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The Exipure and Alpilean Scam

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How does Exipure and Alpilean compare? The answer is both are using the same marketing strategy to push a useless supplement.

I’ve analyzed both supplements individually for weight loss before, and I’ll link both articles down in the description if you want to see why they’re useless for weight loss.

But the marketing strategy used by both of them is very interesting, because it seems persuasive at surface level, but upon further scrutiny, it completely falls apart.

The marketing team behind Exipure and Alpilean, and I’m positive it’s the same marketing team, are really hoping you don’t bother doing more in-depth research, since it really shows just how ridiculous their claims are.

I understand that most people don’t want to bother researching it, and reading research can be tedious.

But allow me to help you summarize their claims and break it down for you, so that we can uncover a deceptive marketing technique used to peddle weight loss supplements that are actually completely useless.

Does Exipure work?

Let’s look at Exipure’s product page. One thing you should always be skeptical about when it comes to weight loss supplements, is the claim that they’ve found something new or discovered a secret method for weight loss.

Exipure claims that having low brown adipose tissue levels is the cause of obesity.

They then cite two articles to back these claims. But they made it so it’s very difficult to verify their claim by making it so I can’t select or click on the text.

Fortunately, my phone can convert these into text for me, so I can easily navigate to those articles.

Exipure’s first claim

So their first claim is that:

…every skinny person was high in brown adipose tissue.

However, the article they use to support this claim is one that says that brown adipose tissue, aka BAT, is associated with cardiometabolic health.

It suggests that higher BAT levels might be correlated with lower risks of diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Not obesity.

They say that this effect was more pronounced in obese individuals with more BAT, meaning that obese individuals with more BAT may have even lower risks of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, compared to non-obese individuals.

The study does not say that skinny people have more BAT, nor does it suggest that BAT can help obese people lose weight. It only says that BAT might help lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases in obese individuals.

Exipure’s second claim

Let’s look at their second claim. They say that:

brown adipose tissue can burn up to 300 times more calories than any other cell in the body.

However, the study they cite is one that talks about how the activity of BAT in the body can fluctuate based on seasons.

That’s all the study really tries to show here. But it goes on to hypothesize that it might be possible to use these seasonal changes in BAT activity to help with weight loss.

The article doesn’t really provide good evidence that this would actually work or anything, it’s just a theory they’ve put forward.

The overall article really has nothing to do with how many calories BAT can burn, however Exipure probably cited it because of this statement here:

BAT … is capable of producing up to 300 times more heat per unit mass compared with all other tissues.

Ok first of all, the statement is saying it can generate 300 times more heat, not burn 300 times more calories. They’re not the same exact thing.

Second of all, the article that this article is citing, is about BAT in fetuses, not adults.

Can BAT help with weight loss?

So you might now be wondering if brown adipose tissue can somehow help with weight loss.

The answer is theoretically speaking, it might be possible, but realistically speaking, not likely.

BAT is primarily used for thermoregulation in adults, in other words, it keeps you warm. When you’re feeling cold, BAT activates and helps to produce heat for you to warm up.

Adults only have small amounts of brown adipose tissue, and there is currently no known way to increase the amount of BAT in the body.

So even with all the BAT being activated, only a modest amount of calories is being burned.

Furthermore, BAT really only starts to burn energy when you’re in the cold, and need to generate heat. It doesn’t activate for no reason. So you’ll need to be constantly in a cold environment for BAT to be active and burning calories for heat.

If spending hours every day shivering in a cold room to burn off a small amount of calories doesn’t sound practical to you, then you shouldn’t bother with trying to lose weight by activating your BAT.

Exipure and Alpilean websites

Now I want to compare the webpages of Exipure and Alpilean. Do you see some similarities here?

Both start by making a dubious health claim related to weight loss.

Exipure goes into brown adipose tissue, while Alpilean goes into inner body temperature.

Both cite articles that cannot be easily accessed, hoping you take them at face value, and don’t look into their ridiculous claims any further.

Next they list a bunch of random ingredients that claim to target the dubious health claim.

It doesn’t even really matter if they can help or not, because both supplements are formulated with such tiny doses of each ingredient it’s not going to help anyways.

