“Metabolic Synergizer” Is a New Category in Dietary Supplements, Firm Says, and It’s Not Weight Management

Photo © iStockphoto.com/Neustockimages

At the recent Natural Products Expo West trade show in Anaheim, CA, OmniActive Health Technologies (Morristown, NJ) offered a sneak peek at its newest ingredient, OmniLean. OmniLean, a Salacia extract, addresses multiple facets of metabolic health, including glucose and lipid management. And while the ingredient provides weight-loss benefits, the company says it is not calling this a weight-management ingredient. Instead, the company has coined a new term that it hopes will give birth to a new dietary supplement category: metabolic synergizer.

“We created this term, metabolic synergizer, to represent a class of ingredients that support multiple facets of metabolic health,” says Lynda Doyle, vice president, global marketing, OmniActive.

Instead of focusing on a singular approach to weight management, such as addressing satiety, carbohydrate metabolism, or lipid management, OmniActive says its ingredient takes a more holistic route to overall health that encompasses not just weight management but also metabolic health.

“Weight management has essentially become a stagnant term,” says Brian Appell, marketing manager, OmniActive. “More people aren’t necessarily looking for weight management only; they’re looking for solutions to be healthier as they’re starting to lose weight, because while their immediate concern is, ‘Yes, I’m overweight,’ they also understand that there’s a constellation of other conditions that are associated with being overweight. There are long-term consequences.” Those long-term consequences include insulin resistance, low HDL cholesterol, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, and visceral fat.

According to OmniActive, OmniLean is being studied for its effects on all of these parameters. The company says it targets reduced carbohydrate and fat absorption, satiety, healthy glucose management, and cholesterol management and heart health. “Traditionally, the way most people look at managing these various aspects of health is by taking multiple ingredients,” Appell says. But OmniLean is “a single ingredient to really address these multiple issues.”

“Weight management is a side benefit of this product,” Doyle adds.

So far, Doyle says the ingredient has shown significant weight-loss effects in animal studies and that the company also has in vitro evidence. In addition, the company is getting ready to present and publish one human study that showed the ingredient was efficacious at doses of 300­­–500 mg. She also points out that this dose of Salacia extract is much lower than doses used in other studies on Salacia extracts, which often range between 0.5–2 g. “We’ve created a very highly potent bioactive compound so that you need a lower dose,” she says.

For now, OmniActive isn’t publicly disclosing the exact species of Salacia in OmniLean. Doyle says it isn’t Salacia oblonga, nor is it Salacia reticulata. She does say, however, that the company screened more than 80 different extracts and that OmniLean was the final choice. As part of its plant-verification program, the company uses DNA fingerprinting and high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC) to authenticate its specific species of Salacia to ensure the bioactives in OmniLean with batch-to-batch consistency.

Appell says the company doesn't see OmniLean as competing with other weight-management ingredients such as thermogenics, including OmniActive’s own Capsimax capsicum extract: “They’re really targeting different demographics.” Capsimax, he says, is for active individuals who are looking to “enhance their performance." By contrast, OmniLean is for individuals “who are struggling but who need help with their diet,” Doyle adds. “It’s more for a general platform of long-term health and wellness.”

OmniActive says OmniLean reflects a shift in how today’s consumer is looking at weight loss. “People are not so much looking at, ‘I need to lose 10 pounds;’ now it’s more like people are saying, ‘I need to lose 10 pounds, yes, but I also understand that my blood sugar might be out of whack, my cholesterol might be high, and, yes, it might be because of my weight, so I need to address those as well as losing weight,” says Doyle.

Also read:

Limit on Added Sugar Is Biggest Change in New Dietary Guidelines for Americans

Protein Is Weight Management’s Good News

New Tactic for Weight Management: Blood Sugar Control

Jennifer Grebow
Editor-in-Chief
Nutritional Outlook magazine
jennifer.grebow@ubm.com