Sparked by this press release about Relacore, I decided they were due for a review. I’m glad I did it.

What’s the scoop on Relacore?

Relacore claims to rid you of your stubborn belly fat. It’s an interest marketing twist. What they do is talk about how yeah, you’re probably losing some weight, but you’ve still got that pesky bulge around the middle…well, Relacore will take care of that!

Or perhaps it won’t.

Apparently, the whole reason you have any belly bulge is from a little hormone called cortisol.

Relacore Takes on Cortisol?

Cortisol is involved in your body’s response to stress, so it’s sometimes called the “stress hormone”. The idea behind Relacore is that cortisol causes weight gain specifically around your midsection. Despite looking for quite some time for any research even remotely supporting the premise behind Relacore, I couldn’t find a single thing.

An article in Good Housekeeping mentioned the FTCs crackdown on Cortislim (along with the makers of Trimspa and Xenadrine) for making unsubstantiated claims regarding their product’s ability to help users lose weight. In that same article, Relacore got an honorable mention, with the ingredients of Relacore exposed.

Relacore’s Ingredient Profile

According to the article, Relacore contains vitamin C, a host of vitamin Bs, herbs, and magnolia bark. This ingredient profile is not given on Relacore’s website. Why? Because there is no research to support Relacore’s claim that any of those ingredients decrease cortisol levels at all (there isn’t even any research to support that the cortisol hormone directly contributes to belly fat, remember).

Alright, I did a bit of digging, and placed a few phone calls and found that their .tv site does contain the ingredient profile (half of it was a proprietary blend, which is lame, but you don’t see anything not proprietary these days). The phone call was actually pretty interesting, take a listen to my call to Relacore. Notice that when I’m on hold during the second call that they say all of their products are clinically proven. So I ask the second girl, Cherise, if they have any of those studies available and, unfortunately, they don’t. For this call, my name was Jesse Smith.

Normally when I review a diet pill I go through each ingredient. In this case, I’m not even going to bother. Read on to find out why it’s not worth your time or mine.

The Company Behind Relacore

While the press release said that the company behind Relacore is the Carter-Reed Company, in actuality, the Carter-Reed company is a subsidiary of Basic Research out of Salt Lake City Utah. Basic Research is by far one of the sleeziest diet pill companies out there. They’ve had entanglements with the FTC and use extremely deceptive marketing tactics. A few examples:

• They produced a very dense, scientifically appearing research paper by a doctor whom they represented as medical doctor. He does have a PhD, but his specialty was in herbs.
• They used the same very dense research paper on another product, simply taking out a few paragraphs and replacing mentions of the first product with the new product (the new product in this case is Zantrex-3).
• They sell a diet pill for $150, then turn around, start a new company and sell a generic sounding diet pill for $80 (which is still extremely expensive) claiming in the generic pill’s advertisments that the company received exclusive rights to market the generic version (the two products are Leptoprin and Leptopril).
• They make claims of clinical studies and show nothing for it.

A quick whois search on relacore.com reveals that it’s registered to Western Holdings LLC, who is also the registrant of zantrex-3.com, leptopril.com, and leptoprin.com. What’s interesting to note is that the registrants email address is @basicresearch.org.

Anyway, I’ve been through this before with the other products I’ve reviewed from these guys. Same old story.

Relacore Overall Conclusion

The foundation of Relacore is built on shaky ground (at best) that increased cortisol levels lead to belly fat. It then proceeds to build a house of cards, claiming that their Relacore ingredients are clinically proven to reduce cortisol levels when, in fact they’re not. Finally, Relacore is hawked by Basic Research, who hawks a bunch of other scam products. I’d stay away. Far away.