Can Kratom Help You Loose Weight?
A lot of our site visitors and customers have asked us about kratom and weight loss but we've never been able to provide a definitive answer due to the lack of scientific support around kratom and its health benefits. Despite this non-existent link between weight loss and kratom, online blogs, and social medial influencers continue to tout the correlation.
Please treat these claims with the utmost skepticism as they're not based on scientific facts but rather hearsay and anecdotal accounts of how kratom might have influenced their own weight loss. These assertions are based on personal experiences and indirect side effects of consuming kratom and how the plant may have properties that suppresses hunger, but are circumstantial at best.
To our recollection and understading, no extended research has even been conducted on the hypothesis of kratom helping humans with weight loss, but a study was made back in 2008 with animals and their gastrointestinal tract. Of course kratom wasn't nearly as popular in America back then, but the study does shed some light.
The Science of Weight Loss in Rats and Kratom
The study is titled “Inhibitory effects of kratom leaf extract on the rat gastrointestinal tract” and the research paper can be found in Journal of Ethnopharmacology.
The study separated two groups of rats, the control and study group, and administered three times higher levels of kratom extract per kilogram of body weight to the study group than it did the control group daily and observed for 30 days. The findings showed a "significant difference" in the study group that had higher dosages of kratom extract than the control group, but the study group was also given low dosages of morphine which is known to cause weight loss. Hence the inconclusiveness of the study, did the kratom or morphine attribute to the weight loss on rats?
Does Kratom Help with Weight Loss or Not?
The study continues to be referenced online to promote kratom as a weight loss supplement and push sales, but we must understand that the study was inconclusive, and conducted on rats, not humans.
From personal experience with consuming most, if not all kratom strains available on the market, I can see how folks may be inclined to link kratom with weight loss because certain strains, like maeng da kratom, does give me an overall sense of wellbeing and vitality that allows me to exercise regularly, focus on my day to day tasks, and provide that social lubricant. However, to directly link kratom with weight loss is unfounded and downright irresponsible.