How Advantra Z and Chromax Work Together to Support Weight Loss

By Cecile Kehoe
Chief Scientific Officer
Chemist previously with Pepsi Cola
and The Wrigley Company

If you're exploring weight loss supplements, you may have come across the ingredients Advantra Z and Chromax. Much like diet and exercise work together, these two key ingredients combine to produce safe and effective results. Read on to learn what each ingredient is, how each works, and how they work together to support weight loss.

Healthy Lifestyle Habits

There is a real health crisis in the US when it comes to obesity. Over 45% of Americans are overweight. Being overweight increases your chances of developing several chronic health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and even some cancers, while hindering your ability to defend yourself against viruses and bacterial infections.

Health professionals agree that making several lifestyle changes are key to losing weight. Some examples are:

Eating Habits

Changing eating habits to eat healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables, lean meats, whole grains. And eat less! To lose weight, you need to create an energy deficit by eating fewer calories or increasing the number of calories you “burn” through physical activity or both. Which brings up the second example.

Physical Activity

Move your body. Any extra activities like climbing stairs or doing housework helps burn calories. Aerobic activities such as running, biking, swimming, are efficient ways to burn off calories. Try 15 to 30 minutes, 3 times a week to start. Also walking at a fast pace for 30 minutes or more, 3 to 5 times a week is an excellent activity to help you lose weight. You can try smaller amounts of activity several times a day if that fits better into your schedule.

Strength Training

To accelerate fat burning, try strength training to build muscle and boost metabolism. Muscle mass burns more calories than fat. More muscle means more calories burned at rest. Try to fit in a couple of days of weight training a week. This will also counteract muscle loss due to aging.

Supplementing Your Weight Loss Journey

You may want to give yourself some extra help along your weight loss journey by taking a good quality weight management dietary supplement. There are several different mechanisms by which the ingredients in these products work. These include:

• Fat burners or thermogenics including caffeine and bitter orange
• Appetite suppressants like hoodia
• Insulin and glucose regulators such as chromium
• Fat inhibitors like green coffee bean
• Bulking agents like fiber to make you feel fuller

Many of these ingredients can deliver better results when combined. Our popular Mdrive Boost & Burn is a weight management supplement that contains several high-quality ingredients that fit into the categories above and have a wealth of clinical studies demonstrating their safety and efficacy.

Two key ingredients that help with weight loss are Advantra Z and Chromax. Just as aerobic activity combined with weight training can work to elevate and maintain weight loss, these two safe and effective ingredients act synergistically to do the same.

Let’s explore what each of these ingredients is, their safety, and how they work. Then, we'll discuss why they are so powerful together.

What Is Advantra Z?

Advantra Z is the trade name for an extract of citrus aurantium, a bitter orange from an evergreen-type tree. The extract is from the immature fruit or peel of the bitter orange fruit and the principal active ingredient is p-synephrine, a protoalkaloid. Historically, bitter orange has been used in Chinese medicine and South American folk medicine for a variety of clinical applications.

Because of p-synephrine’s structural similarities to ephedrine, there have been some misunderstandings about its safety. But this has not been supported by the vast majority of scientific data as well as the widespread use of p-synephrine. This is largely due to the structural differences between p-synephrine and ephedrine, which are reflected in the structure–activity relationships, marked differences in receptor binding, and the resultant physiological and pharmacological properties. Numerous research papers conclude that bitter orange extract is a safe and effective ingredient.^{1, 2, 3}

How Advantra Z Supports Weight Loss

Advantra Z has multiple biochemical mechanisms by which it works. It works on the body’s metabolic processes, including an increase in basal rate and lipolysis as well as acting as a mild appetite suppression. It increases the body’s resting metabolic rate without producing adverse cardiovascular or central nervous system stimulation, resulting in an increase in the body’s ability to break down fats.^{4, 5, 6}

Essentially, Advantra Z functions as a non-stimulant thermogenic. A study done with 40 overweight adults over 30 days demonstrated that taking a chocolate-flavored chew containing bitter orange extract before meals enhanced their appetite control and increased their energy level.⁷

Advantra Z also works synergistically with other ingredients such as caffeine. Together, Advantra Z and caffeine augmented acute resistance exercise performance (total repetitions, volume load) without increasing blood lactate or rating of perceived exertion, while enhancing energy expenditure through increased breakdown of fats and carbohydrate utilization. The addition of caffeine to the Advantra Z increased mean power and velocity of the squat performance. These results indicate supplementation with Advantra Z with caffeine can enhance local muscle endurance and performance kinematics during resistance exercise and do so without adverse effects.⁸

In summary: Advantra Z helps burn fat by increasing the body’s metabolic rate (a non-stimulant thermogenic) and has a mild appetite suppressant ability.

What Is Chromax?

Chromax is a trade name for chromium picolinate. It is a highly bioavailable, stable form of chromium with 35 clinical studies demonstrating its benefits for weight management, body composition, insulin function and more.

