Two compelling reasons for avoiding weight-loss supplements

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to enjoy food and drink to one’s heart content and, once the pounds are piling up, simply swallow a pill and the weight goes down to normal? There are plenty of such pills on the market, but here I advise you to avoid them – mainly for two reasons.

The first is that they do not work. On this blog, we have discussed this before. The claims made for weight loss supplements are bogus. The manufacturers promise substantial body weight reductions not because their product is effective but because they want your money. So, unless you want to donate your cash to quacks, don’t buy such rubbish.

The second reason is probably even more compelling: weight-loss supplements endanger your health. A new paper tells us more about their risks. This investigation was aimed at identifying banned and discouraged-use ingredients, such as ephedra, 1,3-dimethylamylamine, and beta-methyl-phenylethylamine, in readily available weight loss dietary supplements within a 10-mile radius of Regis University.

A list of banned and discouraged-use ingredients was compiled with the use of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) dietary supplement website which provides information on supplement ingredients that are no longer legal or are advised against owing to adverse event reporting. Investigators visited all retail outlet stores within a 10-mile radius of Regis University in Denver, Colorado. Retail chains were not duplicated and only one of each chain was evaluated.

A total of 51 weight loss supplement products from retail stores were found with banned or discouraged-use substances listed on their labels. At least one banned ingredient was found to be listed on the product labels in 17 of the 51 studied supplements (33%). At least one discouraged-use ingredient was found in 46 of the 51 products (90%). Retail outlet stores dedicated to supplements and sports nutrition alone were found to have the greatest number of weight loss supplements that included banned and discouraged-use ingredients.

The authors of this paper draw the following conclusions: the FDA has taken action to remove some weight loss supplements from the market that contain banned ingredients. Unfortunately, based on the findings of this study, it is evident that products containing these ingredients remain on the market today.

You might think that these findings apply only to the US, however, I am afraid, you would be mistaken. People buy such bogus supplements on the Internet where national regulations can easily be circumvented. Thus the trade in weight-loss supplements is thriving regardless of what the FDA or any other regulatory agency might do about them.

The solution is simple: avoid such products!