Clean Burn Cleared Up: Which Kaged Fat Burner is For You?

Kaged caused quite a stir in their 2015 supplement industry debut with Pre-Kaged, a truly innovative pre-workout formula that was way ahead of its time.

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Over the past few years, three unique variants were added to the Kaged pre-workout line, each tailored to a slightly different type of consumer: Pre-Kaged Elite for the serious lifter; Pre-Kaged Sport for aerobic athletes, beginners, and lifters with a lower caffeine tolerance; and Pre-Kaged Stim-Free for caffeine abstainers.

Those details are discussed in our article titiled Which Kaged Pre-Workout Supplement is For You?. Now Kaged is applying the same approach to their fat burner line.

The Kaged Clean Burn Series: Shredded For Summer

We all know how hard it is to diet – hunger pangs, reduced mental and physical performance, irritability and, for some people, difficulty sleeping.

Kaged Fat Burners

Which Kaged Fat Burner is for you? We break down the differences in this article

So why do we do it? To answer that we turn to the old saying, “Abs are made in the kitchen.” When it comes to getting the sculpted physique you desire, no other words ring truer.

To achieve that goal, diet and calorie balance will account for at least 80% of your efforts. No matter how hard you train, if you consider yourself serious-enough of an athlete by taking a supplement like Pre-Kaged, then you’ll eventually have to go on an equally serious diet.

The challenges inherent to fat loss are why every sports nutrition company worth its salt eventually gets into developing fat burning supplements – supplements that are designed to increase the rate of fat-burning and rev up basal metabolic rate to help offset fatigue associated with cutting calories.

But not all fat burner supplements are created equal: and this is especially true when it comes to the Kaged Clean Burn line.

So today we’re here to help answer the question: Which Kaged Clean Burn product is right for you?

In the fat-burner category, Kaged offers three different products:

Pre-Kaged Pre-Workouts

Which Kaged Pre-Workout is for you? In our previous article, we gave four different options!

  1. Clean Burn: stimulant-free capsules, but provides extra blood-sugar support
  2. Clean Burn Amped: caffeinated capsules (248 milligrams caffeine per serving) – for athletes chasing the shredded look by dumping excess water
  3. Clean Burn Powder: caffeinated drink (166 milligrams caffeine per serving) – for athletes focusing on aerobic, endurance-based activities

All three Clean Burn formulas have one crucial element in common: they’ve been tested for banned substances. Each one is a good choice for competing athletes who don’t want to risk their career and livelihood by taking chances with accidental contamination.

Below, we get into the details, but first, let’s check PricePlow’s coupon-based prices and let you sign up for our Kaged news alerts, since they have a lot more planned for the year:

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Supplements like these don’t just help you feel better, but it can also help you reach your goals faster, especially when the bump in your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) coincides with your growing caloric deficit.

Now let’s take a more in-depth look at each formula.

  • Clean Burn: For Stimmed-Up or Straight-Edged Athletes

    The first thing to notice about Clean Burn, the flagship product in the Kaged fat burner line, is that caffeine is conspicuously absent from the formula.

    Kaged Clean Burn

    The orginal Kaged Clean Burn Stimulant-free and stackable with the other fat burners and pre-workouts discussed on this page

    This makes sense when you think about it. Because caffeine is a proven ergogenic aid and fat-burning supplement, most athletes are probably already using lots of caffeine throughout the day. For example, if you’re taking Pre-Kaged, then you’re already getting 274 milligrams of caffeine on designated workout days. Things go even further with Pre-Kaged Elite at 388 milligrams of caffeine!

    So when it comes to serious athletes who are already using caffeine and taking other supplements, Clean Burn is our first choice. Another reason we like Clean Burn is because you won’t have to change your supplement schedule or stack.

    There is one other important thing to note: we also recommend Clean Burn for non-athletes, as well as those returning from a sedentary period of time — meaning someone re-starting a diet and exercise program to lose weight. That’s because Clean Burn has two heavy-hitting ingredients designed to control blood sugar. One of them, ChromeMate (chromium polynicotinate), works especially well for people with existing insulin resistance – which, if you’re currently overweight, is probably something that you’ll be dealing with until you get the weight off. Remember, body mass index (BMI) is positively correlated with both adiposity (body fat %) and insulin resistance.

