Are Herbal Diet Pills Right For You?

I took a few herbal diet pills in college once on a whim, and I didn’t eat anything for nearly two days afterwards. I also didn’t really get much sleep either. Anything that makes you wired like that and kills your appetite so completely just isn’t good for you.

While they were ‘ephedra free’ and were supposedly totally natural and safe, I don’t think I’d ever felt so polluted and ill in my life. A year later I discovered that the FDA had banned the same herbal diet pills I had taken, and I have to wonder what it was I had put in my body.

Herbal diet pills are very popular these days as an alternative to more traditional methods of weight loss like diet and exercise. Herbal treatments in general are very trendy today, which I find a little worrisome for several reasons.

First of all, just about anything can be in an herbal diet pill. ‘Herbs’ are a kind of loophole in the FDA system, as they are not classified as drugs and therefore don’t have the rigorous standards for testing and safety that drugs normally get.

Make no mistake about it though, herbs can be every bit as potent and harmful as drugs. The difference between medicinal herbs and drugs is really quite vague anyway, as most drugs themselves come from a kind of plant or herb.

Most of the time the ‘herbal’ classification doesn’t last very long; the FDA eventually calls it a drug and brings in the scientists. When that happens herbal diet pills often either become available only by prescription or are banned completely. Snooping around a little from site to site selling herbal diet pills, it is clear that the makers of these things are all too familiar with the FDA.

Many sites even use it to their advantage saying things to the effect of ‘buy it now before the FDA bans it!’. You have to ask yourself, if the FDA is likely going to ban an herbal diet pill you’re interested in, should you be taking it at all?

I took a few herbal diet pills in college once on a whim, and I didn’t eat anything for nearly two days afterwards. I also didn’t really get much sleep either. Anything that makes you wired like that and kills your appetite so completely just isn’t good for you.

While they were ‘ephedra free’ and were supposedly totally natural and safe, I don’t think I’d ever felt so polluted and ill in my life. A year later I discovered that the FDA had banned the same herbal diet pills I had taken, and I have to wonder what it was I had put in my body.

Anyway, just don’t be fooled by the word ‘herbal’ in an herbal diet pill. I would actually trust a regular diet pill that is FDA approved a lot more than some herbal diet pill concoction that has who knows what in it. The words herbal and natural are marketing ploys and should never be confused with the word safe unless there’s been some testing to prove it.