Muscle Diet

QUESTION: I recently saw on the news that two separate studies showed that fat burner products don’t work! What’s the deal with this? Are fat burners just a big scam?

ANSWER: Don't EVER pay any attention to newspaper, radio or television (the mainstream media) reports about supplements, diet or exercise! Way more often than not, they're just trying to put a provocative headline out there - they don't actually usually know or care if the information is accurate or addresses the topic thoroughly or fairly. These media stories are almost always incomplete or misleading and usually seem to contradict something you read last week from the same source! Case-in-point are these two studies you referred to that the media claim show that weight loss supplements 'don't work'. Now first off, let me say that I don't think weight loss pills are going to get you ripped on their own, it's more important to get your diet right but most of the good fat burners definitely DO help decrease appetite, so they DO actually help you get your diet right. They also have been shown to help liberate fat from fat cells and increase the metabolism. So let's look at these studies:

The first one looked at ingredients bought at a German pharmacy. These ingredients were polyglucosamide, konjak, cabbage powder, sodium alginate, L-carnitine and others. Not sure how many of you are familiar with typical ingredients in fat burner supplements but I can tell you that they may as well have been studying advanced needlework techniques because NOT ONE of these is the primary active ingredient in the top-selling fat burners. I can only assume that because the ingredients were bought in Germany (a country who's supplement laws are so strict that they tried to have a type of rice classified as a drug - no, I'm not kidding!), that they were the only ones the researchers could get their hands on?? This study is so useless that it should be looked into by Greenpeace for frivolously wasting paper!

How about the other study? Well, at least this one looked at some ingredients that would be considered legitimate, like ephedra, green tea and CLA. To be specific, this study was actually a review of several previous studies that have been conducted on these and other ingredients. Curiously though, instead of weighing up the studies to see if the ingredients had significant effects on fat loss, the researchers set the bar at 5% of bodyweight? Of the ingredients tested, they claim that only the ephedra was able to achieve this target. But what about green tea? Just about every study on green tea has shown some kind of weight or fat loss or loss of inches around the waist? And CLA has over 20 studies showing some kind of ability to shed fat or weight? So My bullshit detector is going haywire at this point! The authors then go on to slate some of the studies on these ingredients...as if they were going to be up to the same standard as studies on drugs, that, unlike natural ingredients can be patented and sold exclusively by one company for 20 years!

I was really starting to smell a rat on this one and then the mist lifted and everything became clear when I read the words "grant supported by GSK"...ya, the drug company that sells Orlistat (and a company I used to work for). You know the weight loss drug that causes less than 3 kilos of weigh loss in a year! The one that also causes "anal leakage"!

So in conclusion, the first study looked at a bunch of useless herbs and the second seemed to be specifically set up to discount the significant results that have been published in scientific journals on natural fat burner ingredients.

To read more of Mark Gilbert’s work, please visit his website at: www.MuscleDiet.net

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