Phena Lean Review

No matter who you are, we’ve all struggled to lose weight at some point in our lives, whether you’re looking to decrease body fat and enhance lean muscle mass, or you’re just looking to drop some pounds hoping to increase your overall health. Luckily there are weight loss supplements such as Phena Lean that can help get us to that finish line and achieve our fat loss goals – Atleast that’s what they say they can do.

Phena Lean is an unfortunate example of everything that’s wrong with diet pills, and their practices are the reason why even the good guys are often viewed through a sceptical lens. We won’t go into too much detail right off the bat here but suffice to say we will not be recommending this product today – and instead would like to turn your attention to a weight loss supplement that is everything Phena Lean claims to be and more, Instant Knockout Cut.

Developed alongside professional MMA coaches, Instant Knockout Cut was designed with one idea in mind; losing fat without losing muscle. This would allow the athletes to reach their weigh-in goals for matches whilst remaining as competitive as possible, and once it was made public it became clear that beyond that, it was just a fantastic dietary supplement. This is to say that as much as it was designed with specific body composition goals in mind, it simply decreases body fat in anyone following a healthy diet and light but regular exercise routine (walking 30-60 minutes a day)

Shop Instant Knockout Deals

Or read about the fat burners that we rated as best for 2023 here —>

Without further delay let’s get into the thick of it and explain why Phena Lean leaves so much to be desired.

Ingredients Breakdown

Vitamin B3 – 25mg

Also known as Niacin Vitamin B3 is an essential nutrient that is found in many foods. B vitamins are categorised by the major roles they play in the bodies metabolism, and vitamin B3 is ofcourse no exception to this rule. It’s converted to a very important coenzyme (Nictinamide Adenine Dinucleotide/ NAD) by all tissues in the body, and this co enzyme is quite possibly the most important in our entire metabolic system, being required as the catalyst for over 400 enzyme reactions [1].

This would lead many to intuit that Vitamin B3 is a fantastic supplement for weight loss, but there’s actually no scientific evidence to support those claims. There were two research papers we found that investigated the effects of niacin on weight loss, the first was was an animal study. The researchers here found a reduction in the pro-flammatory effect of adipose tissue (fat tissue), that this was due to an increased concentration of anti-inflammatory chemicals in the body, such as adipokine, rather than ameliorating the effects of obesity [2].

The other was a 1999 study that had women take a combined supplement of Niacin and Chromium, and this had positive results, indicating that either or both of these nutrients helps to cause weight loss that coincided with a sparing of muscle [3]. The problem here is the inclusion of Chromium, which has since had many studies advocating for it’s use in weight loss supplements, with observations stating it can increase lean muscle mass and decreases body fat percentage [4], where there have been no further studies advocating for vitamin B3 in this manner.

Phena Lean Blend – 766mg

Now here we need to discuss a fairly ugly topic but don’t worry, we won’t linger on it too long. The topic is the use of proprietary blends, which is a stain on this industry that is unlikely to go away anytime soon as, unfortunately, they’re quite effective. To summarise, a proprietary blend allows companies to group the dosage of a blend of ingredients, meaning that each individual ingredients dosage can not be determined. This is very anti-consumer, as for a dietary supplement to do it’s job it doesn’t just need the correct ingredients, but they need to be properly dosed. You can see how proprietary blends get in the way of determining this.

There’s a silver lining however, as the ingredients need to be listed in descending order from highest dosed ingredient to lowest dosed ingredient, so you can somewhat infer the doses to some degree.

With this in mind we’ll be discussing the first few ingredients in this blend but beyond that point, there’s not a chance that they’ll be dosed correctly so we’ll simply skip past them.

Caffeine Anhydrous-Di Caffeine Malate (Infinergy) – 250mg

Thankfully the law is on our side here and we’re able to see exactly how much caffeine is in this product, and it’s a lot. The general guidelines around caffeine is that 400mg per day is considered safe, but it’s recommended that you limit the amount of caffeine you consume to 300mg per dose [5].

With that out of the way we should give credit where it’s due as caffeine is actually a solid pick for weight loss, especially in the context of losing fat whilst preserving muscle mass. This is because it’s been found that the ingestion of caffeine before a high-intensity workout actually increases the intensity of the workout, without any prompting from the researchers [6]. This is why caffeine is so commonly found in pre-workout drinks.

