SodaSlim Disclaimer: A Dietary Supplement, Described By A Retailer

A dietary supplement sold in capsule form. In the United States that is a food category rather than a medicine category, which has three consequences a buyer should understand.

First, it is not approved by anyone before sale. The FDA's own explainer sets out what the agency does and does not do with supplements, and “FDA approved” is not available to any product in this category, including this one. The “FDA registered” mark in this product's artwork refers to facility registration.

Second, the claims it may carry are structure and function claims: support, help, promote. It may not claim to treat a disease, and the four lines on this bottle are all support lines. Everything on this website is held to those four.

Third, the label is the document with authority. This website describes the label artwork supplied to this desk. The bottle that arrives is the thing to read, and where it differs from any page here, it wins.

For an independent view of the category, the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements factsheet on weight-loss supplements and NCCIH's summary of what the science says are both better starting points than anything a retailer writes, and this desk would rather you read them first.

Three claims appear on the seller's product page and on none of these pages, listed here so a reader can hold this website to its own standard.

Recorded in the generator source as well as on this page, so the next person editing these pages can see what was already refused.

Naming them costs this desk something and is the only way the rest of the site means anything. A website that repeats every claim its supplier makes is a copy of the supplier's page with a different logo on it.

Every figure quoted on these pages came back from a live search of the National Library of Medicine's own database, and the author, journal and year printed beside a study were read off that returned record rather than remembered. Thirty-two records survived that process. The rule applied to all of them was the same one: a citation earns its place by testing the ingredient, not by mentioning it.

• The amount is quoted with the finding. A trial that gave 200 mg of one extract and a bottle that states no amount at all are two different objects, and putting the trial's figure beside the label's silence is the only way a reader can weigh them.
• A retracted paper is named as retracted. The best-known green coffee trial in the category carries a retraction notice in its own journal, and it appears on ingredients with that fact attached rather than quietly left out.
• An ingredient with no human trial is said to have none. One of the five names on this bottle has never been tested on its own in people; the two studies that come closest tested products containing six or more actives.
• Consumer pages sit beside the trials. The Office of Dietary Supplements and the FDA publish plainer summaries than any retailer writes, and they are linked so a reader can leave this site to check it.

Two of the five named ingredients carry findings that do not favour the product, and both are printed. A site that cited only the encouraging half of the literature would still be accurate line by line and misleading as a whole, which is the harder failure to spot and the one worth guarding against.

Where the seller's page and the bottle disagree, the bottle governs. The artwork is the object that arrives in the box, and any figure this site prints can be checked against it by anyone holding one.

None of this makes these pages a substitute for a clinician, and none of it makes a cited trial a statement about you. A meta-analysis reports an average across hundreds of people who were not you, on a dose this bottle may or may not contain, for a period that may be shorter than you intend to take it. That gap between a published average and a single person is the honest limit of what any retailer can tell you, and it is why the amounts are printed rather than summarised into a verdict.