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HCG Diet Slapped by FDA, FTC

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Eating just 500 calories a day and injecting a hormone found in pregnant women’s urine. That’s the HCG diet. It is growing in popularity, but raising concerns with government health officials. HCG stands for Human chorionic gonadotropin. It is produced in the placenta during pregnancy.

Around 50 years ago Albert Simeons, a British scientist, in India studied the pregnancy of poor women in India who were living on very low calorie diets. Despite this, they were able to reach term and have their baby. Simeons, an endocrinologist, concluded that the HCG hormone was instructing the body to burn FAT from the mother’s body in order to save the baby.

Since then, the HCG method has been used in various settings and tested in various studies. The conclusion – no evidence that the HCG diet actually works. Obviously, consuming 500 calories a day causes weight loss at first. But it may cause severe health problems due to a prolonged period of malnutrition.

Last week, The FDA and FTC sent warning letters to manufacturers of the HCG hormone, which can be injected or taken orally, accusing them of, well, quackery.

If you are planning to lose weight, there are no easy tricks. You need to find a way to change your overall lifestyle from this point on. Otherwise you will quickly regain all the weight you lost.

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  • http://www.thefrugaldietitian.com Nancy – The Frugal Dietitian

    There are too many Daily Deal sites selling the drops – hopefully they will stop wasting people’s $$$$$$$.

  • Paty

    y would anyone want to mess up their hormones! people don’t understand how crucial hormone homeostasis is!

    • StandupKing

      Naw, it’s easy. They’re just hormones and you’re flooded with them around the clock, anyway. Hey, do you know how to make a hormone? Don’t pay her! Ha, ha, that’s a knee-slapper!!

  • Joy- Healthy & Happy!

    I used a reliable source for my spray (not drops or injections) and got wonderful results! It’s a HEALTHY plan (organic proteins and veggies) that you stay on for ONLY 40 days maximum at a time. Then on to a sensible plan that boosts your calorie intake to 1500-1700 cal. per day eating anything you want EXCEPT for sugars & starches. After a few weeks of that you slowly introduce sugars & starches to see if anything triggers weight gain. I lost 35 lbs. SAFELY, felt great the whole time and would recommend this to anyone who’s serious about losing FAT only (which I checked regularly). Everyone tells me I look great & I haven’t gained that weight back. Is it for everyone? No. Are there scams out there? Yes. Go with a source you trust and that makes sense to you. To make an accusation that ALL HCG products are dangerous is just plain ignorant!

    • calmly

      Whether you starve yourself for four or forty days, it is not safe nor healthy. Hormones can’t be absorbed through your mouth or skin, so what you’ve experienced is called a ‘placebo effect’ and how nice it worked for you. But it is ignorant (your words) to assume something is safe for everyone because you say it is, with no actual scientific fact to back it up.

      • calmly

        Er, hormones can absorb through skin, that was a silly thing for me to type. What I meant to expand on is, 1. Most of those drops and sprays do NOT contain actual hormone and 2. using the drops orally or spray thru skin will not target fat the way the injections do.

        The rest of my comment stands.

    • http://www.thefrugaldietitian.com Nancy – The Frugal Dietitian

      Any one on a 500 calorie diet will lose weight BUT it also decreases your Basal metabolic rate, BMR (resting energy expenditure, REE) so you need less calories to maintain your current weight. I am sure the placebo effect was in play.

      • Joy- Healthy & Happy!

        This product actually BOOSTED my metabolism, Nancy! This was NOT a placebo effect, as some might say. I tried numerous other rational, healthy programs. All started out pretty well the first week… then the next several weeks.. NOTHING! No inches lost, no lbs lost. I partially blame it on menopause & a slower metabolism. But now I’m consuming approx. 1600 calories per day, exercising about 3 times a week and maintaining my weight. I couldn’t do that before. There is no way this is in my mind… not with what I tried for the last few years and failed. I lost FAT, not muscle…. BIG difference.

  • D_zacher

    My mom lost about 55lbs on this diet. She isn’t kidding herself by thinking it is sustainable, but it was the kick in the pants that she needed to start making lifestyle choices and actually see results.

  • Jazz4thelord

    I’ve done this and it works. I wasn’t tired at all. In the past I’ve gone on reduced calorie diets if 1,200 a day, as well as Atkins, and by the four day, I was so weak I almost fainted. If you have real HCG, like the injections given under a physician’s supervision, then thr 500 calorie diet is not the same as the diet without the HCG, period.

  • Kate Heuchera

    Joy…I’m curious how you knew it was a “reliable source”?

    I took HCG injections during infertility treatment(not for weight loss). It does have legitimate uses outside the claims of weight loss. As I understand it your body can’t process the drug orally(similar to things like insulin, etc), so it can really only be processed if it is injected.  So that makes me skeptical of a lot of the HCG products.

    HCG in pregnancy is suspected to cause nausea..so perhaps if one was injecting it…maybe that would kill your appetite.  It doesn’t seem very pleasant though.

    I’m glad the FDA has stepped in here.

  • Kate Heuchera

    Joy…I’m curious how you knew it was a “reliable source”?

    I took HCG injections during infertility treatment(not for weight loss). It does have legitimate uses outside the claims of weight loss. As I understand it your body can’t process the drug orally(similar to things like insulin, etc), so it can really only be processed if it is injected.  So that makes me skeptical of a lot of the HCG products.

    HCG in pregnancy is suspected to cause nausea..so perhaps if one was injecting it…maybe that would kill your appetite.  It doesn’t seem very pleasant though.

    I’m glad the FDA has stepped in here.

  • Pingback: A Better FDA? Why Not? « GxP Perspectives « Health and Medical News and Resources

  • http://www.lindasdietdelites.com/low-carb-or-sugar-free-34/low-carb-breads-35/ Low Carb Bread

    We were asked by many customers to carry the drops, but ultimately decided we did not want to be involved in marketing them in any way.

  • Mary N

    I work at a medical weight loss clinic in Illinois (Complete Clinics), and we do use HCG.  The FDA crackdown seems to be on retail outlets (I even saw HCG at Costco!), and mail order sites.  Most of these are scams from what I hear from the patients that come to us.  Though not FDA approved for weight loss, I will say that we’ve seen great results in our patients. 

    The FDA has come out and said that the 500 calorie diet is unhealthy, and I think that’s one of the main reasons they’ve banned the retail and online sites from selling it.  Another reason is that there’s no oversight over what this over the counter HCG really is. 

    At our clinic, we do not have a 500 calorie diet, and our HCG has a certificate of authenticity.  The injectibles are not synthetic, unlike all the mail order HCG out there.  We emphasize healthy eating, with no calorie restriction. 

    I’d HIGHLY recommend going to a medically supervised weight loss clinic so that you can lose weight in a healthy way.  I’ve heard horror stories about those that did online HCG (adverse reactions), and those that did a 500 calorie diet did lose weight, but gained it back as soon as they stopped restricting their calories to 500.  

  • moogalioogali

    What has been slapped down by the FDA are the over the counter homeopathic HCG supplements that don’t contain any HCG hormone at all.