What's up, guys?
Sean Nalewanyj at www.SeanNal.com and I haven’t been doing a lot of supplement reviews over
the past year or so because I feel like I’ve pretty much covered most of the popular muscle
building and fatloss supplements out there in my older videos, but this one that I haven’t
covered yet.
So in this video I’ll be doing a quick review of CLA, which is one of the most popular fatloss
supplements out there.
It’s one of the main ingredients that usually get used in various fat burner blends and
it’s also sold on its own.
Now I was debating whether or not to even cover this in the video but then I notice
that one of the top five selling products on bodybuilding.com is a CLA based fat burner
and pure CLA is still thirtieth on their list of top sellers out of thousands of different
products.
So if even a small handful of people benefit from this video then I think it’s still
worth posting.
Now I don’t have a lot to say on this because it’s pretty straightforward, as far as I'm
concern, so I’ll try to keep this concise and just give you the main points here.
So CLA is a mixture of poly-unsaturated fatty acids.
It’s found naturally in foods like beef, milk, butter, basically ruminant food sources.
And it’s also sold in supplement form, of course, as a stimulant free fat burner.
Now, I won’t go into the detailed biology of how CLA is claimed to improve fatloss because
it’s mostly just boring, theoretical type stuff that most people won’t really care
about.
I’ll link the studies in the description box below for anybody who’s interested.
But to put it in really simple terms, CLA’s main effect is that it acts on the body’s
PPAR receptors.
It activates one variation of the receptor PPAR-a, which increases fat breakdown mainly
in the liver but also in subcutaneous fat, and it inhibits another variation of the receptor
PPAR-?, which plays a role in fat gain by creating new fat cells and also increasing
appetite.
And all of this involves a bunch of different fat burning enzymes, different fat storing
enzymes, not really important here, but the basic idea is that CLA supplements supposedly
help you burn more bodyfat and store less bodyfat.
But aside from the theoretical stuff, the real question is does CLA worked?
Does it actually burn fat in the real world when you take it as a supplement?
And the simple answer is that CLA make sense on paper but if you actually look at the human
research on it, and there is a decent amount available, what you see overall is either
a very minor benefit or no benefit at all, which isn’t surprising because the vast
majority of supplements out there that are promoted as fat burners don’t really do
much if anything, aside from a select few exceptions.
One study on a hundred and twenty men or so using CLA versus a placebo for one year didn’t
show any difference between the two groups in terms of bodyweight or fat mass.
Another CLA study comparing CLA with sunflower oil for twelve weeks also showed no difference.
Another six months study and eight weeks showed the same thing.
This is just a small sample, there are quite a few studies available and I’ll link a
bunch of them in the description box below for anybody who’s interested.
And even for the studies that do show positive effects, the benefit is usually really small
bordering on insignificant.
And a lot of studies also have certain flaws in them so it’s hard to know just how reliable
a lot of the results are in the first place.
And another important point here is that it’s not just that CLA is most likely ineffective
for fatloss but when you take it in high amount as a supplement it might actually be bad for
your health as well.
When you consumes CLA as part of your regular diet in smaller amounts then it can actually
of certain benefits like improving immune system function and keeping cholesterol levels
in check.
But when you start having too much it can actually start to have possible negative effects.
The average dietary intake of CLA is anywhere from about a fifth of a gram up to around
one gram, depending on your diet, whereas the dosage used for fatloss supplements is
usually at least two grams up to five grams or more.
And at that amount some studies have shown certain side effects like increased inflammation
and decreased insulin sensitivity.
And I’ll link those references below for you as well.
But bottom-line, even if CLA does burn a very small amount of fat, which is still not even
proven to do, it’s probably still not a good idea to take it as a supplement in high
amounts anyway because of the possible side effects.
Not to mention that if you did take CLA for a year or so at around three grams a day,
it’s probably going to cost you somewhere around a hundred and twenty-five dollars or
so.
Not a huge amount but it all counts and that’s extra money that you could just as easily
put toward other things like your gym membership or food or whatever else.
Now, I know that some people will claim that they used CLA and that it worked for them
but the reality is that even if CLA does have a fat burning effect it still going to be
small enough to where it wouldn’t be something that you took and then clearly noticed that
you were leaning down faster from it.
I mean, in the best case scenario you might be looking at, like, an extra pound or two
of fat over the course of several months.
Even the research supporting CLA shows very minor effect, somewhere around that level.
So for anybody claiming that they saw a significant benefits from CLA, it would be virtually impossible
to decipher the difference between losing one pound of fat per week versus losing 1.05
or even 1.1 pounds of fat per week.
So that’s really just a placebo effect.
You lost fat because of your training and you diet and not because you were supplementing
with CLA.
So all in all, this is just something I wouldn’t recommend bothering with.
There are certain supplements that can be beneficial as a part of an overall muscle
building and fatloss program like I've covered in previous videos.
Things like protein powder, fish oil, certain vitamins and minerals, certain pre-workout
compounds if you want that extra kick, but most of what's out there is basically just
marketing hype, especially when it comes to the fat burner category.
So my suggestion is to save you money and put most of your focus where it matters, which
is on proper training and proper nutrition, since that’s going to be responsible for
the vast majority of your results.
A few basic supplements can help out but CLA is almost certainly not one of them.
So I hope you guys found this helpful.
If you appreciate this science-based, no BS approach to fitness and you want to get a
complete step-by-step road map for gaining muscle and losing fat as efficiently as possible.
The workouts, the meal plans, supplement guides, along with one-on-one coaching, then you can
grab my complete Body Transformation Blueprint by clicking here or by heading over to www.BTBluePrint.com
using the link in the description box.
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Thanks for watching, guys.
I’ll see you in the next video.