Checking my in-box today I came upon this offering:
HCG Diet Direct – hCG Diet Drops – Homeopathic Drops
HCG Diet Direct – Lose weight on the homeopathic HCG Diet without heavy exercise or without frozen or prepared foods to buy. HCG Diet Direct – a brand you can trust
http://losskilosmore.ru
HCG = Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, a hormone produced during pregnancy. Quite how it would help you lose weight, I am not sure. The idea that it could do so appears to be based on claims that – in combination with an ultra-low calorie diet (around 500 cal/day) – use of this hormone would help obese individuals lose weight. However, there is no clinical evidence to support this claim, & I see that in the US over-the-counter sales of ‘homeopathic’ HCG diet products were banned by the Food & Drugs Administration – something our advertiser gets around by being based in Russia. (Although I see you can also buy the stuff here in NZ.)
I suppose you could argue that since the highly diluted nature of most homeopathic products means that they contain no active ingredients, then all you are ingesting is water or sugar pills (the latter, of course, are not going to help with weight loss!), so the product’s hardly going to do any harm. It’s not unknown for homeopathic ‘remedies’ to actually contain physiologically-active levels of various drugs & other chemicals (think Zicam), and this may have influenced the FDA’s ban, but more likely they were working from the viewpoint that there is no way such a weight-loss product could do what is claimed for it. Low-cal diets – yes, the weight should come off (although whether it will stay off is another matter). After all, the original claims about HCG’s efficacy in weight loss saw it combined with that very low caloric intake. So why bother with the additional water/sugar pills? Anyone buying such products in the expectation that the kilos will melt away without any additional effort on their part is likely to be sadly disappointed.
In other news: the Quackometer examines claims that homeopathic products are useful in dealing with sports injuries (worth knowing, I guess, as Olympics fever strikes).