There are an estimated 100 million people in the US trying to lose weight and they spend $20 billion for weight loss products. Since the 2012 Dr. Oz show about weight loss the interest in �green coffee extract� (GCE) has skyrocketed. These three keywords gave 21 million hits on Google whereas the same words gave only 80 hits on PubMed. Such is the exponential difference between science and the journalism that describes it. There are currently hundreds of commercially available GCEs all purporting to produce weight loss. We obtained 54 commercial samples and made composite samples which were extracted with methanol/acetic acid and stored at -200 until assay by gradient HPLC and after identification of the chlorogenic acids (CGA) (monomers and dimers) by LC-MS. We quantified weight % and weight/dose by two methods; one in which we added up the areas of the CGAs and used chlorogenic acid as the sole standard and in the second we used the published extinction coefficients of the monomers and dimers (total of 7 compounds) at the lambda max (more accurate analytical method). We found a significant difference between the 2 methods. Of those samples with the amount per dose of CGA on the label (n= 39), the average claim was 233 mg but the average actual amount was only 157 mg (67% of claim). 18/54 products had less than 90% of the label claim. Four products claimed to have CGA from 200 to 400 mg/dose but had none by our analysis. Three other products which advertised to contain CGE, in fact had none. The caffeine in the green coffee beans was purported to be selectively left behind by the extraction process but varied from 0 to 17%. Based on publications, weight loss appears to be dose-dependent on CGA, so let the buyer beware!

Chlorogenic acids in commercial green coffee extracts: Label vs. actual

248th National Meeting (2014)

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