Sami Tabor Carb Cutter Report Biology 1103 Lab 12 February 2013 Clever or Counterfeit The Truth About Carb Cutter There is a massive market for diet and weight management pills in the United States with Americans spending 27 billion dollars on dietary supplements a year The diet market claims that pills such as Carb Cutter can shed unwanted pounds but do they actually work The manufacturers of Carb Cutter claim that the pill stops amylase the enzyme that breaks down starch which lets starch pass through the body undigested The idea is that if the starch is never digested no fat can be collected and no weight can be gained Biology students at the University of Georgia recently put the supplement Carb Cutter to the test By using two different solutions one including Carb Cutter the study solution and one without the control solution students were able to investigate whether or not the enzyme amylase would continue to digest starch in the presence of the Carb Cutter solution To test whether or not the Carb Cutter was stopping enzyme activity a spectrophotometer was used to compare the absorbencies of the solutions over time After the spectrophotometer was set to zero two different solutions were created Both solutions contained the enzyme amylase a tris buffer and starch but only one contained the Carb Cutter Each solution was put through the spectrophotometer at one minute intervals for five minutes and the absorbency reading were recorded Looking at the results you can see that while the Carb Cutter solution solution B decreased at a slower rate starch was still being digested Therefore students gathered from the experiment that the Carb Cutter cannot be said to block the enzyme amylase completely Carb Cutter merely slows the digestion of starch The findings by the University of Georgia students were supported by the findings at the Mayo Clinic which stated that most commercial carb blocker pills or capsules did slow down carb absorption but it was not proven that they could help you to lose weight It would be beneficial for students to do additional experiment with the Carb Cutter product to see if the same trends resulted before claiming that the pill does not work Also the experiment should be done for a longer amount of time to see if the readings ever level off While carb blocking pills such as Carb Cutter appear to aid in weight loss as seen in this experiment they only slow the digestion of starch rather than stop it At this time carb blocking pills remain unapproved by the FDA until their effectiveness can be confirmed through more experiments and research but for now consider them a waste of money