    So, to summarize, we recommend Clean Burn for the following people:

    • Athletes who are already taking caffeine as part of their current supplement stack
    • Recently sedentary non-athletes and returning athletes
    • People who are significantly overweight
    • People with diagnosed insulin resistance

    Clean Burn Ingredients at a glance

    Here’s what you get in Clean Burn:

    Kaged Clean Burn Ingredients

    • Chromium (ChromeMate) – 134 mcg (382% DV): increases insulin sensitivity, lowers blood glucose. The ChromeMate brand of chromium is also bound to niacin, which supports NAD+ production.
    • L-Carnitine Tartrate (Carnipure) – 1,000 mg: helps your mitochondria burn fat for energy. Athletes have an increased need for carnitine because it’s consumed by exercise. Carnitine can increase performance and recovery.
    • Green Tea Extract – 333 mg: high in antioxidant polyphenols. Inhibits the growth of fat cells and increases thermogenesis by activating brown adipose tissue (BAT), helping your body burn calories as heat.
    • Gymnema Sylvestre Extract 75% (GS4 PLUS) – 100 mg: Glucose disposal agent, reduces blood glucose. Helps regenerate insulin-secreting cells in the pancreas. Also blocks glucose absorption in the small intestine.
    • Capsicum Fruit Extract (Capsimax) – 33 mg: increases thermogenesis, helps reduce blood glucose levels.

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  • Clean Burn Amped: For More Intense Shredding, Water Elimination

    Whereas Clean Burn balances thermogenesis with glucose disposal, Clean Burn Amped focuses on thermogenesis and water balance with diuretic ingredients like asparagus, juniper, parsley, and uva-ursi.

    Kaged Clean Burn Amped Ingredients

    Amped brings caffeine (248mg per serving) and a lot of water-shredding elements!

    By “water balance”, we mean eliminating excess water, which helps you achieve a lean, toned look with high vascularity.

    Of course, for most people, achieving this particular goal is motivated by their personal aesthetic ideal. However, water retention is not merely a cosmetic concern. Pragmatic reasons for decreasing water retention might include increasing your power-to-weight ratio, preparing for a bodybuilding competition, or making weight for a fighting league.

    These are just a few of the many reasons why a competing athlete might want to dump water. If you fall into this category, then Clean Burn Amped is the Kaged fat burner for you.

    Amped means caffeine!

    The other big thing to note about Clean Burn Amped is the presence of caffeine – hence “Amped” in the product’s name – which is itself a diuretic. But caffeine has plenty of other useful properties.

    Caffeine is usually included in pre-workout and fat burning supplements because of its status as a potent ergogenic aid, meaning any compound that increases a person’s capacity for physical activity. By this definition, we expect an ergogenic aid to improve at least some aspects of athletic performance, and that’s exactly what the research literature indicates about caffeine.

    Clean Burn Amped Ingredients at a glance

    Here’s what you get in Clean Burn Amped:

    Kaged Clean Burn Amped Energy

    Amped up energy – but not an overwhelming amount

    • Caffeine (as PurCaf caffeine from organic green coffee bean) – 248 mg: derived from USDA-certified organic green coffee beans, PurCaf is free of any xenoestrogenic or industrial residues. Caffeine is an ergogenic aid that increases athletic performance in many domains. Increases cAMP levels, making more energy available to your cells.
    • Svetol Green Coffee Bean Extract (std. 45% chlorogenic acid) – 200 mg: chlorogenic acid has high lipolytic activity, and can help manage body fat levels and blood glucose.
    • Green Select Phytosome green tea extract – 150 mg: besides the usual benefits of green tea extract, like thermogenesis and lipolysis, you get added lecithin, which increases the bioavailability of polyphenol antioxidants.
    • Grains of Paradise Seed Extract (as CaloriBurn) – 40 mg: standardized for 12.5% 6-paradol by weight. 6-paradol drives the conversion of white adipose tissue (WAT) to brown adipose tissue (BAT) by increasing mitochondrial density, thus increasing thermogenesis.
    • Asparagus Stem Extract – 20 mg: a diuretic compound that promotes the flushing of salt and water from your body. Also can protect your skin against damage caused by ultraviolet (UV) light. Possibly neuroprotective.
    • Juniper Fruit Extract – 15 mg: also a diuretic, but spares electrolytes from being eliminated, thus mitigating the biggest concern with diuretic use, which is potentially excessive loss of electrolytes.
    • Parsley Leaf Powder – 10 mg: increases potassium retention in the kidneys, thus promoting diuresis and increasing urinary volume.
    • Uva-Ursi Leaf Extract – 5 mg: antibacterial diuretic.

    Now that’s a lot of water-shredding support next to a solid dose of caffeine – a perfect two-capsule dose. But if you want even less caffeine, or are in the early afternoon, just take one capsule!

