Hydroxycut is one of the most well-known, heavily-marketed weight loss supplement in the last decade. Hydroxycut is especially well-known for its before and after photos ((Some have claimed these are misleading. For example, in a lawsuit filed by Missouri’s Attorney General in 2003, a before photo of a woman was from just after giving birth.)) I suppose the real question is whether Hydroxycut lives up to its marketing hype. We’ll use this Hydroxycut review to dig in.

Hydroxycut’s Marketing

• Hydroxycut’s Success Stories - Hydroxycut uses Before and After photos masterfully (some diet pill companies don’t do it so well) to encourage the potential customer to give Hydroxycut a try. Each of the stories talks much more about how the person changed their eating/exercising habits and very little about the assistance of the Hydroxycut supplement in their transformation. I don’t doubt that some of these success stories are legitimate (35 pounds in 20 weeks is a lot, but it’s not crazy. Usually you’ll see a large amount of weight loss and then have the rate of weight loss taper off as times goes on).
• Hydroxycut’s Doctor Profiles - These are a joke. One of their guys is still in residency…?
• Other Resources - Hydroxycut.com’s website is far and away one of the better diet pill websites out there. They boast a serious amount of information about everything from leading an active lifestyle to recipes to a body mass index calculator. My hat’s off to them for providing so much useful information.

Become a Celebrity with Hydroxycut?

I had to laugh when I saw their advertisment to become a Hydroxycut Celebrity. It’s an interesting gimmick. They offer a person “an endorsement contract” worth $5,000 and the person supposedly will become famous because they’re featured on late-night informercials. A stretch to say the least. Considering the revenue that Hydroxycut obviously brings in for the company, to drop even several hundred thousand dollars on these endorsements is nothing for them. They still have very, very juicy margins.

What About the Actualy Hydroxycut Product? Does it Work?

I suppose that is the real question. Let’s dig in.

• Calcium - good for the bones, a vital mineral, but nothing to be crazy about when it comes to weight loss.
• Chromium (see full Chromium Picolinate review) - it’s up in the air about Chromium’s efficacy when it comes to weight loss. Some studies support it, others don’t.
• Potassium - also healthy, but not a lot to do with weight loss.

The real potency with Hydroxycut comes from its trademarked Hydroxagen Plus ingredient. At 1.32 grams, that’s quite a bit of ingredient so you hope the ingredients they include are solid:

• Garcinia cambogia, at 60% of HCA. Hydroxycut makes the claim that their form of HCA is 10 times more expensive than their competitor’s form of HCA. Is that true? There’s honestly no way to tell. What you really have to question is the effectiveness of Garcinia cambogia at all. According to one of my favorite sources, Garcinia cambogia’s “usefulness is unproven.” However, according to this study HCA “was also shown to exhibit concentration-dependent release of serotonin in isolated rat brain cortex, which may explain its appetite suppressive action.” A key to this supporting study that you’d never see mentioned on Hydroxycut’s website is the fact that the dosage was 4.6 grams per day — clearly more than the 1.32 proprietary blend present in Hydroxycut. I’m not saying that a lesser dose is not effective, I’m just presenting all of the facts. The study used a much higher dosage.
• Green Tea (see my Green Tea review) is also a component of their proprietary Hydroxagen blend. I can stand behind Green Tea as it’s backed by mounds of research showing that it does increase your metabolic rate, which increases the amount of calories you burn, which burns fat. ((I should note here that you still need to be at a caloric deficit to burn fat)) This ingredient is effective.
• Gymnema sylvestre is meant to be an appetite suppressant specific to control sugar cravings. Unfortunately there has been little scientific evidence to support this claim. The fact that Hydroxycut contains Gymnema sylvestre should, at this moment, not mean much to you.

Hydroxycut Review Conclusion

I’ll reiterate that I like Hydroxycut’s website for its information specific to exercise, eating habits, and lifestyle changes. The site’s also extremely well done. They must have poured a ton of money into their website development. As far as the marketing, they provide a lot of research quotes, but not a lot of citations to actually read the entire research piece for yourself. That type of “selective citing” can tempt companies to be less than up front about actual results (or actual dosages, as we saw with HCA).

The Hydroxycut ingredient profile is moderate to slightly above average. I’m not going to say that the HCA doesn’t have an effective dose for appetite suppression, but I do want to put it out there that those dose is much lower than what the research suggests. The Green Tea is a great ingredient, but Gymnema sylvestre is an unknown. Hydroxycut certainly isn’t going on Criticalorie’s recommendations.

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