steveb_ohio via flickr

It isn’t easy to achieve or maintain a healthy weight. If it was there would be no such thing as a multi-billion dollar weight loss industry. While we contend here at ShrinkGeek that the only tried and true method of losing weight is to eat less and exercise, we concede that there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” solution on the best way to get there. The struggle to find the combination of diet and exercise that works best for your particular personality and physiology is probably the hardest part about losing weight, and frustration over finding out what you can and can not live with can be a potentially crippling road block to your progress.

Many people chose to rely on “natural” dietary supplements to aid in their weight-loss efforts, and with good reason. The ability to consume a product that can help you lose weight without introducing any man made chemicals into your system is pretty appealing! Unfortunately, it appears as though a lot of people who use these products are getting considerably more than they bargain for.

Dietary supplements are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994. Under the guidelines of the DSHEA, a dietary supplement is “a product taken by mouth that contains a ‘dietary ingredient’ intended to supplement the diet.” Dietary ingredients in this case include things like vitamins, minerals, herbs, botanicals, amino acids, enzymes, organ tissues (eww!), glandulars, and metabolites. Any product that falls into this kind of classification has a different set of regulations than “conventional” food and drug products. In fact, the FDA pretty much takes a “hands off” approach and relies on the manufacturers to ensure that their products are safe before going to market.

Unsurprisingly, this particular approach has led to some problems.

According to an article printed in the New England Journal of Medicine, many of the dietary supplements on the market today add chemicals that are not listed in the ingredients, including (in some cases) amphetamines! The FDA has apparently identified over 140 products that are contaminated in this manner, and the author of the article claims that this is just “a fraction” of the problem. He goes on to claim that there are estimates of up to 50,000 unreported “supplement-related adverse effects” in the country annually.

Unfortunately there is no easy answer to this particular problem. If you take an over-the-counter dietary supplement, you risk the possibility that you’re ingesting something you hadn’t planned on due to the lack of oversight. If you take a product that is regulated by the FDA (such as Alli) you’re taking some sort of chemical. A chemical that, according to the FDA anyway, is supposed to be safe (although how “safe” it is to take something that prevents your body from absorbing fat is seriously up for debate in my not-so-humble opinion).

Neither one of the propositions is particularly appealing to me.