True Life Research (teamtlr.com) Scam — TLR Are Selling Some "Fake" Products
Several of True Life Research's high-tech-sounding propriety products have been shown to be "fake", in the sense they are merely taurine powder or some other cheap supplement sold for an enormously high price! That is according to a product lab analysis detailed in this post on www.reddit.com.
The following four True Life Research proprietary compounds all turned out to be just taurine powder:
ADJ01
All of these products have high-tech, scientific-sounding names and descriptions, but have been shown to be just a few cents worth of the supplement taurine.
Of course, since the ingredients of these propriety products sold by True Life Research are not specified, these products are not fake in the sense that they not the substance that you paid for, as you don't actually know the substance you paid for! So legally speaking, True Life Research are probably not doing anything against the law.
However, True Life Research are scamming you in the sense that these products give the impression they are designer peptides or similar research chemicals, rather than a few cents worth of a common supplement. For example, True Life Research describe their ADDX-OX product as "Scientifically Engineered Proprietary Optimized Extract Formulation Acting Upon Resetting Addiction Targeted Pathways and Counteracting Hyper-Psychoneurodysfunctional States."
But when you pay $139 for a total of 6 grams of this ADDX-OX product, you are just getting a few cents worth of the supplement taurine.
Lab analysis on a few other of their high-tech-sounding proprietary compounds with secret ingredients showed these to be just common drugs or herbs such as noopept or maca. The product ADJG2 turns out to be just noopept, and ADJB1 turns out to be maca root powder.
These may not be the only "fake" products sold by True Life Research, since True Life Research's range is large, and only a few products were lab tested.
Not all of True Life Research's products were scam products though. The lab analysis showed that the following non-proprietary products they sell are real: coluracetam, fasoracetam, NSI-189 and memantine. These all contained the stated ingredient.
It is a sad indictment of our society that companies feel the need to make money in such unscrupulous ways.
Just for ease of reference, the original post on reddit detailing the laboratory analysis is given below:
TLR (True Life Research) Product Testing Results
As some of you may know, TLR has been selling proprietary compounds and extracts since they launched. That led a lot of people, including myself, to call them out on the practice. Who in their right mind would take something that they did not know the ingredients or chemical structure of?!? We also questioned their testing practices, which led to the owner telling customers that they did not need testing, and that people should just trust them. Again, more red flags. Then we had the owner threatening to sue us moderators for slander, libel, and defamation. There are other crazy things that people have made me aware of via private message. However, we will not get into that at the moment. Needless to say, I have been interested in testing their products for a while, and have been organizing to do just that. Today, we have those results.
Again, a big thanks to Nootropics Depot, for use of their lab in this testing.
Let's start with the most alarming results. Four of TLR's "proprietary" compounds have tested as Taurine powder. That's right, TLR has been selling ADJ01, MORP-OX, HDAC-OX, and ADDX-OX as proprietary compounds, yet they are just Taurine powder! They are touting their ADDX-OX as "Scientifically Engineered Proprietary Optimized Extract Formulation Acting Upon Resetting Addiction Targeted Pathways and Counteracting Hyper-Psychoneurodysfunctional States." They are selling at-risk people with addiction, Taurine, yet telling them it will help them with with their addictions. This is flat out unacceptable! The ADDX-OX is selling for $140 for 24 capsules. They are selling 50 cents worth of Taurine for $140! I've spoken to one of their customers that is dealing with addiction, and bought that from them thinking it would help. After it doing nothing at all for him, he wrote me wondering if it was BS. Well now we know for sure it is.
Their MORP-OX is listed as "a first-in-class herbal Mu Opioid Receptor (MOR) Positive Allosteric Modulator (PAM) Optimized Xtract." It's a first class capsule of bullshit, is what it is. It's just Taurine in a capsule.
Their HDAC-OX is listed as a "Scientifically Engineered HDAC Class I Inhibitor (HDAC-C1I) Extract." NOPE, just Chuck Taurine.
Here are the percentages for each of those:
ADDX-OX- 94.79% match to Taurine
ADJ01- 99.16% match to Taurine
MORP-OX- 98.44% match to Taurine
HDAC-OX- 98.47% match to Taurine
Now we move onto the other results. These are more what I expected, rather than just Taurine capsules. A few of their other "proprietary" compounds and extracts came out to be normal things like Maca and Noopept.
Their ADJG2 is a 99.04% match to Noopept. It's not on the site now, but has been sent to a few people.
Their ADJB1 is a 96.58% match to Maca root powder. A customer that got ADJ01 from TLR actually asked the owner if it was just Maca root, since that is what it seemed like. The owner denied it, saying it was a totally different proprietary extract. Riiiight.
The HCBT-OX is likely Shilajit. Shilajit is not in the reference library, though. So we will need to do more testing on it to know for sure. It is an organic compound, somewhat related to Ashwagandha and Holy Basil. However, the physical characteristics match Shilajit. It's like little chunks of tar. I have no idea how we would expect people to use it properly.
There are a few other unreleased compounds that he was selling to customers who asked. ON-1 was an 85% match to ashwgandha, with distinctive peaks in the mid-high wavelengths. OB-1 was a 92.27% match to Niacin. It looks to be a mixture of things, with mostly Niacin in it. The other proprietary things we tested did not match anything in the reference library. So perhaps some of them are real. We will have to do some more testing to know.
Now for some good news. Some of the things they were selling as real compounds, actually were real.
Coluracetam was a 99.11% match to our reference sample.
Fasoracetam was a 98.54% match to our reference sample.
NSI-189 Freebase was a 99.10% match to our reference sample.
Memantine HCL was a 97.45% match to our reference sample.
So it appears that at least some of the non-proprietary compounds are what they are supposed to be. Some of the proprietary ones are things like Noopept, Maca, and Shilajit. Some are not in the reference library. Then some are just Taurine. Keep in mind that we have not tested every one of their products, since they have a metric shitload of them. We tested ones people were complaining about. If anyone else has any suspect TLR stuff, they can send it to me for further testing. We can also pay for further in-depth testing of any compounds that did not show up in our reference library, if people feel that is warranted. On that same token, if someone is willing to gather samples, and send them off to a third party lab, I am willing to pay for further testing. That will eliminate any claims of bias that might be made. I just did this testing round to get an idea of what we were dealing with.
EDIT: Here is the album of spectra results
Edited by Hip, 05 August 2015 - 01:09 AM.