The fucoTHIN story
Jordan Rubin Discovers the Miracle of Fucoxanthin
Whenever I tell someone the story of fucoTHIN, there is almost always the same reaction. I tell them that the product is a fat burner, and they roll their eyes. After all, there are hundreds of products that tout their ability to burn fat or raise your metabolism. The vast majority of them do not work or are extremely dangerous. Maybe you have had that experience yourself? In fact for the past seven years I have resisted completely the urge to launch a fat burning product. I have researched all of the ingredients used in these products, and frankly I found that they didn't meet my standards or the standards of the doctors and scientists that I collaborate with. While the market for weight management products exploded, I was happy to not be a part of it.
I felt that most of the products were unsafe or ineffective. I could understand then why people would roll their eyes when I started telling them about Garden of Lifes new fat burning product fucoTHIN. But something funny happened as I continued the story. You see, the story of fucoxanthin, the main ingredient contained in fucoTHIN reads like an action adventure novel. There are exotic locales, cutting edge science, stories of ancient cultures, a dedicated Russian Doctor, and even a sad, tragic and untimely death. All of a sudden, people were becoming more and more interested. Of course every story has a climax, a resolution that both grabs and satisfies the person hearing the story. For fucoTHIN it is this: It works. It burns fat, and clinical research shows that it does so without all of the harm that other fat burning formulas cause.* This is the story of fucoTHIN.
The Russian Doctor
Dr. Zakir Ramazanov was a good friend of mine. More than anything we shared a passion for finding whole food ingredients that promoted vibrant health. Dr. Ramazanov was a classically trained biochemist and plant physiologist who graduated from university in Russia at the top of his class. After a stint in the Russian army, he served as the Head Engineer at the Institute of Solar Energy of the Soviet Union. It was there that he began experimenting with solar bioreactors and how they affected the cultivation of certain marine vegetables and algae, including spirulina and chlorella. As his career advanced and eventually took him to the United States, Dr. Ramazanov continued to develop cultivation methods that allowed for the human consumption of sea vegetables more commonly known as seaweed.
Why seaweed? Why not look at beets, or cherries or apples? Dr. Ramazanov focused on seaweed based upon epidemiological data from some of the longest lived and healthiest cultures on the planet. Scientists have found compelling data that links the consumption of seaweed to the long-term health of many Asian cultures, most notably the Japanese.
It is amazing to me how often we ignore data like this. Instead of following the health secrets of the longest lived people in the world, we opt for convenience foods such as greasy fries and mocha lattes and then wonder why we are getting fatter and sicker. We even feel hopeless as to why. The answers are right in front of us! Dr. Ramazanov understood that key components of the Asian diet, namely seaweed, contributed to their extraordinary health. He was determined to bring this message to the world.
Eventually, Dr. Ramazanov would move to the Canary Islands where he would work for the Institute of Technology and Marine Sciences. While living there, fucoxanthin and its ability to burn fat caught Dr. Ramazanovs attention, which would ultimately lead to it becoming the main ingredient in fucoTHIN.
Fucoxanthin Discovered
It should not come as a surprise that fat burners are in such high demand. Sixty six percent of all American adults are overweight. Total health care costs associated with being overweight are over $90 billion a year. Fifty nine percent of Americans do not exercise at all. Only 9 percent of Americans eat the recommended 5 to 9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. In 1970, the average person consumed only two calories a day from high fructose corn syrup. In 2005, that number was 200 calories a day. We do not exercise enough. We overeat. We eat more of the foods that are horribly unhealthy, and we are getting fatter because of it.
As a result, we have seen the proliferation of some unsafe and unhealthy products designed to aid weight management and burn fat. Unscrupulous companies tout the benefits of their magic pills that supposedly help you shed pounds without even trying. As I mentioned before, most of these products are completely ineffective. Worse still, many of them contain chemicals that cause very dangerous side effects. What is needed is a completely natural product that is clinically tested and shown to work.
That is where fucoTHIN comes in!
Fucoxanthin, contained in fucoTHIN, is a compound that is found in several different types of seaweed. Fucoxanthin is a carotenoid (similar to lutein and lycopene), which is a powerful antioxidant that protects cells from free-radical damage. It is the pigment that gives brown seaweed its characteristic color and also participates in photosynthesis (the conversion of light into energy). While all of that makes fucoxanthin interesting, when fucoxanthin was studied in the laboratory, it revealed a quality that makes it unique.
