If you spend any time on social media, you’ve probably seen ads for supplements by a company called Arrae. This post looks at the company’s most popular supplements for a combined Arrae MB-1 review and Arrae Bloat review.
Like I said, Arrae Bloat supplement seems to be one of the most popular, but the company has a new ‘fauxzempic’ supplement that it claims is effective for weight loss.
Just another company jumping on the ‘natural Ozempic’ trend.
Read my Xyngular GLP-X review here.
This Arrae supplement review looks the science behind Arrae products, and how their claims hold up against current evidence.
Arrae was founded by a husband and wife team. Essentially, she was a beauty influencer who had digestive issues, he was a tech bro, and it was a match made in heaven.
Arrae marketing
Arrae clearly targets their products to a specific demographic (female, wealthy).
You all know that I don’t like to mince words, so I’m going to come out and say it: as a dietitian and health professional who is also public-facing, I have issues with much of Arrae’s content. This includes influencer posts, but also Arrae social media ads and some of the posts on the Arrae site.
It’s totally fine and expected for Arrae to target a certain demographic and to make claims about the products that people find enticing. That’s how marketing works.
But in order to properly market a nutritional supplement, you should understand the science and physiology behind it and the conditions you’re claiming that supplement can help.
My overarching issue with Arrae as a company is that they seem to make claims about their products that are not supported by solid, peer-reviewed, human trials. Yes, the company seems to lean heavily on alternative medicine. No, it’s not okay to act like a product does something that it potentially may not do.
I think that’s a fair statement, don’t you?
Here are some examples:
Arrae claims that its products ‘heal your gut over time,’ which is likely unproven.
It advertises that one of its products ‘kills anxiety for good,’ which is reckless and potentially dangerous. Do not avoid taking medications for anxiety if you need them.
Here we have one of the Arrae founders implying that Arrae bloat helps with gluten and dairy sensitivity.
A bloated face is likely due to water retention. FYI.
Yes, bloating can be uncomfortable and a sign of illness – if you have painful bloating that doesn’t go away, and is associated with other symptoms such as rashes, diarrhea, vomiting, or excessive gas, don’t just take a supplement. Please see a doctor/RD.
I discussed the specific gluten and dairy sensitivity claim with a gastroenterologist, who saw the Arrae bloat ingredients and concurred with the following take:
Dairy sensitivity – which we can assume is lactose intolerance – is a deficiency in lactase, an enzyme produced in the small intestine that breaks down lactose into glucose and galactose. Lactose intolerance can cause bloating and diarrhea when lactose is consumed.
Bloat supplements don’t contain lactase, and therefore can not break down lactose.
The cause of gluten sensitivity is not known. Many people experience a bloated belly after they eat carbs, but THIS IS NORMAL. For every gram of glycogen we absorb, we retain 3-4 grams of water. It doesn’t mean you’re sick or that you don’t tolerate carbs or gluten.
Gluten sensitivity does exist for sure, but according to research, its prevalence is thought to be between 0.6-13% of the population. The only way to treat gluten intolerance is a gluten-free diet (not supplements).
Lastly, there’s something really disingenuous and gross about a woman in a small body selling a weight-loss supplement.
Arrae MB-1 review
I know a lot of you want to read an Arrae MB-1 review about the company’s recently-released ‘faux-zempic’ supplement.
Like similar ‘natural Ozempic’ supplements, Arrae MB-1 is marketed as being a ‘natural alternative’ to the ‘chemicals’ in GLP-1 agonist medications.
Telling us that a product is ‘natural’ and therefore ‘better’ is called the Appeal to Nature fallacy, and it’s absolutely wrong.
GLP-1 agonist medications have never been matched in weight loss efficacy by a supplement. These meds have been around since 2015, and have a good safety record. Yes, some people don’t tolerate them, just as some people may not tolerate MB-1. But to market MD-1 by wrongly implying that GLP-1s aren’t safe, is completely unethical.
In reality, supplements – including MB-1 – aren’t well regulated, and neither are the claims companies make about them.
Read my review of GLP-1 agonists here.
Read my review of Oprah’s Weight Loss special here.
As for the cost, I’d rather pay more for something that’s clinically proven, tightly regulated, and approved by the FDA than a supplement that is none of those things.
Some of the marketing of Arrae’s new MB-1 supplement is absolutely offensive. Hello, what message does the image below send? You need pills to be thin? Being thin is preferable? You can depend on this pill for weight loss?
The 80s called…they want their advertising back.
The founders claim that 88% of Americans are ‘metabolically out of balance,’ but we don’t know where that number came from or what that even means, exactly.
The above is just vague enough to convince people that they probably have something wrong with them, while not telling them anything at all.
And boosting your metabolic rate by 500%? I’m sorry, what?
If my BMR is 1400 calories a day, this would mean that MB-1 would potentially boost it to 8400 calories a day. How is a company even allowed to make this claim? ‘Boosting metabolism’ is a marketing term, not science.
Arrae claims that MB-1 is ‘clinically proven.’ This sounds exciting, until you realize that the supplement itself has not been studied; the ingredients in it have. Even if these ingredients have research behind them, this doesn’t mean that this research is good, or that it backs up the claims Arrae is making.
All research isn’t good research, and if a study’s outcomes haven’t been replicated, it’s hard to imagine any ethical company using it to support the efficacy of their product.
We’ve seen this sort of shady marketing in a lot of supplements, including the Glucose Goddess’s Anti-Spike.
Read my Glucose Goddess Anti-Spike review here.
When I wrote the company asking for the research behind MB-1. They were very responsive and sent me 3 citations right away.
