at a dose far above what a five-ingredient once-daily capsule could plausibly carry.

An appetite study in Physiology & Behavior looked at the satiety half of the claim directly, and a 2012 safety and efficacy review covers the wider literature. The picture across all of it is of an ingredient whose fame has outrun its results.

Garcinia is also the ingredient on this label with the most serious safety literature, which is covered on the side effects page rather than here, because this page is about what the ingredient is for.

The last of the five and the one with the largest evidence base. Green tea extract is on this label for its catechins, of which epigallocatechin gallate is the most studied.

The Cochrane review of green tea for weight loss took in randomised trials of at least twelve weeks in overweight or obese adults. The twelve-week floor is the part worth noticing even before the conclusions: this is a category that expects to be judged over months, and it is the reason the timeline on this site runs in weeks rather than days.

A meta-analysis of EGCG and energy expenditure found the metabolic-rate signal appearing around 300 mg of EGCG, which is the figure to set against any green tea extract label. A systematic review of green tea and body composition and a meta-analysis of leptin and ghrelin fill in either side of it.

One result complicates this particular formula. The 2009 meta-analysis reported that the catechin effect was attenuated in people whose habitual caffeine intake was above 300 mg a day. A capsule that combines catechins with caffeine anhydrous is standing on both sides of that finding at once, and a reader is entitled to know it.