Chromax has also been tested for safety and has GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) status to be used as a food ingredient as well as a dietary supplement ingredient.⁹

How Chromax Supports Weight Loss

Several clinical studies showed that Chromax reduced body fat while maintaining lean muscle. It does this by helping the body utilize insulin more efficiently. It is best used with a diet and exercise program if you want to lose weight. Utilizing insulin more efficiently helps the body metabolize glucose for energy rather than the glucose circulating in the bloodstream to be stored as fat.

It may be possible to lose excess weight when we diet and exercise but many of us gain it back. One of the suggested reasons for the lack of long-term success with weight loss is the loss of lean body mass (LBM). Therefore, it may be advantageous to focus on improving body composition rather than just losing weight – get rid of fat mass (FM) but maintain lean body mass (LBM).
Here is where Chromax shines. A study comparing Chromax to several other weight loss dietary supplement ingredients showed Chromax led to the highest percentage of FM loss with the lowest percentage of LBM loss, so you can retain muscle.¹⁰ Decline of LBM during weight loss can negatively affect various physiological processes and, in turn, hinder weight loss management and healthy body composition.

In a clinical study with 154 subjects over a 72-day period, Chromax chromium picolinate improved body composition when a BCI (body composition index) is used to calculate total improvement in body composition based on depletion of body fat and maintenance or addition of FFM (fat-free mass).¹¹

In summary: Chromax helps reduce body fat and helps support sustained weight loss by improving body composition. Lose fat not muscle.

Weight Loss Benefits of Advantra Z and Chromax Together

From the multitude of studies done with Advantra Z, we find that it is an excellent active ingredient to be used with many other weight loss ingredients such as those in Mdrive Boost & Burn’s Burner Blend: caffeine, green tea and ginger extracts. These ingredients all help boost your metabolism so you can burn fat and lose weight quicker.

But to help maximize the benefits of the fat burning, Chromax, through its glucose utilization mechanism, helps you maintain a healthy body composition so you keep your lean muscle mass while losing fat. And this, in turn, can help you keep off that weight.

Combined with a healthy diet and exercise regimen Chromax and Advantra Z is a winning combination for short- and long-term weight loss!

References

1. Stohs, S.J., Preuss, H.G., Shara, M., The safety of Citrus aurantium (Bitter Orange) and its Primary Protoalkaloid p-Synephrine, Phytotherapy Research (2011) 8 pages
2. Stohs, S. J., “Safety, Efficacy, and Mechanistic Studies Regarding Citrus aurantium (Bitter Orange) Extract and p- Synephrine”, Pytotherapy Research 31 (2017) pg.1463-1474
3. Stohs, S.J., Ray, S.D., Review of Published Bitter Orange Extract and p-Synephrine Adverse Event Clinical Study Cases”, Journal of Dietary Supplements (2020) vol 17, no.3 pg.355-363
4. Gutierrez-Hellin J, Coso JD. 2016. Acute p-synephrine ingestion increases fat oxidation rate during exercise. Br. J. Clin. Pharmacol. doi: 10.1111 bcp.12952.
5. Stohs SJ, Badmaev V. 2016. A review of natural stimulant and non-stimulant thermogenic agents. Phytother. Res. 30: pg.732-740
6. Stohs SJ, Preuss HG, Shara M. 2012. A review of the human clinical studies of bitter orange (Citrus aurantium) and its primary protoalkaloid p-synephrine. Int. J. Med. Sci. 9: pg. 527-538.
7. Kaats, G.R., Leckie, R.B., Mrvichin, N., Stohs, S.J., Increased eating control and energy levels associated with consumption of bitter orange (p-synephrine) extract: a randomized placebo-controlled study, Nutrition and Dietary Supplements 2017:9 pg 29-35
8. Ratamess NA, Bush JA, Kang J, Lraemer WJ, Stohs SJ, Nocera VG, Leise MD, Diamond KB, Campbell SC, Miller H, Faigenbaum AD. 2016. The effects of supplementing with p-synephrine alone and in combination with caffeine on metabolic, lipolytic, and cardiovascular responses during resistance exercise. J. Amer. Coll. Nutr. doi:10.1080/07315724.2016.1150223.
9. Berner, T.O., Murphy, M.M., Slesinski, R., Determining the safety of chromium tripicolinate for addition to foods as a nutrient supplement, Food and Chemical Toxicology 42 (2004) pg. 1029-1042
10. Willoughby, D., Hewlings, S., Kalman, D., “Body Composition Changes in Weight Loss: Strategies and Supplementation for Maintaining Lean Body Mass, a Brief Review”, nutrients (2018) 10, 1876, 10 pages
11. Kaats GR et. al. Effects of Chromium Picolinate supplementation on body composition: a randomized, Double-Masked, Placebo-controlled Study. Curr Ther Res. 1996; 57(10):747. (Pg. 753)