After having reviewed over 295 diet pills in the last year, I’ve come to realize that the one and only factor that determines how effective a diet pill is likely to be is the ingredient profile. If the ingredients are proven to work and they is enough of the ingredient included, it’s usually a good bet that you will lose some weight. Without those two things, it’s anyone’s guess.
When you start to research the ingredients that are in a given diet pill, you’ll want to be sure that you use credible sources. Unfortunately, many diet pills provide information on the ingredients that sounds more like a sales pitch (because it is) than unbiased statements. A such, you should always verify their cliams by researching the ingredients for yourself. PubMed, Wikipedia, and peer-reviewed medical journals are good sources of unbiased information.
One common trick that diet pills will use is to cite a clinical study of an ingredient, but try to make it appear as though it was a study on their product itself. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when they cite research on ingredients as long as they disclose that the research is actually on the ingredient in the diet pill. Also, many will ‘quote’ research but will give no reference to verify that the study was legitimate or that it even happened. Essentially if they don’t clearly reference the study in a way that you can find it yourself, you shouldn’t believe anything that they’ve said.
The reason that it is so important for you to verify their claims through your own research is that there are a lot of ingredients that a lot of people believe are effective and yet they have not been proven to be in any actual clinical studies. Hoodia Gordonii and Acai Berry are good examples of this. Despite the fact that they have not been proven by a single legitimate (documented) clinical study, they have become extremely popular because of the hype that diet pill companies have created. Hence the need for your own independent verification.
So if I check out all the ingredients in the diet pill and they look as though they’ve been proven to effectively cause weight loss, I can then assume the diet pill will work right? Well, not so fast. You then have to verify the amounts of the ingredients used. Many diet pills will use what they call ‘Proprietary Blends’ in which they don’t have to disclose the amounts of each ingredient in the pill. They only list the ingredient.
As you can imagine, it’s important to know the amounts of the ingredients. If 900 mg of a certain ingredient have been shown to be needed to be effective, and your diet pill only containts 200 mg, you can bet that you aren’t going to get the results that the studies have shown. Unfortunately when diet pills use proprietary blends, most of them take the opportunity to include a fraction of the amounts that are needed (to save on costs) and you have no way knowing.
Another thing for you to watch out for is when diet pills put a big long laundry list of ingredient on the label trying to impress you into thinking the diet pill will work. With so many ingredients you usually can’t fit the correct amounts in. So don’t be impressed.
Some of what you’ve read may seem like common sense. It is. But it’s so often overlooked by consumers that diet pill companies are making a killing by providing sub-par products. When it comes down it, the ingredients are the only things that make a pill effective. So make sure you do your homework to make the right choices when picking diet pills.
