Muscle Diet

Q. How powerful is ephedrine as a fat burner? In your opinion, was the USA ban on its use justified?

A. Ephedrine is a stimulant similar to amphetamine but with substantially less potent effects. It was banned about five years ago in the USA because it was “associated” with adverse events, including several deaths. Regarding its use for fat loss, combined with caffeine at a dosage of 20 milligrams ephedrine (or ephedra, the natural form) plus 200 milligrams caffeine, it’s quite simply the most research-proven “natural” fat burner combination available (or in the case of the USA, not available), and many bodybuilders and gym rats still use it despite the ban.

Over here where I live in the UK, it’s still easy for bodybuilders and overweight housewives to find. So ephedrine definitely works, but it isn’t for everyone. Some people get quite jittery and anxious, and in rare cases, it can cause heart palpitations and in very rare cases, death. So you have to be careful if you’re using it for the first time and stay clear if you have heart problems, are sensitive to stimulants, or are training in hot conditions. As far as the ban goes, it’s a long, complicated story, but the FDA tried and failed to ban ephedra between 1997 and 2000 because of lack of evidence. Then, with the deaths of two high-profile athletes a few years later, along with some sketchy adverse event reports obtained from a company called Metabolife, a ban was enforced in early 2004.

Next, a federal court in Utah determined that there wasn’t enough evidence of ephedrine’s alleged harmful effects and overturned the ban, but it was finally reintroduced in 2006. Ephedrine’s cause wasn’t helped by the fact that criminals were using it to make methamphetamine. So when the lawyers got involved in 2003 and launched huge class-action lawsuits, at the same time as misinformed and misleading media reports on ephedrine were running in the news, juries were easily made sympathetic to the alleged victims of ephedra, resulting in numerous substantial payouts by many of the big supplement companies.

So now that all the smoke has cleared, what are the facts? Statistically, the evidence reveals a good safety record for ephedrine. In the dozens of scientific studies, no serious adverse events were reported, and of the millions of users, they could only uncover 84 deaths in users, and only five of those were likely caused by ephedrine! So that makes ephedrine/ephedra safer than many drugs and certainly several times safer than long-term use of alcohol or tobacco.

To read more by Mark Gilbert, check out FitnessInventor.com