Desperate for a magic diet pill?

Do you want to know “Britney’s slimming secret” or “reduce your body fat intake by up to 28 percent?”

Well if this appeals to you, you might be one of the millions of Americans each year spending money on weight-loss products like Hydroxycut, Slimquick, Xenadrine or Avatrim.

There is an endless amount of diet pills on the market claiming to do wonders for our bodies. What’s ironic is even though more and more supplements appear on the market, more than two-thirds of the nation is still overweight or obese.

Truth be told, a majority of the supplements we see on shelves are lying to our faces. One container might claim to contain a “rare herbal extract” that will increase our metabolism while the container of pills next to it contains “the total body weight loss solution.” The fact is these products are actually too good to be true. These bottles might say they contain 50 mg of some ingredient like ginkgo biloba, when in reality it could have no trace of ginkgo biloba in it, and worse, it could really just be a plastic container filled with ground up rat feces. I wish I was kidding.

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act says a supplement is “‘dietary ingredient’ intended to supplement the diet.” These dietary ingredients could include “a vitamin, a mineral, an herb or botanical, or an amino acid.” The product has to be intended for ingestion but cannot be advertised as a food. So basically anything that fits these guidelines can make it onto the shelf and sold to the public without the FDA regulating the product’s safety or effectiveness.

This is why products can claim to contain rare, fat-burning ingredients and do miraculous things when really no one but the manufacturer knows what is in it. Scary, right? Well, what is scarier is that there are people who know these facts and still buy these products because they believe the infomercials’ “before and afters.”

To these people I say, watch out for the side effects. You may be desperate to fit into your skinny jeans, but the nightmare of it all is that you might actually die before you put the jeans on.

Products will remain on the market, unregulated by the FDA, until enough consumers complain about complications with the product, or until people start dying.

Metabolife, the largest selling ephedra-based product, had gotten over 14,000 complaints, but the company didn’t tell the FDA about these complaints until Congress pressured them. When the FDA evaluated the product, they discovered Metabolife caused cardiovascular events such as hypertension, irregular heartrate and heart palpitations, heart attack and death from cardiac arrest. It also caused strokes, transient ischemic attacks, and seizures. That’s when ephedra was banned from being sold.

Even though supplements these days don’t have ephedra, they can be just as dangerous if you don’t research what is in them.

You may have heard of Alli, “The only FDA Approved Over-The-Counter Weight Loss Pill.” It is to be used in conjunction with a low-fat, low-calorie diet and exercise. Alli disables the enzyme lipase and prevents it from breaking down fat, causing undigested fat to be excreted. The catch is, if you don’t follow your new diet, and eat something too fattening, you might literally soil your pants.

It seems there is no such thing as a magic diet pill and that calorie restriction and physical activity is still the key to weight loss. Take it or leave it, but if you take it, and by ‘it’ I mean a diet pill, be sure to research it before you become one of the reasons the FDA researches it themselves.

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