The Most Important Aspect of Diet Pills
Posted on 06. Mar, 2009 by Cal Stevens in Losing Weight
I’ve reviewed close to 300 different diet pills now and I’m often asked how it is that I can judge the efficacy of a diet pill without actually taking the diet pill myself. The answer is simple: If you want to know if a diet pill will work, just look at its ingredients. Surprisingly, the actual ingredients in the product are usually what gets looked over when most consumers decide on a diet pill. This brief article will help you as you evaluate diet pills to know if the ingredients included are up to par and will be likely to help you lose weight.
As mentioned, one of the first things that you need to research before a possible purchase is the ingredients. Now, when you are doing your research, don’t get your information from sites that sell diet pills, ingredients, or the like. Get that information from unbiased sources such Wikipedia, PubMed, or peer-reviewed medical journals. These will provide well documented studies that easily verifiable and legitimate.
One thing to watch out for are citations of studies on the diet pill website that are made to appear to be about the diet pill itself. Often, if you look up the study, it was a study done on an ingredient in the diet pill, but not on the actual product. I like to see as many citations of studies that I can, but they need to clearly explained so the consumer knows what exactly they are looking at. In addition, some companies will explain the results of some study without citing the reference to the study. In most cases this is because they are just making the study up or the study wasn’t quite as favorable as they want to it be.
The reason that it is so important for you to verify their claims through your own research is that there are a lot of ingredients that a lot of people believe are effective and yet they have not been proven to be in any actual clinical studies. Hoodia Gordonii and Acai Berry are good examples of this. Despite the fact that they have not been proven by a single legitimate (documented) clinical study, they have become extremely popular because of the hype that diet pill companies have created. Hence the need for your own independent verification.
Once you have verified that a certain ingredient has been proven to cause weight loss, your research isn’t over there. You must also verify that the amount of the ingredient used in the diet pill is up to par with what the clinical studies have shown to be effective. Too often diet pills will use ‘Proprietary Blends’ that hide the amounts of the ingredients.
The reason that verifying the amounts is important is because most ingredients have only been proven to be effective when they are used in high enough dosages. For example, if a certain ingredient was proven effective in the study when used at 1,000 mg per dosage, the diet pill would need to contain the same amount in order to work in the same way. Most diet pills use only a fraction of the recommended dosages and use a proprietary blend so that you don’t know much of the ingredient is actually included. So when possible, look for diet pills that fully disclose the amounts.
Yet another ling to keep an eye out for: extremely long lists of ingredients. Now, I’m not saying that a diet pill is automatically bad if it does have a lot of ingredients. But what I am saying is that some companies will try to fool you into thinking that its the best diet pill because they have a list of ingredients a mile long. Often because they have so many, they aren’t able to include each on in high enough amounts to be effective.
I’m often surprised at how many decisions are made to purchase a diet pill bases solely on how convincing their website is or which celebrity supposedly endorsed it. The only thing that makes a diet pill effective or ineffective is the ingredient profile. Without good ingredients (in the correct amounts), it simply won’t work. So do your research before you purchase. You’ll be glad you did.
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