MYPROTEIN CLA Review

If you want to cut bodyfat take care of your dieting habits first. The CLAs did little to none for an average guy like me who lifts a lot, but does not pay minute attention to detail on diet. I increased in bodyfat whilst on MYPROTEIN CLAs from 12% to 16%, being what I would perceive as an average diet of a normal family life inclusing travels.

What is CLA ?

CLA is an abbreviation for conjugated linoleic acid and can be found in cheese, lamb, sheep and beef. CLAs describe a family composed of 28 isomers of linoleic acids. Current use cases for humas are being debated and it is discussed whether or not it has benefits to training.

It is also known and used as a component of several fat loss pills. It got popular because it has not the same side effects on your cardiovascular system as caffeine. Caffeine has the side effect of high blood pressure and exposing you to more risk of a heart attack. However caffeine was used to speed up metabolism in the most successful fat loss pills, which then got criticised by doctors for the mentioned side effects. CLA tablets, powders and liquids are an outcome of that discussion. Same goes for fat loss pills using chromium as their main ingredient.

What can CLAs do for you ?

Evidence points towards that it can help against cancer and support training. However there have not been enough studies on humans being conducted to provide a solid base to prove this. For animals it works.

Here you see a common problem with many of the fitness industries products. As the pressure to come up with new wondrous pills and tinctures with more companies entering the market to turn a profit increases, the more likely it will be that products are being churned out that have not been properly tested.

It is also very costly and time consuming to conduct tests on humans. As fitness products are usually designed to be sold over the counter at a price of 0 - 100 euro, it is not lucrative for the companies in question to produce a long trail of paper to prove if it works.If you want to dive deeper on how these mechanics work, read "Bad Pharma" ny Ben Goldacre. Some shocking insights there.

A funny sentence I found taken out of a study on CLA is this one "A 50:50 mix of conjugated linoic acid and fish oil enhanced the healing process of inflammatory bowel disease in pigs". So, if you are a pig and fart a lot, take your fish oil and CLAs ;).

How many CLAs do you get from MYProtein ?

Nutritional Information CLA

MYPROTEIN promotes two different sizes of the product, one being a container with sixty pills in it which lasts you for 30 servings as you take two at once. The other being 90 servings delivering a 180 pill container.

What did it do for you ?

The CLAS did very little to nothing for me based on my personal progression towards a lower bodyfat percentage, which is the main claim the product makes.

Before shooting it down completely, let me give you some context here. For this assesment I only have two data points one being March/April 2015 at a bodyfat percentage of 12%, the other six months later with 6 kg of lean muscle mass more, but also a body fat percentage of 16%. Within these six months i stopped running, which I found to be very helpful towards losing bodyfat, and switched to a routine of lifting four days a week without a lot of cardio. I started taking the CLAs mid way through this period when I bought my Lean Muscle stack from MYPROTEIN. You also have to consider that CLAs and fat loss pills are way down the priority list when it comes to planning your diet. My diet is not particularly planned so you can challenge me on that I did not even get the basics right in terms of optimising for losing bodyfat. I also attended a wedding, went to the USA and London for holidays in this period, where I did not train and stuffed my face.

Before you shout out "ok then, so this is unfair on the product" hold on a second. What this proves is that this pill has very limited to no effect for an average guy who trains a lot, eats a lot of protein, does not do a lot of cardio and is not a professional bodybuilder. So if all of this applies to you, which is not unlikely, maybe invest in something else than CLAs.

If you are a professional bodybuilder who gets all of his/her dieting plans down to the very last milligram and wants to avoid caffeine in their weight loss stack, because you either already drink a lot of coffee during the day or you are already prone to high blood pressure, this can be for you after testing it. So get yourself the one month supply, keep all of the other parameters the same during that month and see whether CLAs have impact towards your goals or not.