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  • Clean Burn Powder with Apple Cider Vinegar: For Fitness Athletes

    The supplement industry tends to fixate on strength training and bodybuilding, and there’s good reason for that. Who doesn’t want to be big and strong?

    Kaged Clean Burn Powder

    Clean Burn Powder is a new apple cider vinegar enhanced fat burning drink from Kaged, providing 166 milligrams of natural caffeine alongside ACV!

    However, this fixation sometimes comes at the expense of endurance or team-sports athletes. This isn’t to say that aerobic athletes aren’t into supplementation, because they definitely are. But it’s not common to see pre-workout or fat burner formulas designed specifically for aerobic and fitness athletes.

    Fortunately, that’s exactly what Kaged did with Clean Burn Powder with Apple Cider Vinegar.

    Admittedly, many of the ingredients in Clean Burn Powder also make an appearance in one or both of the other two Clean Burn formulas, but the emphasis on thermogenesis is strongest in Clean Burn Powder.

    We like the ultra pro-thermogenesis approach this formula takes because, arguably, fat-burner supplements are even more important for aerobic athletes than for anaerobic and strength athletes.

    That’s because when aerobic athletes cut calories to slim down, they generally do so while maintaining their usual aerobic training load. That’s great in one sense, because cardio can really help you maximize your calorie burn for rapid weight loss, but it also comes with some problems.

    For example, calorie deficits impair recovery from exercise, and generally speaking, aerobic athletes have a much higher training load than other athletes – we saw this reality featured prominently in the 2010s “chronic cardio” meme.

    At some point, all endurance athletes personally experience the dreaded “bonk” – the extreme disorientation and drop in athletic performance that comes with glycogen depletion.

    In order to keep those glycogen levels up, you have to eat a lot of carbs.Or, alternatively, you can spare your glycogen stores from consumption by burning as much fat for energy as possible.

    That’s where we think a quality fat-burning supplement comes in for the aerobic athlete — it can help promote metabolic flexibility during your workout, not only increasing your calorie burn for faster weight loss but also helping keep your glycogen stores topped off.

    This should matter a lot to any aerobic athlete, because low glycogen levels seem to cause increased cortisol secretion.[1] We definitely don’t want cortisol to stay elevated under normal circumstances, but it’s especially important to keep cortisol under control while cutting calories because calorie restriction itself has been shown to lower testosterone and raise cortisol.[2] So if your glycogen recovery from exercise is incomplete, on top of running a calorie deficit, you’re hitting your endocrine system with an unholy double whammy.

    We’re glad to see that Clean Burn Powder makes use of ingredients like caffeine, whose ergogenic (performance-boosting) effect is due in large part to the way it increases fat burning during exercise, which ultimately spares muscle glycogen.[3]

    Caffeine’s not all it’s got though. Let’s take a look at all of the ingredients in Clean Burn Powder and how they can support the body-composition goals of aerobic athletes on calorie-restricted diets.

    Clean Burn Powder with ACV Ingredients at a Glance

    Kaged Clean Burn Powder Supplement Facts

    Powered by apple cider vinegar, but that’s not all that’s in Clean Burn Powder!

    • L-Carnitine Tartrate (Carnipure) – 1,500 mg: helps your mitochondria burn fat for energy. Athletes have an increased need for carnitine, since it’s consumed by exercise. Carnitine can increase performance and recovery. For aerobic athletes, carnitine’s ability to increase oxygen uptake is especially important. Same for its ability to increase androgen receptor activity, basically amplifying the effects of circulating testosterone (which tends to be reduced by LISS and calorie restriction). Note that there’s a bigger dose of carnitine here than in the original Clean Burn formula, 1,500 mg instead of 1,000 mg.
    • Coconut Fruit Water – 500 mg: coconut water is an awesome natural source of electrolytes like sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium, which are crucial for optimal health and are depleted by sweat during prolonged bouts of exercise. Athletes have a higher baseline need for electrolyte support than non-athletes, but since calorie restriction involves eating less food and thus having a smaller overall electrolyte intake, dieting athletes have an even higher need for electrolyte support. If your weight loss strategy is to cut carbs, you should be aware that low-carb diets tend to reduce electrolyte levels as well.
    • Organic Apple (Fruit) Cider Vinegar (ACV) Powder – 500 mg: ACV is the headlining ingredient of the Clean Burn Powder formula, and for good reason. There’s ample research in humans indicating that ACV increases fat burning and accelerates weight loss. ACV seems to work by activating a cluster of genes that turn on fat oxidation. It can also reduce blood pressure and improve your blood lipid profile.
    • L-Tyrosine – 375 mg: tyrosine is a precursor for catecholamine neurotransmitters like dopamine, adrenaline, and noradrenaline, all of which are implicated in the fight or flight response. Supplementation with tyrosine can improve energy and focus, which makes it a great ingredient for any supplement intended to support a calorie-restricted diet. Tyrosine is also important for dieters because it can increase the production of thyroid hormones, thus offsetting the drop in thyroid function caused by caloric restriction.
    • Kaged Muscle PurCaf

      Why does Kaged Muscle only use PurCaf caffeine? Outside of it being naturally-derived, there may be some fringe benefits to keeping caffeine with its natural counterparts.

