SodaSlim Ingredients: Five Names Against Five Trial Doses

Caffeine anhydrous is caffeine with the water taken out, which is what makes it practical in a capsule. Chemically it is the same molecule as the caffeine in coffee; the difference is that a capsule delivers a fixed amount and a mug does not.

This is the one ingredient on the bottle with a human effect that has been shown more than once. In the 1989 thermogenesis study, volunteers given 100 mg raised their metabolic rate for the following two and a half hours, and repeated doses through the day raised total daily energy expenditure in both lean and post-obese groups. Astrup and Toubro traced the same effect across doses and recorded the heart-rate and blood-pressure changes that come with it.

A 2017 randomised trial added a mechanism: catechins and caffeine together activated brown fat and raised cold-induced thermogenesis. That is the pairing this bottle carries, which is the most defensible thing about the formula's design.

What the effect is not is large. The thermogenic response to a single dose is measured in tens of kilocalories, and it fades as tolerance builds in regular consumers. It is a nudge, repeated daily.

Roasting destroys chlorogenic acid, so green coffee extract is made from beans that were never roasted. The extract carries caffeine as well, which matters for the total this capsule delivers.

A 2023 systematic review pooled twelve randomised trials of chlorogenic acid from green coffee and found a small average reduction in body weight, graded at low certainty. An earlier meta-analysis reached a similar conclusion and was blunt about the quality of the underlying studies.

Two individual trials are worth naming. An eight-week trial in people with metabolic syndrome measured anthropometric indices, glycaemic control, blood pressure and appetite together. A 2021 study in healthy overweight adults reported a shift in the ratio of lean mass to fat mass.

The trial everyone quotes is not on that list, and the reason is on the blog: the crossover study the journal withdrew.

Raspberry ketone is the compound that gives raspberries their smell. In food it is a flavouring. In supplements it is sold on the strength of a 2005 paper in which it raised fat breakdown in rodent cells and limited weight gain in mice fed a high-fat diet, and of later mouse work on hypothalamic inflammation.

No randomised trial of raspberry ketone by itself in people has been published. The closest thing is an eight-week trial of a multi-ingredient product in which it is one component among several, which cannot tell you what the ketone contributed.

A 2025 analysis of what raspberry ketone supplements actually contain adds a second reason for caution: the compound is expensive to extract from fruit and most commercial material is synthetic, which is legal and ordinary but worth knowing.

This desk carries no claim that rests on this ingredient, and says so on every page where it comes up.

The active in garcinia rind is hydroxycitric acid. In a test tube it inhibits ATP citrate lyase, an enzyme in the pathway that turns carbohydrate into fat, and that single fact is the whole basis of the ingredient's reputation.

The randomised trial published in JAMA in 1998 put that idea to the most direct test it has had: 135 overweight adults, 1,500 mg of hydroxycitric acid a day for twelve weeks, against placebo, with everyone on the same diet. Fat mass did not differ between the groups.

A 2011 meta-analysis of the trials that followed found a small difference in weight and warned that the effect was of questionable clinical relevance given the quality of the studies. The appetite study looked specifically at whether hydroxycitric acid changes hunger, fullness or how much people eat, and found it did not.

A safety review and a case series of acute liver injury are the other half of the picture. The events are rare; they are also the reason this ingredient has a safety section of its own.

Green tea extract concentrates the catechins in tea leaves, chiefly epigallocatechin gallate, and usually carries some caffeine with them. It is the most-studied ingredient on this bottle after caffeine itself.

A 2009 meta-analysis found catechin and caffeine mixtures produced a small reduction in weight and helped hold it. The Cochrane review that followed pooled fourteen trials and concluded the average change was small and not clinically important, with wide variation between studies.

A 2024 review asked a narrower question, whether catechins add anything to exercise training, which is the setting closest to how most people would use this capsule.

The dose range across those trials runs from 270 mg to 1,200 mg of catechins a day, which is a spread of more than four to one. Where this bottle sits inside that range is the question the section below is about.