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Alli weight loss pill - dangers of a FDA approved drug
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What is Alli?
Alli is a weight loss program that basis itself around a weight loss pill. That in itself is nothing new. What is new is that it is the first FDA approved weight loss pill for over-the-counter use. I am not going to input to much of my thoughts on the FDA, I will just say that looks like that they want their cut in this over-the-counter market too. The active ingredient in Alli is Orlistat. How it works is simple.
How does it work?
When you decide to take a bite of food, that food is made up of three nutrients, proteins, carbohydrates, or fats. These substances all have energy or more known as calories. Depending on what the item of food is depends on what it has more of what nutrient. An apple is made up more of carbohydrates, where as an avocado is made up of mostly fat. When you digest these properties your body sorts them to where they need to go or stores them for later use. If you have an excess amount of energy (calories) this is how the body gains mass from the storage of those nutrients.
Orlistat comes into play whenever you eat fats. When you eat the fat and it enters your digestive system Orlistat will attach itself to some of that fat and block it from breaking down with your body’s natural enzymes. As it can’t just float around in there, your body will then pass it through your digestive system, into your intestines and eventually out through your bowels. In short this pill turns some of your fat intake in to a "fiber" type source. Just like when you eat fiber, your body can’t break it down so it passes through your system. This also means the energy (calories) don't count, so the fat you eat you isn’t absorbing.
Off the bat it doesn’t sound to bad does it? Well like anything it isn’t that simple.
The Problems of Alli
First off let me state that taking the pill alone will do nothing for the fat that you already have stored. This means that if you have fat already you still have to get rid of it by using a lower caloric diet. That is what the full Alli plan is about, pill+diet program=fat loss. The diet plan is no different then all the other diet plans that are out there right now. Too low of calories and in this case low fat. The recommendations range from 1200-2000 calories a day depending if you are a man or woman.
Most important are the fat intake guidelines. You have a certain amount of fat to take in at given points and time. That isn’t anything new and not eating too many fat calories isn’t going to stop you from going overboard on calories in general. Didn’t we learn anything about the low fat craze? What is new and more fun even is what happens if you go past those fat guidelines. If you take in to much fat you get what is known as “Treatment Effects”.
What are “Treatment Effects?”
The popular treatment effects that you may have already heard about already mostly have to do with your bowel movement. The simple and short reason is your body cannot break down and digest fat, your body is going to put that fat on an express lane. As fat is oil, when it gets to the final stop it is still in a liquid form. It becomes a great lubricant for moving stools you have stored already in the body. This could lead to leaking, wet gas, diarrhea, and a sudden event where you could at any moment “go”, without being in control. To add more fun to this the more fat you have in your diet, the more likely this is to happen. This is part of their "behavioral" modification of Alli. They teach you that if you eat too much fat, your punishment is an accident in your pants.
What about the other side effects?
Orlistat has been used for years now in a prescription capacity to treat obesity. Meaning that until now you could only get this ingredient by prescription from seeing a doctor. The good news is because Orlistat has been around already for awhile I don’t have to wait for my logic to tell you what scientist have already gotten a chance to test.
What they have found is interesting but seemingly not interesting enough to reveal to the advisory board that is responsible for giving the okay to this being an over-the-counter product.
Neal Benowitz, a professor of medicine and biopharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, had this to say about the results I am going to share with you. “This was not in any of the documents that we reviewed,” he commented about the aberrant crypt foci issue. “Unless it gets reported by the manufacturer or FDA, or unless someone brings it up who gives testimony, we may not know about this.
So what was it that has been found out about this drug that would lead to this kind of hiding? What are the other side effects of Alli? What is the aberrant crypt foci issue?
A study done shows significant increase in the incidence of aberrant crypt foci. These crypts are widely believed to be a precursor of colon cancer. This is also not a bias study done by a competing drug company either. The National Cancer Institute has done these works, and they have established a healthy link between ACF and colon cancer.
That is a big problem to casually leave out of a report.
Another scary problem that could exist is the chance of breast cancer. “In the seven randomized, controlled clinical trials, there were 10 cases of breast cancer in the treated groups with only one in the control groups. The relative risk of getting breast cancer while taking orlistat (compared to placebo) was calculated several times by both FDA and the sponsor and found to vary between 4- and 7-fold, depending on the analysis.”
That is startling results, so much so that it cause an FDA Medical Officer to take back his original approval.
Let’s say that this wasn’t an issue or that you just don’t care about the cancer aspect of Alli. Do you care about your hair, nail growth, skin aging process, good cholesterol? Then Alli may not be for you.
When you block fat from being absorbed in the body, you are blocking the valuable nutrients that fat can provide. We have already learned from study after study how valuable and important fats are for the basic needed function of the body. Since you have to take in a low fat amount (remember you don’t want to have an accident) as it is and of those fats a certain amount of that intake is going to be blocked, in a day your percentage of fat from you diet is going to be to little to provide the best of basic function for your body. The negative effects of that will wage war from things ranging from your hair and skin to your HDL levels.
Does Alli’s Benefits Make Up for the Risk?
As simple as I can put it, no. Give it a few years and you are going to see those local lawyer firm advertisements that go “Are you or a loved one suffering from the effects of taking the drug Orlistat?” When you see that pop up I hope you are smiling because you read this report and you decided that bowel movement diet therapy wasn’t for you. Not to mention it isn’t even easy. You still can’t eat well, can’t eat certain foods and on top of that have to worry about running to the bathroom in embarrassment. How this program got as far as it has in the first place is beyond me. One thing is for sure; its shelf life is short, both in consumer desire and in government allowance.
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For more information head to Leigh Peele's Site
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