Next they ship some basic dietary and lifestyle advice to go with your useless product.

Since the supplement itself isn’t going to do anything, you need consumers to follow a basic weight loss plan so that they might lose some weight and hopefully attribute the weight loss to the useless product, and not the basic weight loss plan.

Poor business practices

They also both offer deceptive money back guarantees. We know from other consumers that these are deceptive because by going to Exipure’s Better Business Bureau website, we can see legit, non-sponsored reviews of Exipure’s business practices, and oh boy they do NOT look good.

The complaints can be summarized in three points:

  1. Consumers allege the business is requiring used empty bottles to be sent to them from customers to process a refund.
  2. Consumers allege Exipure not upholding their Full Money Back Guarantee.
  3. Consumers allege product not helping customers lose weight. What a shocker.

Sponsored news reviews

But their deceptive marketing practices do not end there. If you Google Exipure or Alpilean, you’ll notice a million similar looking clickbaity articles from random news sites.

Allow me to introduce you to sponsored content. One way news articles make money is through advertising. It can take the form of ads on their webpage, or creating sponsored news stories.

These stories are paid for by advertisers to promote their products, and don’t need to be factual whatsoever, as long as they add a disclaimer at the bottom.

Sponsored content can generate a news site much more revenue. But you usually won’t find fake weight loss supplements being peddled too often on larger, more reputable news sites like the New York Times, since doing sponsored content on controversial subjects like fake supplements or Scientology tarnishes their reputation and just plain looks bad, although it still happens from time to time.

But for smaller news websites, well they may not care as much, since they need the money. These marketers buy sponsored content from many different small news sites to fill search results.

The problem is that Google tends to prioritize news sites, since they believe it to be factual, so when you search the supplement, you get a whole bunch of sponsored baloney that jam pack the first results.

Sponsored YouTube reviews

The same is true for YouTube. Exipure and Alpilean stuff the YouTube search results by paying random people to pump out reviews, many of them from the same exact channels.

These so-called reviews are nothing more than sponsored videos, and the only thing impressive about these channels is the frequency and amount of videos they pump out.

The idea is to stuff YouTube and Google searches with sponsored content, so that legitimate reviews might be pushed down and not viewed.

Google, you guys need to work on cutting down on garbage sponsored content better!

Marketing Exipure and Alpilean

So let’s review what we’ve learned here from the deceptive marketing practices of Exipure and Alpilean. Here is how to sell a useless supplement.

Step 1 – Come up with fake premise

Come up with a random premise related to weight loss, it doesn’t need to be factually correct whatsoever, it just needs to sound cool. Then claim it to be a new and secret way to lose weight.

For example, my useless supplement is called ExiCrement. It’s based on the secret idea that skinny people push food out of their bodies so fast, they don’t have time to absorb the food.

So that’s why they’re skinny. So to lose weight, you need to use laxatives, to bypass absorption and blast the food out faster.

Step 2 – Find random articles

Find a bunch of random research articles that are related to what I’m talking about, but don’t worry if the articles don’t support my premise at all.

Just list the url and make it really small and unselectable. The longer the url the better so that people won’t bother to find the actual article.

Step 3 – Attach diet plan

Copy and paste a basic weight loss plan that you stole from the internet to ship with the product, so that some patients might lose some weight.

Even though it’s obviously because of the weight loss plan, claim that it’s the supplement that’s doing all the magic.

Step 4 – Pay for fake reviews

Pay a bunch of sketchy news sites and YouTube channels to create sponsored content about my new product.

ExiCrement Reviews: is it real or a scam?

ExiCrement Reviews – Shocking Customer Side Effect Complaints About Gut Bypass.

All of it is just clickbait to trick people into watching more fake sponsored reviews.

Step 5 – Advertise

Advertise the living daylights out of your product on all social media sites, then sit back and watch the money roll in, and when people finally catch onto the fact that ExiCrement is literally just crap, simple create a new random premise related to weight loss, maybe based on the secret idea that skinny people’s urine is more yellow because they’re urinating out more fat, and we’ll call this new useless product AlpiS.

