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Remedies to reduce
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If being obese is bad enough, receiving ‘free advice’ to reduce is worse
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Bad fad Eating the wrong nutrients
Fat people attract quacks more than carrion attracts vultures. For every fat person trying to become thin, a quack nearby is salivating at the prospect of selling a remedy to that person. Here is a run down on the usual cons.
Weight loss books: These sell in the millions. Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, published in 1972, triggered the craze for low-carb foods. Fit for Life, by Harvey Diamond, sold over 3 million copies, despite its astonishing assertion that obesity causes accumulation of “toxic wastes” within the body.
Most popular diet books blame obesity on eating the wrong nutrients, diets lacking certain nutrients or on certain food combinations.
They brim with anecdotes of personal experiences of the author or of dieters who have successfully tried the “revolutionary ideas” in the book.
Few modern diet books are shameless enough to peddle the “eat-all-you-want-and-still-lose-weight” principle, but they still appeal to dieters’ secret desire to eat meat and fat without fear of weight gain. Atkins, for example, made steak and sausages popular again among dieters.
Books sales and the ads aside, none of these diets do what we demand of even a simple pill for headache: prove their long-term success in a double blind trial.
Diet pills: This is a rapidly growing field of research, and there are several legitimate drugs that offer limited success. None, however, will produce the “guaranteed”, “effortless”, “rapid”, or “permanent” weight loss claimed by mail-order diet pills. Most of these are OTC drugs used for other ailments.
Phenylpropanolamine (PPA), a nasal decongestant, has a temporary appetite-suppressant effect and is a common ingredient in these pills. However, it has no long term effect on obesity and can cause severe anxiety disorder and stroke in those who abuse it.
“Natural” remedies: Apparently nature reveals the weight-loss secrets hidden within her bounty only to telemarketers and mail-order diet experts. People associate “natural remedies” with absence of side effects. Spirulina, Gymnema sylvestre, chromium picolinate, guar gum, ma huang are all quite “natural” and quite useless. But they are not always harmless.
Ma huang, for example, contains ephedrine, a nasal decongestant and stimulant. Ephedrine can raise blood pressure and is dangerous to those with high blood pressure.
Deaths have been reported among users of ma huang.
Being fat is a modern curse, and losing weight the right way is hard enough. Being gullible only makes life harder and your wallet lighter.
RAJIV M.
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