Dietary Supplements and Weight Loss
Hi, I am Dr. Craig Primack from Scottsdale Weight Loss Center.
Welcome to my Medical Minute.
Today I’m going to talk about non-prescription over the counter dietary supplements that lead to weight loss.
So just recently two papers were presented at the European Congress on Obesity or ECO. These two studies one had 67 studies and the other with 121 studies. They were looking, many of them in a blinded placebo-controlled fashion at weight loss in now over 10,000 adult humans, so in a clinical setting.
And what we found unfortunately, time and time again, is almost none of them have any weight loss at all.
And the few that do the weight loss achieved is about less than five pounds on average.
I would argue that for somewhere between 30 and a 100 dollars for one of these supplements, something you have to take between once and multiple times per day, that five pounds of weight loss would not be worth what you are spending.
The supplements specifically, and there were many of them, but a few of them are Garcinia cambogia, green tea extract, glucomannan, conjugated linoleic acid or CLA,, and chitosan. There are many, many others that obviously also do not work.
What Does Work for Weight Loss
At the end of the day let’s use use current medical scientific principles. Use what we call the four legs of the chair. The first is dietary manipulation to decrease calories in a way that works for you. The second is activity and movement to make us feel better, to help glucose regulation, to help us sleep better. The third is potentially the use of anti-obesity medications. These have been proven by the FDA in a placebo controlled method to lead to percentage of weight losses much more than five pounds.
And the fourth component is knowledge and learning to be able to do something like this long-term. It’s learning how to eat safely in a restaurant. Because you should be able to, at this day and age, eat occasionally in a restaurant, if not more often than that. How do you choose foods in the grocery store by learning how to read food labels? How do you make a meal? And plan for a meal that maybe takes 20 or 30 minutes to cook on a regular basis and have maybe several days of leftovers. As well as potentially using meal replacements to make it so you don’t have to cook on a regular basis, but can cook when you want to.
We Want Non-Prescription Dietary Supplements to Work
So at the end of the day we really want to try to find just that next and next and next supplement. The over the counter one that works for weight loss, we now have proven yet again, that they just don’t.
Please join me next week for my next Medical Minute.
Have a great rest of the week
Doctor Primack