      Caffeine (as PurCaf caffeine from organic green coffee bean) – 248 mg: derived from USDA-certified organic green coffee beans, PurCaf is free of any xenoestrogenic or industrial residues. Caffeine is an ergogenic aid that increases athletic performance in many domains. It increases cAMP levels, making more energy available to your cells. Caffeine also specifically increases fat oxidation, and multiple studies have shown that people who take caffeine immediately before a workout burn more fat for energy during exercise, thus sparing glycogen.[3]
    • Organic Guayusa Leaf Extract – 100 mg: the guayusa plant is a member of the Ilex family, which includes edible holly plants like yerba mate and yaupon. Guayusa is loaded with methylxanthines like caffeine and theobromine, which have ergogenic and thermogenic effects by increasing the body’s rate of fat oxidation. Guayusa also contains chlorogenic acid, another thermogenic compound, and ursolic acid, a compound that may improve body composition via anti-diabetic effects.
    • Capsicum Fruit Extract – 50 mg: capsicum is another ingredient that increases your body’s rate of fat oxidation. At rest this energy can be burned off as heat in a process called thermogenesis, but capsicum can increase the rate of fat oxidation for fuel during exercise.
    • CaloriBurn GP Grains of Paradise Seed extract – 20 mg: much like capsicum, this ingredient can increase the rate of fat oxidation for thermogenesis or exercise fuel.
    • Chromium (ChromeMate) – 400 mcg (1143% DV): increases insulin sensitivity, lowers blood glucose. The ChromeMate brand of chromium is bound to niacin, which supports NAD+ production. Note the whopping 400 mcg dose here, which is more than twice what Kaged uses in the original Clean Burn formula.

    You can see with the formula in Clean Burn Powder that Kaged really went all in on thermogenic and ergogenic compounds. Of the nine ingredients in this formula, six have been shown to directly increase the rate of fat oxidation in cells!

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Kaged: Athlete-Friendly but not just about muscle

Kaged Muscle is now KAGED

With a new tagline of “Never Stop Evolving”, Kaged Muscle is now KAGED. It’s all discussed in episode #058 of the PricePlow Podcast.

One of the things we love about Kaged is that all of their products are tested for banned substances, ensuring that athletes won’t accidentally disqualify themselves from a big event by taking a banned (or tainted!) supplement.

Kaged’s approach to supplement formulation can only be described as premium: in addition to ensuring product purity through lab testing, Kaged also consistently opts for natural flavoring and coloring agents, organic caffeine, and the minimum-effective dose of artificial sweeteners in their products.

Your body is a temple, but it’s also a machine. If you care about maximizing your athletic performance, you need to give your body the cleanest inputs possible.

When it comes to product purity, Kaged definitely has your back.

Kaged – Deals and Price Drop Alerts

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No spam, no scams.

Disclosure: PricePlow relies on pricing from stores with which we have a business relationship. We work hard to keep pricing current, but you may find a better offer.

Posts are sponsored in part by the retailers and/or brands listed on this page.

About the Author: Mike Roberto

Mike Roberto

Mike Roberto is a research scientist and water sports athlete who founded PricePlow. He is an n=1 diet experimenter with extensive experience in supplementation and dietary modification, whose personal expertise stems from several experiments done on himself while sharing lab tests.

Mike's goal is to bridge the gap between nutritional research scientists and non-academics who seek to better their health in a system that has catastrophically failed the public.

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References

  1. “Glycogen Muscle Level – an Overview | ScienceDirect Topics.” Science Direct; https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/glycogen-muscle-level
  2. Trexler, Eric T et al. “Metabolic adaptation to weight loss: implications for the athlete.” Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition vol. 11,1 7. 27 Feb. 2014, doi:10.1186/1550-2783-11-7 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3943438/
  3. Maughan, Ron. (2002). The athlete’s diet: nutritional goals and dietary strategies. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society. 61. 87 – 96. 10.1079/PNS2001132. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231918041_The_athlete’s_diet_nutritional_goals_and_dietary_strategies

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