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(More customer reviews)You can make just about anything sound more powerful when you append Force to the end of it. CinnamonForce! MangoForce! CupcakeForce! It's kind of like adding the "Extreme" qualifier to a product name.
Anyway, there's really only one reason most people will bother to read a review of a bottle of supplements: they want to know if it works. Well, I'll get to that part, but first I'll go ahead and get all of that other stuff out of the way.
The Amazon product description is disconcerting to me. There's a summarized version of it on the bottle, too, but I don't care if it has been used since ancient times. I don't care if Columbus was looking for it, that doesn't mean it's a magical cure-all. I recently saw a show on one of the "nerd channels" that I adore so much (either History or Discovery, I can't remember now) that was talking about how ancient Romans loved to cook in lead pots because they liked the added "flavor" that the lead imparted on the food. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time considering ancient opinions of the mystical healing properties of cinnamon.
The 60-count capsules come in a glass bottle. It's a 30-day supply when following recommended use (one capsule each after your two largest meals of the day). The capsules themselves are tiny -- you could probably fit four of them on the head of a US dime, if that was something you were likely to try. They're black and shaped like a rugby ball. They actually look more like something that your college roommate's "friend" handed you that one time than any sort of herbal supplement. So maybe you won't want to have any of them loose in a plastic baggie the next time you go through airport security, but they sure do smell nice!
Contents. I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count. That's right, they contain cinnamon. More specifically, they contain cinnamon extract. Even MORE specifically, they contain a 140mg (per 2-capsule serving) "Proprietary Blend" of Cinnamon and Cinnamon (bark) 94mg hydroethanolic extract and 46mg supercritical extract. Based on what I could find (and understand), all of these words are a fancy way of saying "cinnamon extract". Please feel free to leave a comment on the review if my understanding of this is incorrect. Below that, there is a section called "Other Ingredients" which lists olive oil and yellow beeswax.
Let's talk price for a second. At the time of this review, a 60-count bottle of 70mg capsules is going for around twenty dollars. Compare with Natrol 80-count Cinnamon Extract 500mg Capsules at under four dollars a bottle. That's a huge difference, especially considering you get an extra 20 capsules and each one is more than 700% as potent as these. There's no magic elixir in here, folks. It's cinnamon extract in a pill.
So now we get to the real question: Do they work? The short answer is, I don't know. Maybe I'm cynical by nature, but if I try a product that promises something, I want to be able to see a difference. And I'm not seeing a difference here. So let's talk about the claims on the bottle (notice the asterisks):
Use as part of your diet to promote healthy weight management*
Promotes normal blood lipid profiles*
Helps maintain blood sugar already in normal range*
Quick aside: Once I looked at the package of a "whitening" chewing gum. Seeing the dreaded asterisk next to the claims of tooth whitening abilities, I read the fine print. To summarize, the fine print said that the gum is "whitening", in that the act of chewing gum makes it more difficult for stains to adhere to the teeth. What they were saying in that fine print (in not so many words) was that there was no actual whitening compound in the gum! But the act of chewing the gum (or ANY gum, "whitening" or not) made stains less likely to appear over time. I was flabbergasted! I mean, it made sense that they couldn't put a whitening compound in gum because whatever they put in it would end up in your body as you chewed it, but it really made me think about product claims like that.
Okay, sorry about the digression. But I feel it applies here -- look at how these claims are worded. "Helps maintain blood sugar already in normal range" sounds like "if your blood sugar is normal, this will not change that." Well that doesn't sound like much of a benefit. You could say the same about water -- or nothing at all! Or how about "Use as part of your diet to promote healthy weight management"? Note it's not weight loss, but weight management. To me, that says that as long as you eat right, these pills will not cause you to gain weight. I won't get into the third one, because I'm not sure what "normal blood lipid profiles" are.
But you get my point. And each claim has the "These Statements Have Not Been Evaluated By the FDA" asterisks, which means that they can claim just about anything they want.
I have not used all of the pills in the bottle yet. And although there is no information regarding how long I should expect to take them before seeing any benefits, I will continue to take them for the 30 days. If at some point I do see a change that cannot be merely attributed to some placebo effect, I'll amend the review accordingly.
I do want to make it clear that I'm not dismissing these supplements out of hand. Maybe there is some science to it. I really don't know. If someone has any real data about the significant benefits of cinnamon from a true, unbiased source, please add a link in the comments to this review because I'd like to read it. I did some searches on the internet for more information, but every site that had information about cinnamon's health benefits was also selling cinnamon pills, and made all sorts of claims about their products ("Stop Aging Now!", etc.) that made them sound untrustworthy. Plus, some of them mention "recent studies" or "new research" that suggests all of these wild benefits, but not a single one of them provides a link to that data (that I could find, anyway).
But even if there is a benefit to it, aren't there a number of more cost effective ways of getting your dose of cinnamon?
Or cinnamon extract?
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