Avoid any supplement with a proprietary blend label on the packaging
I am not a big believer or fan in 90% of the supplements that exist in the world out there. The industry is dominated by doctored claims or even outright lies and they get away with this because the supplement industry is, for the most part, completely unregulated. This is the reason why they always have some sort of new "fat burner" on the market when anyone with even a fundamental knowledge of physiology already knows that such as thing isn't possible without potentially killing you in the process.
There is no such thing as "fat burning" supplement because the body doesn't work that way. You can't target specific fat in your body and this is true with exercise as well. I don't know how many times someone was going to get rid of their gut by implementing a ab-centric exercise regimen into their workouts. You will build muscle if you do this, for sure but for people that have a gut, this is actually going to make your gut more profound because the abdomen muscles are simply going to push the fat in your belly out even further.
Supplements make these claims all the time about dubious or even impossible results but I think the greatest lie in the supplement industry is anything that has proprietary blend, written on the packaging.
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Any time you see "proprietary" on a supplement there is a very good chance that whatever that supplement happens to be, it is likely, nay, guaranteed that it is even more full of shit than the run of the mill supplements that make specific claims - even though the claims themselves are likely BS as well.
When a supplement company puts "proprietary blend or formula" on their packaging, they are not required to divulge how much of each ingredient each capsule or spoon/cup full of their supplement actually contains. In many instances, when tested by people with the right equipment, it gets discovered that it doesn't even contain ANY of some of the ingredients that they have on the package.
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Companies use the word "proprietary" as a legal loophole. Their claim - which is complete BS - is that if they were to reveal what their specific formula is to the public, that some other company would replicate it and steal all of their hard earned research and development. The REAL reason is that the company either does not know what is actually in the capsules, or they have supplemented their own supplements with cheap ingredients that don't do anything at all.
What you end up with is an expensive capsule that actually will help you lose a bit of weight in the form of money leaving your wallet and very little if anything else other than a placebo effect.
There actually ARE some levels of strange chemical sounding things that if taken in very specific amounts in a controlled environment that can actually boost performance as far as a variety of exercise is concerned but that is not what you are going to get in a bottle at a GNC, Wal-Mart, or wherever the hell people buy this crap these days.
The supplement industry is nearly a $50 billion dollar a year industry and they have the lobbying power to ensure that they are allowed to continue duping the ignorant public forevermore. You don't have to be one of the suckers though and even though I recommend that people avoid almost all supplements other than whey protein and MAYBE creatine, you really need to just steer clear of anything that has "proprietary blend" written anywhere on the package. If it was a real product they would simply get a patent and then tell you what is in it but they don't do that for a very specific reason. Just stay away and establish a caloric deficit naturally and get your protein from whey powders if you must.
My knowledge in this field doesn't come from going to school or any sort of certification. It comes from me for the most part doing things wrong over the course of 20 years. Losing weight and being reasonably or "normie" fit isn't really that difficult, but you gotta put in the work and stop believing in magic cures - because they don't exist.