Sunday Evening Blogging

A new diet craze has swept the inter-tubes and has been lauded as "a revolution in weight loss". The claims of this diet are pretty amazing. Specifically, the claim I came across went something to the effect of "a friend of a friend lost 3o to 40 pounds in a month". Wow, if that's true, who needs liposuction?

Since my Sunday Skeptic antenna was keen on checking the veracity of this extraordinary weight loss claim, I began to poke around and dig up references and data on this new diet. It was called The hCG Diet. hCG stands for Human Chorionic Gonadotropin and is a hormone produced in pregnant women who are, well, pregnant.

The basic premise behind the diet is that by taking HCG along with dietary modifications, you can lose a ridiculous amount of weight. Up to 1 to 3 pounds a day. HCG proponents say that during pregnancy HCG almost completely controls a woman's metabolism and that in non-pregnant persons, HCG increases the metabolism similar to pregnant females.

Now you can either inject HCG or take it orally. Wait, what? I was under the impression that injection and ingestion had very different mechanisms by which a substance enters the blood stream. Whatever, maybe two modalities were researched and two different drugs were created to meet the needs of a discerning public.

The accompanying diet modifications require the dieter to intake only 500 calories a day. The HCG folks call this a Very Low Calorie Diet (VLCD). Seriously, after reading this statement, my jaw dropped. 500 calories a day isn't much at all. In fact, the FDA bases their percentage daily values on those Nutrition Facts labels on a 2,000 calorie a day diet. (If you haven't read the FDA site on the Nutrition Facts labels I linked to, take a gander, it's worth it.)

At this point, I'd become very skeptical of the HCG diet claims. Mostly because anyone on a 500 calorie a day diet will most likely lose weight due to a lack of proper energy intake. By only ingesting 1/4 the amount of energy your body needs to think, walk and talk your body is going to get the energy from elsewhere. Usually it gets it from the bodies internal store of energy, fat. You reduce energy intake, your body increases energy uptake from fat and, presto chango, you lose weight.

Truthfully, there are a lot of warning signs that the HCG diet is a fraud and probably shouldn't be followed. Kevin Trudeau's push of the diet for one. Trudeau is a modern day snake oil salesman who has been convicted several times for lying about his product's ability to cure you. I have very little sympathy for this man especially since he proffers fake 'natural' cures for life threatening diseases like cancer. It's disheartening to see someone bypass chemotherapy for raw vegetables.

Also, I did a quick check of pubmed.gov (a site that collects and indexes medical citations) and found that HCG's effects on weight loss had been studied and deemed no more effective than injections of placebo.

I did, however, take a little pleasure in skimming the book "Pounds and Inches" of the HCG diet progenitor one Dr. A.T.W. Siemeons. The book is a heap of silliness with nary a double blind trial in site but this quote tickled my fancy the most "Throughout his research, Dr. Simeons noted how patients lost significant amounts of weight while their bodies reshaped naturally- without exercise, and without effort." LOL! Without exercise or effort, the telltale sign of a weight loss charlatan.

So, if you're planning to lose weight, do your research before jumping into the next internet fed craze. And always remember, caveat emptor. :)