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Before You Buy, BEWARE These Dangerous Diet Pills!

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What Exactly Are Diet Supplements?

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Everyone was particularly obsessed with a combo drug called fenfluramine-phentermine more popularly known as fen-phen. Marketed as a weight-loss miracle, the drug helped users lose an average of 30 pounds in just a few months. It became a total sensation in the media, attracting such a cult-like following that in , its year of peak use, 18 million prescriptions were written for it. But despite its catchy nickname and miraculous fat-evaporating abilities, the too-good-to-be-true pill did indeed prove to be too good to be true.

Fen-phen was shown to cause heart valve problems in up to one-third of people who used it, in addition to a potentially fatal lung condition called primary pulmonary hypertension PPH. By , the FDA had banned fenfluramine, one of the two drugs contained in the combo, and yanked fen-phen from the market.

But not before thousands of people suffered serious side effects and even died, including Mary Linnen , 30, of Massachusetts, who was dead from PPH just ten months after taking fen-phen to lose weight for her wedding. The fen-phen scandal was sufficiently shocking that it scared many women off of weight-loss drugs entirely, in addition to causing doctors to become skittish about handing out prescriptions.

The FDA didn't approve any new diet drugs for a decade. Instead, women begrudgingly returned to exercise and fad eating plans like the South Beach Diet Phentermine, as it turns out, never went off the market. It has been low-key available on its own ever since fen-phen was pulled.


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The most recent FDA study, from , found that over 25 million prescriptions for phentermine were dispensed between and 65 percent of those were to women between the ages of 17 and And the number of prescriptions doubled between and , according to the health-care data company Iqvia. Taken solo, the phen half of fen-phen doesn't melt pounds quite as miraculously as the infamous super-drug, but it's still an effective appetite suppressant, helping users lose weight without having to lift a dumbbell.

Doctors believe it works by targeting the hypothalamus the part of the brain responsible for satiety and boosting neurotransmitters that help minimize hunger and cravings. Rebecca Scritchfield, RDN, a registered dietician nutritionist who runs a body-positive anti-dieting nutrition group in Washington D.

Harmful Effects of Diet Pills and Supplements

This has driven phen users underground, to a network of online health and fitness message boards where they can anonymously share doctor recommendations and compare doses with their "phrend friends. My bod is a mushy mess. Publicly, she received comments like, Love your body! But she got multiple DMs telling her about a local weight-loss clinic that prescribed phentermine, a drug that could supposedly make her skinny fast. With wannabe fitness influencers doing crunches next to her?

Not six months later she was down 60 pounds and wearing her skinny jeans. It was five months after Stacey swallowed her first phen that she passed out. She was at a bar with friends, one of whom caught her in his arms. No one medication for hypertension works for every single person. That new understanding is why some major medical associations have come to see diet pills as intrinsic in the battle against obesity. Weight loss drugs are recommended supplements to diet and exercise — included, for example, in guidelines by the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology and the Obesity Society, Bohula said.

There are probably a few reasons for this, including cost, if not covered by insurance, and a perception that these agents are not safe in light of the history with weight loss agents. In fact, a report that examined the medical records of 2. Vijaya Surampudi, an endocrinologist and an assistant professor of medicine at the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of California, Los Angeles. I think a lot of physicians are uncomfortable prescribing weight loss medications.

Fen-phen scares off a lot of them. When it comes to dieting, Americans need to reframe how they view weight loss, Surampudi said.