Lipo-C is not a peptide, and it contains none. It is a compounded injection of amino acids and vitamins — methionine, choline, carnitine and, depending on the pharmacy, inositol and B vitamins — sold through the same clinics as research peptides and searched for alongside them.
Its dosage question is unusual: the schedule is published clearly by the pharmacies that make it, and the formula is not fixed, so the schedule does not tell a reader what a dose contains. This page reports what the two formulas state and what the literature holds. It recommends nothing.
Two pharmacies, one name, different injections
| Ingredient | Empower Pharmacy (503A) | Hallandale "Bio Boost Plus #2" (via Defy Medical) |
|---|---|---|
| Methionine | 15 mg/mL | 25 mg/mL |
| Choline chloride | 50 mg/mL | 50 mg/mL |
| L-carnitine | 50 mg/mL | 15 mg/mL |
| Dexpanthenol (B5) | 5 mg/mL | 25 mg/mL |
| Inositol | — | 50 mg/mL |
| Pyridoxine (B6) | — | 25 mg/mL |
| Cyanocobalamin (B12) | — | 1 mg/mL (0.51 mg/mL elsewhere on the same page) |
| L-arginine | — | 15 mg/mL |
| Ingredients | 4 | 8 plus benzyl alcohol |
Both pages were opened on 17 September 2026. Three things stand out.
The "I" is missing from one of them. The category is known as MIC — methionine, inositol, choline — and Empower's Lipo-C contains no inositol at all. It is a methionine, choline, carnitine and B5 injection.
Carnitine differs by 3.3 times. A 1 mL injection delivers 50 mg from one formula and 15 mg from the other. Methionine differs by 1.7 times, in the opposite direction.
One page disagrees with itself. The Defy listing gives cyanocobalamin as 1 mg/mL in its product description and as 0.51 mg/mL in the pharmacy instruction line below it.
The stated schedule, and what it does not state
Empower's page is the most specific source located:
- 1 mL intramuscularly once or twice weekly as a common starting regimen in adults with normal kidney and liver function;
- titration every four weeks against fasting lipids, liver transaminases and serum carnitine;
- 0.5 mL weekly where there is gastrointestinal intolerance;
- 2 mL twice weekly given as a maximum, under clinician supervision.
That is a clear protocol, and it is a pharmacy's protocol. No approved label for this combination exists, and the same page states that the evidence is "largely extrapolated from the individual components' pharmacology and not from randomized controlled trials of the exact compounded combination". A schedule in millilitres also carries no dose information unless the formula is named: 1 mL twice weekly is 100 mg of carnitine a week from one of the two formulas above and 30 mg from the other.
One claim on the second page can be checked with its own arithmetic. It states that injected nutrients are fully absorbed, applies a "pharmacy standard 10-1 ratio of absorption in oral versus injected nutrients", and concludes that "our Lipo-C provides the equivalent of 2000mg of oral L-Carnitine per injection". At the formula's own 15 mg/mL, 2,000 mg of oral equivalence would require 200 mg injected — 13.3 mL. The page does not say which injection volume it means, and the volumes discussed elsewhere for this category are 1 to 2 mL.
The literature census
| Search | Records | What they are |
|---|---|---|
lipotropic[tiab] AND injection[tiab] |
8 | Newest 1989; animal nutrition, psoriasis oxygen therapy, a 1961 cholesterol paper. No weight-loss trial |
methionine AND inositol AND choline (tiab) |
55 | Mostly nutrition biochemistry |
| The same, with obesity or weight-loss terms | 2 | Both narrative reviews (2001, 2010) |
"lipo-c"[tiab] |
5 | All unrelated — the string is an abbreviation in liposome chemistry |
| ClinicalTrials.gov, term "lipotropic" | 1 | Liver disease in parenteral nutrition |
| Positive control: choline with injection and weight or fat terms, human-tagged | 44 | The ingredients are studied |
The last row is the one that makes the rest meaningful. A census returning almost nothing is only a finding if the search works, and it does: the components have a human literature. What has not been studied is the mixture sold under this name.
The one label in the US database, and its coding problem
DailyMed holds a single injectable lipotropic label: Lipovite Injection, from Perdido Key Health and Wellness Inc, published 23 November 2015 and never updated. Its marketing category is "unapproved drug other". It lists 13 active ingredients — including lidocaine — and no strength for any of them.
It also contains an anomaly worth recording. The ingredient a reader would expect to be methionine is coded as L-methionine-S,R-sulfoximine (UNII M9P6YZ6JX9). That is a different molecule: methionine sulfoximine is a glutamine synthetase inhibitor used in animal research precisely because it provokes seizures, and it carries 679 PubMed records under its own name, including work on seizure-prone mouse strains.
The likeliest explanation is a data-entry error in the structured product listing rather than the contents of a vial. But that is the point of a label: it is the document that says what is in the product, and this one cannot be used to tell methionine from a research convulsant. Our testing page covers what an analytical certificate does and does not establish about a vial's contents; a mis-coded label is the same problem one step earlier.
What FDA says about injections in this category
FDA's consumer page on fat-dissolving injections, marked current as of 20 December 2023, states that such unapproved products "pose a significant safety risk because they are unapproved, which means the FDA has not evaluated their safety or effectiveness", and that the agency has received reports of "permanent scars, serious infections, skin deformities". It names Kybella (deoxycholic acid) as the only approved fat-dissolving injectable, and only for fat under the chin.
Lipotropic vitamin injections are a different formulation from the phosphatidylcholine-and-deoxycholate injections that page is about. Neither has an approved label for body contouring, and the compounded lipotropic formulas are prepared under section 503A rather than manufactured to an approved specification.
What is not established
- No approved label for any Lipo-C formula, so no reviewed dose, maximum or indication.
- No fixed composition; two formulas under one name differ in ingredient count, in concentration and in whether inositol is present.
- No trial of the combination for weight, body composition or any other outcome.
- No stated origin for the once-or-twice-weekly schedule beyond pharmacy practice.
- No strength information on the only injectable lipotropic label in the US database.
What a reader can check in five minutes
- Open two pharmacies' Lipo-C pages and line up the milligrams per millilitre.
- Note whether inositol appears in both.
- Search DailyMed for lipotropic injection labels and check the marketing category.
- Run the lipotropic-injection PubMed search and read the newest date.
- Ask any page quoting a weekly volume which formula the figure assumes.
Related on this site
NAD+ injection dosage covers the other non-peptide injectable sold through this channel, where the same compounding questions arise with a much wider dose range. How to read a dosing claim sets out the questions that separate a label from a protocol, and the peptide dosage chart indexes every dose record on this site by source type.
Sources and dates
Opened 17 September 2026: Empower Pharmacy's Lipo-C Injection page (composition, strengths, schedule and its own evidence statement); Defy Medical's listing of the Hallandale "Bio Boost Plus #2" 30 mL formula (composition, the carnitine-equivalence claim and the two cyanocobalamin figures); the DailyMed SPL API searches for inositol, methionine and lipo, and the full structured record for Lipovite Injection, set id 253ea822-c2e3-688b-e054-00144ff8d46c; PubMed through the NCBI E-utilities for the five searches tabulated above; the ClinicalTrials.gov v2 API for lipotropic; and FDA's page "Fat-dissolving injections that are not FDA approved can be harmful". Corrections go to the contact page.