Are there safe and effective dietary supplements for weight loss?
In a previous discussion, I pointed out that an investigation found that four out of five bottles of commercial herbal supplements purchased at major US retailers (GNC, Walgreens, Target and Walmart) did not contain any of the herbs listed on their labels, but instead “often contained little more than fillers “cheap as rice powder.” , asparagus and indoor plants…”
You may want your supplement to only contain houseplants. Weight loss supplements have a reputation for being “spurious with prescription and over-the-counter medications. In a sample of 160 weight loss supplements that “were reclaimed as 100% natural,” more than half were contaminated with drugs and active pharmacological ingredients, from antidepressants like Prozac to erectile dysfunction medications like Viagra. Diuretic medications are frequent pollutants, which makes sense. In my previous videos on ketogenic diets I talk about rapid water loss. be “the $33 billion diet hack” that has been selling low-carb diets for more than a century. But why Viagra?
At least spiked Viagra and Prozac are legal drugs. Researchers in Denver tried all the weight loss supplements they could find within a ten mile radius. Alarmingly, they discovered that a third were adulterated with banned ingredients. The Most Common Illegal Adulterant of Weight Loss Supplements is sibutramine, which was sold as Meridia before being taken off the market in 2010 due to risk of heart attack and stroke. Now, it is also blamed for cases of psychosis induced by slimming supplements.
An analysis of weight loss supplements. bought Internet researchers advertising with claims such as “purely natural products”, “harmless” or “traditional herbal” found that a third of them contained high doses of the banned drug sibutramine and the rest had caffeine. You couldn’t tell if caffeine was added to a supplement? Maybe not, if it also had temazepam, a controlled substance (benzodiazepine), a “depressant” sedative found in half of caffeine-tainted supplements.
Doesn’t the FDA demand Recalls of adulterated supplements? Yes, but they often reappear on store shelves. Twenty-seven supplements were purchased at least six months after the recalls were posted, and two-thirds still contained banned substances. That’s 17 of 27 with the same pharmaceutical adulterant originally found and 6 containing one or more additional prohibited ingredients. Aren’t they the manufacturers? penalized for non-compliance? Yes, but “the fines for violations are small compared to the profits.”
One of the ways supplement manufacturers can skirt The law consists of labeling them as “not intended for human consumption because it transfers responsibility from the seller to the user”; for example, labeling the fatal fat burner DNP as “an industrial or research chemical.” This is what designer street drugs can be like sold openly at gas stations and convenience stores as “bath salts.” Another way is say Synthetic stimulants added to slimming supplements are actually natural food components, such as including the designer drug dimethylamylamine (DMAA) as “geranium oil extract.” The FDA banned it in 2012 after it was determined that DMAA “was not found in geraniums.” Who eats geraniums anyway? Although tentatively tied to cases of sudden death and associated with hemorrhagic stroke, DMAA has remained found in weight loss supplements with innocuous names like Simply Skinny Pollen made by Bee Fit with Trish.
There is no doubt that certain banned supplements, such as ephedra, could aid people lose weight. “There’s only one problem, and it’s a big one: This supplement can kill you” wrote a founding member of the American Board of Integrative Medicine.
Are there safe and effective dietary supplements for weight loss? As I analyze it in my video. Friday’s Favorites: Are Weight Loss Supplements Safe and Effective?When popular slimming supplements were tested in a randomized, placebo-controlled trial, not a single one could defeat eliminate placebo sugar pills. “A systematic review of systematic reviews” of diet pills came to a similar conclusion: none appear to generate measurable impacts “on body weight without undue risks.” That was the conclusion reached in a similar review by the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center, which term with: “In closing, it is appropriate to highlight that perhaps the most general and safe herbal alternative/approach for weight control is to replace low energy density foods with [low-calorie] high energy density foods and processed foods, thus reducing total energy intake.” In other words, eat more whole plant foods and less animal and junk foods. “Taking advantage of low energy density [low-calorie] and the health-promoting effects of plant-based foods, it is possible to achieve weight loss, or at least help maintain weight without reducing the volume of food consumed or compromising its nutritional value.
Learn more about the risks of supplements in my video. Are weight loss supplements safe?.
I referred to a ketogenic diet video I made; check out the related posts below for links to other videos and blogs in that series.
Learn more about optimal weight loss in my book, How not to diet.
