Miracle ‘weight loss’ cures that aren’t

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Obesity is a major risk factor in many diseases and illnesses, including high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.

There have been some bold claims made recently by companies promoting various types of consumer products that claim to enable you to lose weight without the usual ‘no pain no gain’ factor.

Here are some of the tempting claims that try to separate you from a substantial amount of your hard earned cash, and promote lazy weight loss:

• Slimming Chocolate – a new type of chocolate that is claimed to reduce your weight by burning fat, it’s effectiveness being proportional to the amount that you eat – eat more chocolate – lose more weight! this chocolate costs $45 per month for the average recommended quantity
• Slim Ball gastric balloon – an edible device that supposedly expands within the stomach, reducing appetite – cost one off payment of $75
• Lipo-Slim Liposuction device – an external pad that attaches to the feet to ‘extract 6 pounds of fat per week’ – cost $50 per month
• Fat ‘burning’ pills – one per day to lose up to 10 pounds per week without any exercise or diet – cost $15 per month

Information supplied by the United Kingdom Office of Fair Trading indicates that nearly a quarter of a million Britons placed their trust and their money in these products last year, and now spend approximately 30 million dollars each year attempting to beat back the seemingly relentless weight gain that afflicts so many of the population.

The Director of the UK Office of Fair Trading, Mike Haley, stated that three quarters of the people who responded to these phoney were women, and that the victims of these weight loss ’scams’ are becoming victims due to their desperation to find an easy cure for being overweight. He added that the products are effectively of no value, and without any evidence supplied by the manufacturers to substantiate their weight loss claims. In some cases they may actually contain ingedients that are untested and potentially harmful to consumers.

The fact is that when it comes to being overweight, in most cases this is due to a greater number of calories being consumed by the individual than those that are used by the daily requirements for that person.

This leads to surplus calories being converted by the body into fatty deposits that accumulate around the waist, buttocks upper arms or thighs.

Our advice is – let the buyer beware!