The first one was a 72-person 2008 study looking at cissus quadrangularis for weight loss. It was sponsored by a company that makes supplements containing this ingredient.
Interestingly, a 2021 study on cissus quadrangularis and weight loss concluded that compared to the 2008 study’s result, investigators found that this ingredient had no effect on weight, BMI, body fat, or body fat percentage. They hypothesized that the 2008 study participants may have lost lean mass versus fat mass, as these were not measured in the old study.
The second study Arrae sent me was a 2020 review of both animal and human studies on various health effects of B-Lactis, a probiotic.
All but two studies in the review were in mice or in vitro, and therefore don’t prove a thing (at least, to me).
One 2016 study found a statistically significant but minimal 2.4-4% reduction in body fat in 24 subjects who were given B-Lactis. A 2019 study found increased beneficial bacteria in the gut with B-Lactis, because of course it did. Nothing remarkable and to me, nothing that proves most of the above claims.
Moving on, the third study the company sent me was a 4-week 2014 study on grains of paradise on 19 non-obese women aged 20-22. Not exactly representative of the general population, not to mention that the study is old and tiny. Subjects received 30g of GP a day.
The study found ‘Neither GP nor placebo ingestion affected subcutaneous or total fat.’ Intervention subjects lost 2.9 cm of visceral fat compared a visceral fat gain in the placebo group. Is that clinically relevant?
Basal energy expenditure was measured in a metabolic chamber, and did find a 97 calorie reduction per day in the intervention group. Is that the 500% metabolic boost the company advertises? Who knows, but if so, it’s not accurate.
African mango is another ingredient in Arrae MB-1, and while the company didn’t send me a study on it, here’s the one they use on the Arrae site to prove this ingredient’s efficacy. The study concluded that 300mg of African mango aka irvingia gabonensis appeared to cause significant weight loss.
Two more recent studies – one in 2013 and one in 2019 – found that although this ingredient may cause some weight loss, the only human research we have on it is methodologically flawed and can’t be used to prove the efficacy of this ingredient.
The other ingredients in MB-1 – green tea extract, chromium, and vitamin B6 – are frequently used in weight loss/fat burner supplements but have no convincing evidence behind them in terms of their effect on body weight.
Arrae supplements, like many others, contain a proprietary blends of their active ingredients. I never recommend supplements that contain proprietary blends, for several reasons:
First of all, we have no way of knowing if the product contains effective doses of their active ingredients. We actually don’t know how much of these ingredients the product has, period. Aside from potentially being too low, it may also be too high. Hiding ingredient amounts in a blend prevents us from knowing if an ingredient is in a dose that may be dangerous to some people.
The bottom line is this:
No food burns fat. No supplement burns fat. If something like this existed, the weight loss industry would cease to exist. If MB-1 burns fat and is so great for weight loss, why have none of the scientists and researchers discovered it until now? If any of its ingredients were that effective, why in the world wouldn’t they be first-line treatment for obesity?
Because they just aren’t all that great. As a dietitian, I would not recommend MB-1 or any ‘fat burning,’ ‘metabolism-boosting’ supplement to anyone. I think they’re all total scams.
Arrae Bloat Review
Arrae Bloat seems to be the other very popular Arrae supplement. One ‘well-meaning’ bride in California actually handed it out at her wedding, and I just don’t even know what to say about that.
We have medicalized bloating to the point where people believe that having a full stomach is wrong and that it needs to be fixed. For most individuals, transient bloating after eating is completely normal and doesn’t require a supplement to ‘cure’ it.
The main ingredient in Arrae Bloat is ginger. While research supports the use of ginger for nausea and vomiting in pregnancy, the evidence is otherwise mixed and mostly unimpressive in terms of ginger’s efficacy for indigestion.
One small study showed an improvement in gastric emptying with 1200mg of ginger taken an hour before meals (Arrae recommends taking Bloat after a meal). Bloat only contains 220mg of ginger per dose.
Bromelain, an enzyme from pineapples, is also in Bloat. There’s really not a lot of human research around the efficacy of bromelain for indigestion or bloating, but it does contain enzymes called cysteine proteinases that may help the body break down protein in the stomach.
The other ingredients in Bloat – dandelion (diuretic), along with mint, lemon balm, and slippery elm – have historically been used to soothe the gut after meals. There is solid evidence supporting the use of peppermint for IBS symptoms.
Again, most of Arrae Bloat’s active ingredients are in a proprietary blend. Who knows if we’re getting enough?
My issue with Bloat is not with the supplement as much as how it’s marketed.
For this Arrae Bloat review, I asked Arrae for the research behind the supplement, since they make some pretty big claims about it.
They directed me to a small 35-person open-label, unpublished trial using subjective outcomes. The trial’s size, the fact that it was open-label, single-arm, not peer-reviewed or even published, and commissioned by the company. Garbage in, garbage out, as we say in my business. Before and afters, random influencers, and testimonials are not research.
That being said, I can’t see Bloat being dangerous for most healthy people (except to your wallet – it’s expensive), so try it if you want.
Arrae supplements review in short
I can’t give Arrae a pass, even if its founder is Canadian. Their advertising is disappointing. Their claims are disappointing. And, their ‘research’ is not, for me, good enough.
Arrae Bloat may be effective for some people with gastrointestinal issues. Otherwise, let’s stop medicalizing all bloating, please. Having a full stomach is normal, and your stomach isn’t supposed to be flat all the time.
A pretty package and high price tag isn’t what people should be looking for in a supplement.
Also: can we stop believing that fat burners do anything for weight loss?