The temperature is finally dropping, bringing a wave of brightly colored leaves, fall fashion, and foods that are heavily laden in pumpkin and cinnamon, and normally contain quite a bit of fat. The fall diet is always a switch over for most people from their healthier summer one. As your buns of steel get a little bit blobby, there may be a temptation to skip the cold walk to the gym and opt for an easier method of staying thin. Most people know the dangers of not eating and taking medicated diet pills, but if a company advertises “herbal weight loss supplements”, it does not seem as harmful. If it’s all-natural, how bad can it be?
If these capsules only contained various herbs, there wouldn’t be a great health risk; but many dietary supplements are spiked with drugs to accelerate weight loss, such as fenfluramine and phentermine (better known as fen-phen). Fen-phen, a popular drug prescribed in the 90s for weight loss seemed to be a miracle cure for obesity, as it greatly suppressed patient’s appetites, allowing them to more rapidly lose weight. Although, if a pill seems too good to be true though, it probably is. In 1947, fen-phen was pulled off the markets by the Food and Drug Administration after it was found that the drug may have caused heart valve defects in as many as a third of patients it was given to.
Fen-phen is one of the many prescription drugs added to “all natural” supplements today that cause harm to users. The problem is that because of the classification of an herbal supplement, there is little to no regulation from the FDA. Due to an increased attempt to test these herbal supplements, the manufacturers have recently begun to use a new tactic to ensure the unregulated substances avoid detection. Examples includes putting the medicine in the capsule that surrounds the tested material or loading up the pills with so many unregulated substances that they crash any machine testing the pills. Unless the United States Pharmacopeia (the agency the FDA relies on to test all drugs) has approved medicine, there is no guarantee that the advertised substance is what you will take or in the dosage noted.
As a general rule, these unregulated, herbal weight loss pills and dietary supplements should be avoided. If you really feel that you need medical assistance with weight loss, it is best to talk to your physician beforehand. It can be embarrassing to talk about weight issues, but your health and happiness are well worth it.
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