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The diet pill myth--shattered once and for all

As the great Yogi Berra has said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” Over the past year, millions of viewers watched variants of the same commercial repeatedly. It claimed, “you can lose weight and keep it off.” The spokesman, Dr. So-and-so, made me think of the movie Sleepless in Seattle when the son of Samuel Baldwin (Tom Hanks’ character) is talking to a radio psychologist about his father’s love life. The son says, “Listen to her Dad, she’s a doctor.” Baldwin replies, “Her first name might be doctor!”

You and I have heard it all before. “Lose weight and feel great.” You know it sounds fishy… or to use another overused, odorous metaphor, you smell a rat. Still, if you’re like me and have struggled with weight issues all your life, part of you might have wondered, “Could it be true? Have they finally found the magic pill that makes you lose weight?”

After being bombarded by that ad, many of my comrades in weight loss succumbed and tried the product. The result? There were a lot of disappointed people making news wanting to shut the company down. Why? After all, they were fairly warned by the fine print disclaimer at the bottom of the ad, “Results dependent upon diet & exercise.” They felt they had been promised the “magic bullet,” but it didn’t deliver the desired results.

It seems like you can get weight loss pills from anyone these days, and the ones making the most money in the business are the pharmaceutical companies. With very little effort you can persuade your doctor to get you a prescription for a drug that will make you pay for it if you eat too much fat… by having to run to the bathroom all day long, and worse. People do lose weight on these drugs. But the side effects may not be worth it.

And what of the herbal weight loss industry? It seems people were reasonably successful taking Ma Huang, or ephedra, products. Maybe the results were too promising, because on December 30, 2003 the FDA banned it. Oh, you can get ephedra if you want some now, but it’s harder. You can buy it on the black market, but if you want to get it legitimately, ephedra is only available by prescription. The mighty pharmaceutical companies wanted control of that niche! All they needed was one excuse, and they got it, quickly acting on the tragic news of the death of Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler, one of around 100 deaths that year linked to ephedra use. (1)

What the news didn’t report on was how many deaths occurred in 2003 that were directly linked to conventional medicine. The same year ephedra was banned, a report found that 783,936 people die annually from mistakes in conventional medicine (2). Among these were deaths related to prescription drugs.

Still, there are countless ephedra-free, non-prescription herbal weight loss products on the market, and people are looking for them. As of this writing, there are over 250,000 internet websites with information or products about herbal weight loss, searched by at least 4000 people in the last few weeks. The weight-loss product stores make it no secret that they have the “one product you’ve been looking for,” your “ultimate weight-loss solution”. (3)

The truth: there is no magic bullet, no one answer to the problem. What causes people to put on excess pounds? To say that too many calories and not enough activity is the only reason is too simplistic. Metabolism, moodiness and depression, sleep deprivation, the misinformation given by the classic Food Pyramid… all of these are factors in battle for health and wellness. Overweight and obesity are complex conditions caused by a variety of problems.

Can herbal supplements help? Perhaps. Researchers have developed a multi-faceted approach designed to tackle the weight problem through nutrition. Products exist to target many of the common problems leading to weight gain, and most people have a combination of these to deal with. But consumers have a daunting task ahead of them: to sort through the huge health and wellness industry, sift out the herbal weight loss products, and determine which products address all their various needs. Among these, they must discover which are produced in FDA-monitored facilities to verify their ingredients list, which products are listed in the Physicians Desk Reference, and which are safe to use in combination with other weight-loss supplements.

There is no magic pill for weight loss, but it is possible to lose weight with the help of good supplementation. To assist in the task of understanding weight loss nutritional products, My Natural Supplements is offering a free individual report with weight loss supplement recommendations. A healthy lifestyle is not impossible to achieve. Weight loss products can help, if we move beyond the myth of the magic bullet and turn to high-quality nutrition.


Footnotes:
1. http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/12/30/ephedra/ Government announces ban on ephedra
Wednesday, December 31, 2003 Posted: 7:58 AM EST (1258 GMT)


2. 2003 medical report Death by Medicine, by Drs. Gary Null, Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, 783,936 people in the United States die every year from conventional medicine mistakes.

3. Reference the Market Research Wizard program

Permission is granted to reproduce this article provided that this tag and the links within the article remain intact. Darcy Maher Bunn is the owner of My Natural Supplements, a division of Midwestern Wellness, LLC.


 

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