Alpha Nutrition Health Education

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Fantasy, Futility and Fraud Flourish in the weight loss business.

Thousands of weight loss schemes have been marketed -some sincere but flawed, others frankly fraudulent.   Some estimates of cost suggest over 35 billion dollars a year is spent in the USA alone on weight loss. 

Infomercials, shown on cable TV promise that you can lose all the weight you want while you eat everything you want are false and not to be believed. 

This is what everyone wants of, course, a quick cure, but there is no easy path. It doesn't matter what they are trying to sell you - crab shells (chitin), fat absorbers, fat burners, magic mushrooms, wonder bark from Brazil, magic cellulite pills, pyruvate, creatine, garcinia cambogia, green goop, algae, magic genies in a bottle - it's all a great fantasy that will not come true.

Every year, new weight-loss books appear on the bookstalls, and magazines run endless articles on the subject. Millions of people have proven that it is easier to gain weight than to lose it. Dieters have proven that weight-loss attempts by following a "weight-loss diet" may succeed for a short time but ultimately fail. 

There is no magic diet. None of the weight loss schemes printed in any book over the past 50 years has had any real advantage over common sense.

Here are some good consumer rules:

Red Flag - claims that are never true:

• You can eat whatever you like
• You don't have to exercise.
• Fat stores "burn" off spontaneously.
• Celullite disappears.

Nanci Hellmich writing in USA Today ( Pitching Claims that Lighten Wallets. Aug 16 1999, 6D) reported on the dubious claims made by the company Enforma Natural Products who market "Fat Trapper" and "Exercise in a Bottle." The claims are that a crab shell component, chitin along with the plant fiber psyllium ( usually used as a bulk laxative) can reduce fat absorption enough that you don't have to worry about how much fat you are eating; and that taking calcium pyruvate can promote "fat burning" so you don't have to exercise. The infomercials feature nice, plausible people and it is hard to believe that their claims have no validity.  Hellmich reports that "California's Sonoma and Napa counties have filed lawsuits accusing Enforma Natural Products of false and misleading advertising." According to Hellmich the package of one bottle of "Fat Trapper" and one bottle of "Exercise in a Bottle" costs $69.95 US; the infomercials have been shown 23,000 times; and 500,000 units have been sold in 8 months. Sales of $35 million in a few months is a respectable sum for a startup company with little to offer. 

We have been unable to substantiate any claims that any substance on the market actually "burns fat". The idea is intriguing but no product does that. Calcium pyruvate is not "exercise in a bottle."  The herbal substance "garcinia cambogina" has been studied and show no fat burning ability and will not cause weight loss.

We advise against drug use for weight loss  and encourage all overweight people to seek a healthier life and achieve weight goals without the use of drugs. The regrettable problems encountered by users of Redux and fen-fen should remind everyone that weight-loss drugs have a regrettable history of poor long-term efficacy and intolerable side effects. Evidence suggested that dexfenfluramine (Redux) caused  irreversible pulmonary hypertension and that the combination of this drug with phentiramine (fen-phen) causes heart valve defects in human subjects and brain damage in lab animals triggered increasing concern about their use.