Back to our regularly scheduled program of original content shortly, I promise, but this was too good to let pass without comment.
Via Healthranker: The New York Daily News features eight of the most absurd weight loss products they could find. These are guaranteed to be effective wallet-slimmers but not much else. Among them:
- Swallowing air makes you fat. No, sorry, swallowing air makes you belch. Swallowing high-calorie, low-nutrition food makes you fat.
- You can slim down with weight loss lip balm, overnight skinny cream or body shaping supplement added to your lotions and moisturizers. No, sorry, you can slim down by reducing your intake of empty calories and increasing your exercise.
- An $80 supplement containing oat and palm oil (and snake oil?) will suppress your appetite and help you eat less. Interestingly, this one actually claims support from clinical studies. Their nutrition advice is very sensible and hardly mentions their product (so may have been copied from somewhere else). I’m pretty dubious, though, looking at the ingredients, that the product would have any particular effect. I’m even more dubious that it’s worth $80 a box.
- A carbonated drink containing caffeine, from not one but two evil corporations (Coca-Cola and Nestle), can increase your metabolism and cause you to burn more calories. Again, they claim the support of a study (which they conducted).
These claims are, as far as I’m concerned, unproven and unlikely. What I do know is this. If you eat a nutrient-rich diet with an appropriate amount of energy intake for your height, age and gender, and are physically active, all else being equal your health will improve and you will gravitate towards a healthy weight. There is no magic product, however expensive, that will change this. This is because human bodies don’t work by magic. They work by physics and chemistry.
I’m happy to help you with motivation to put this knowledge into practice. But don’t go looking for a way to reduce weight without changing your lifestyle. It simply doesn’t exist.
Technorati Tags: weight loss, scams, dubious products, diet, nutrition, lifestyle
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