Solidax ADX appears to be discontinued.
According to the promotional material…
“The Solidax diet pill has proven to be one of the most effective non-prescription diet pills on the market.”
Wait, it gets better. here’s another couple of “gems”…
“Thought to be revolutionary and the best of all diet pills, Solidax ADX is the most recent in this field. Since many dangerous side effects present in other diet pills do not appear, both health care professionals and patients take a positive view of Solidax ADX…”
And…
“… The American Weight Loss Institute considers Solidax, launched in 2003, the best diet pill on the market.”
Of course, my questions after reading this were…
Proven to be most effective by whom? Which health care professionals think so highly of Solidax? Any other than the same ones that are manufacturing and selling the stuff? Funny that they wouldn’t be interested in lending their support to such a revolutionary product, isn’t it?
Fact is, “The American Weight Loss Institute”, as wonderful as it may sound, is not a respected organization, but a Web site that sells Solidax.
So what’s in Solidax?
According to retailers at the Weight Loss Institute, Solidax is based on synephrine, chromium picolinate and pyruvate (they don’t actually tell us how much of each ingredient is in the formula).
I’ve talked in detail about chromium picolinate many times. It’s a great supplement for moderating insulin function, but it’s not a miracle fat burner by any means. If you want to learn more about chromium, a full review is posted here!
Synephrine, the standardized extract of the citrus aurantium fruit, is thought to work in a similar manner to ephedra, but without all the jitters. Unfortunately, there’s not much evidence that synephrine does much of anything. Sure, you’ll see a lot of web sites selling synephrine based fat burners touting that clinical studies validate its effectiveness, but I think this extract…
“An extensive search of MEDLINE, EMBASE, BIOSIS, and the Cochrane Collaboration Database identified only 1 eligible randomized placebo controlled trial, which followed 20 patients for 6 weeks, demonstrated no statistically significant benefit for weight loss, and provided limited information about the safety of the herb.”
… from this PubMed abstract sums up the state of the evidence validating synephrine’s effectiveness at this time.
When it comes to pyruvate, it gets interesting. The Weight Loss Institute claims…
“The effect of the ingredients contained in Solidax have been proven in controlled laboratory human weight loss studies: (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 56:630-635, 55:771-776)”
Here’s the thing… this element of the Journal discusses the effectiveness of pyruvate for weight loss in various clinical trials. And pyruvate HAS been proven effective… in the dosage of 22-44 grams of pyruvate per day. But it’s very expensive at this dosage and can cause severe gastrointestinal distress at levels where it becomes effective.
Sidebar: to give you an idea of the cost, 60 1 gram capsules of pyruvate — enough for a 2-day supply at the dosage proven effective — costs about $36. So you’re looking at a monthly cost of over $500 to take enough pyruvate to do anything… if your stomach could handle it. And somehow, I doubt Solidax provides enough pyruvate to generate any results. Why? If it did, the manufacturer would certainly post their product’s full ingredient list.
Need another reason? Pills containing much over 1000mg of product become increasingly difficult to swallow. If Solidax contained enough pyruvate to be effective (remember there is no real evidence that either of the other two ingredients in the compilation is effective) you’d need a new bottle every third day.
All in all, it all adds up to a very suspect product. I’d highly recommend you give this one a miss.