Fucoxanthin contained in fucoTHIN actually burns fat.
But it gets even better. Most fat-burning products work by creating a thermogenic effect in the body. This is almost always done by stimulating the central nervous system. Creating a thermogenic effect is good. Thermogenesis is the process by which the body generates heat (energy) by increasing the metabolism above normal. While thermogenesis is good, creating this effect by boosting the central nervous system can be very problematic for most people.
Fucoxanthin is unique because it creates a thermogenic effect without stimulating the central nervous system. Fucoxanthin actually boosts your metabolism, without giving you the jitters or causing you to lose sleep. Instead of the shotgun approach of boosting your metabolism by stimulating the central nervous system, fucoxanthin breaks down fat without the increased heart rate.
While the discovery of the fat-burning potential of fucoxanthin was ground-breaking, there was still one rather huge problem. In order to get the right amount of fucoxanthin to effectively burn fat, you would need to eat an outrageous amount of brown seaweed.
Weighty Issues
Dr. Ramazanovs dedication to finding a way to make fucoxanthin available to everybody is nothing short of inspirational. He was so excited about the implications of the laboratory studies that he would spend the next seven years figuring out how to solve the problem at hand.
As mentioned before the problem was two-fold; the first problem was one of access. Very few of us have tons of edible seaweed in our backyard, and while I like a seaweed salad as much as anyone, who wants to eat one at every meal?
The first step in finding a way to cultivate and concentrate fucoxanthin from edible seaweed was to choose the right seaweed. Dr. Ramazanov experimented with hundreds of different types of seed stock before finally settling on two specific strains, Undaria (Wakame) and Laminaria (Kombu). Once selected, he moved on to the next issue.
The reality is that to concentrate enough fucoxanthin from the seaweed, you would need to grow miles and miles of seaweed just to have enough to answer the demand created by this unique product. Thankfully, Dr. Ramazanovs work provided the answer. By controlling the amount of sunlight and using large cultivation tanks filled with pristine deep sea water, he was able to perfect a process that greatly concentrated (200 to 500 times) the amount of fucoxanthin from the seaweed.
Finally, Dr. Ramazanov created a proprietary process used to extract the fucoxanthin and make it available for human consumption.
There is a sad note to the story. Dr. Ramazanov died before he could see fucoxanthin made available for mass consumption. Fucoxanthin is his legacy, and I am here to carry that on.
One More Step
For most manufacturers the story would wrap up soon thereafter. After all, there are laboratory studies that demonstrate the method by which fucoxanthin works. Why not make the product available and start seeing returns on the seven year time investment?
For me, the answer comes from our competition. The trail of weight management products is littered with broken promises. If I was going to put Garden of Life and my name behind a fat burner, I needed more than just studies done in a lab. I needed human research.
This is, of course, a gigantic risk. After seven years of development, what if you take the product to clinical trials and it is not effective? What if the lab results are not mirrored in humans? All the time and money spent on development would be wasted. This is the reason so many of our competitors do not perform the human clinical trials. They are afraid of the results. At the end of the day though, you only have your name. People need to trust that name. If fucoTHIN failed in human clinical studies, so be it. We decided to put fucoTHIN to the test. But of course you know by now that it did not fail. In fact, it succeeded far beyond our expectations.
The Skinny on fucoTHIN
In two separate double-blind placebo controlled clinical trials, a total of 150 overweight female subjects were put on fucoTHIN, the Garden of Life product that contains the patent- pending fucoxanthin formula, developed by Dr. Ramazanov. Participants followed an 1800 calorie diet and were monitored over 16 weeks. Results will vary. The results? In the first trial, the group that used fucoTHIN lost an average of 14.5 pounds. The placebo group lost an average of three pounds. Simply put, the fucoTHIN group lost significantly more weight than the group that DID NOT use fucoTHIN!
In the second clinical trial study, participants who used fucoTHIN experienced a significantly higher metabolic rate than with diet alone and without stimulating the central nervous system or negative side effects.
Paradise Found
Today, Garden of Life is the only company to bring health food stores in the United States the clinically studied fucoxanthin compound contained in fucoTHIN. Seven years in the making, my team and I at Garden of Life
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