How to avoid being scammed

There’s no end to the number of products that can be marketed in this deceptive manner, and there’s probably many more I’m missing here. To avoid falling for such tricks, there are a few things you can watch for.

First, understand there are no secret tricks or undercover loopholes in weight loss. If you see this being suggested to you, be highly skeptical.

Realistic weight loss is unfortunately quite boring, and no supplement or medication is going to replace a proper weight loss diet or lifestyle.

Second, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Your body is not going to turn into a fat burning furnace by taking a supplement. That’s ridiculous.

You’d have more luck turning yourself into a fat burning furnace by dousing yourself in gasoline and going for a smoke.

Finally, if when you search for a supplement, you see tons of clickbait reviews from small news sites, or YouTube videos from the same channels with a bunch of clickbait thumbnails, understand that most of these reviews are sponsored, and are meant to have you buy the supplement, not give you an honest review about it.

Weight loss can be very difficult for many people, and it’s completely understandable that many people are looking for ways to make this process easier.

If you’re finding it very difficult, reach out to a friend, talk to your doctor about it, or join a supportive online community like Reddit.

But don’t bother with these useless weight loss supplements. Because the only weight you’ll be losing is from your wallet.

Top alternatives to Exipure and Alpilean

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Citations

Au-Yong IT, Thorn N, Ganatra R, Perkins AC, Symonds ME. Brown adipose tissue and seasonal variation in humans. Diabetes. 2009 Nov;58(11):2583-7. doi: 10.2337/db09-0833. Epub 2009 Aug 20. PMID: 19696186; PMCID: PMC2768171.

Bastardot F, Marques-Vidal P, Vollenweider P. Association of body temperature with obesity. The CoLaus study. Int J Obes (Lond). 2019 May;43(5):1026-1033. doi: 10.1038/s41366-018-0218-7. Epub 2018 Sep 24. PMID: 30250242; PMCID: PMC6760582.

Becher T, Palanisamy S, Kramer DJ, et al. Brown adipose tissue is associated with cardiometabolic health. Nat Med. 2021;27(1):58-65. doi:10.1038/s41591-020-1126-7

Better Business Bureau. Exipure. https://www.bbb.org/us/il/mchenry/profile/weight-loss/exipure-0654-1000034511/complaints

Carpentier AC, Blondin DP, Virtanen KA, Richard D, Haman F, Turcotte ÉE. Brown Adipose Tissue Energy Metabolism in Humans. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2018 Aug 7;9:447. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2018.00447. PMID: 30131768; PMCID: PMC6090055.

Gaspar RC, Pauli JR, Shulman GI, Muñoz VR. An update on brown adipose tissue biology: a discussion of recent findings. Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab. 2021;320(3):E488-E495. doi:10.1152/ajpendo.00310.2020

Landsberg L, Young JB, Leonard WR, Linsenmeier RA, Turek FW. Do the obese have lower body temperatures? A new look at a forgotten variable in energy balance. Trans Am Clin Climatol Assoc. 2009;120:287-95. PMID: 19768183; PMCID: PMC2744512.

Power GG. Biology of temperature: the mammalian fetus. J Dev Physiol. 1989;12(6):295-304.

Protsiv M, Ley C, Lankester J, Hastie T, Parsonnet J. Decreasing human body temperature in the United States since the industrial revolution. Elife. 2020 Jan 7;9:e49555. doi: 10.7554/eLife.49555. PMID: 31908267; PMCID: PMC6946399.

Thoonen R, Hindle AG, Scherrer-Crosbie M. Brown adipose tissue: The heat is on the heart. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol. 2016 Jun 1;310(11):H1592-605. doi: 10.1152/ajpheart.00698.2015. Epub 2016 Apr 15. PMID: 27084389; PMCID: PMC6345214.


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2 thoughts on “The Exipure and Alpilean Scam”

  1. I knew it was total crap when I saw 3 “ice hack” ways to lose weight videos within 1 minute of being on Instagram. I finally clicked on one and watched the ridiculously long, cheesy and stupidly unbelievable sales pitch. Spoiler alert, there is no Ice hack…it’s just another scam to take your money, Zach Miller and Band should be in prison.

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