It’s also been found to increase energy expenditure by increasing thermogenesis, which is the mechanism with which your body maintains it’s internal temperature. Simply put, if you increase the amount of heat your muscles are outputting, you get a similar increase in calories burned, essentially increasing your resting metabolism [7].

Finally is caffeine’s effects on appetite suppression, which is something most coffee drinkers will be somewhat familiar with. Have you ever been looking forward to dinner, drink some coffee and find that you’re not very hungry anymore? That’s caffeine doing it’s work, as it’s been found that ingesting caffeine 0.5-4 hours before a meal reduces the amount calories that you eat [8].

L-Theanine

This remarkable amino acid is found in green tea, and is actually responsible for green teas calming effect. This can be seen in a couple of different ways, as it’s inclusion could be to ameliorate the negative impact that such a high dose of caffeine can have, or it could simply be with the idea of reducing stress in general, as those suffering high-stress have been found to increase the risk of obesity [9].

With it being second in line, it’s reasonable to assume that a good amount of L-Theanine has been used, but then again it’d be foolish to rule out the possibility that everything beyond caffeine has been wildly under-dosed, considering caffeine takes up 33% of the entire blend of ten ingredients. This would mean that if each ingredient is dosed equally from that point onwards, that there would only be 57.3mg per ingredient, and if L-Theanine was dosed correctly (100mg), this would only leave 416mg left for the 8 other ingredients.

Theobromine

Somehow the third most abundant ingredient and it’s the thing in chocolate that poisons dogs. Saying that as it’s the most interesting thing about it, theobromine has had some evidence suggesting it helps with weight loss in mice, but is very controversial when it comes to studies with human subjects, as it lacks any mechanism that might be associated with this [10].

Ginseng

The fourth most abundant ingredient here and again, it’s wasted space. Similar to Theobromine, Ginseng has only had successful results for weight loss in animal studies, with very little evidence existing that advocates for it’s use in weight loss supplements for humans [11]

At this point a decent dosage is still possible but is again very unlikely, as it’s more likely that ingredients are more evenly divided from this point, as it’s far less likely that they’ll be containing something like 10mg of cayenne powder.

Verdict

This is probably the most expensive and fancy caffeine pill we’ve ever seen, with a dosage of caffeine that will give you so much energy you’ll be bouncing off the walls. This is just not a very good fat burner at all, with everything from it’s poor business practice with the proprietary blend to the formula itself just not being up to scratch. If there’s anything to take away from this, it’s that with the right market conditions, you can sell 250mg of caffeine for $44.

Changing gears and moving onto something more positive we’d once again like to turn your attention to Instant Knockout Cut. Now there were two ingredients in Phena Lean that were decent with caffeine anhydrous and L-Theanine, both of which are found in Instant Knockout Cut. Not being content with just two good ingredients however, they’ve included them in an outstanding formula that covers every base for fat loss, for just $6 more than Phena Lean.

Ingredients such as green tea extract EGCG, which has been found to significantly reduce body weight and BMI compared to placebo [12] and cayenne pepper, which is also in phena lean but was so far down the list it wouldn’t have been dosed enough to warrant mentioning. That’s a shame as cayenne pepper is one of the best thermogenic fat burners out there, and when dosed correctly has been found to reduce body fat percentage by 5.91% more than placebo [13].

Finally, one of the aspects of weight loss that is common in the best weight loss supplements is appetite suppression, and once again Instant Knockout Cut shows them how it’s done with it’s inclusion on glucomannan. It works by swelling in size in the stomach, helping you to reduce calories per meal by making you feel full faster and for longer, reducing food cravings in between meals as a result [14].

Shop Instant Knockout Cut Deals

Plean Lean Review Conclusion

To summarise, Phena lean is an unfortunately poor showing no matter which way you look at it, falling apart under the smallest amount of scrutiny. As soon as you see a proprietary blend in this industry it’s absolutely fair to take it as the ill-omen it is and start looking elsewhere, as when you do look deeper you tend to find something similar to phena lean – some decent ingredient over shadowed by poor business practices and ineffective dosing.

References

1 – https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Niacin-HealthProfessional/

2 – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3742781/

3 – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11225649/

4 – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9763876/

5 – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14687776/

6 – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8400708/

7 – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6467726/

8 – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28446037/

9 – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5373497/

10 – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4335269

11 – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5766689/