Hydroxycut Recall: What Other Diet Pills Are Unsafe?

If you're taking Hydroxycut to lose weight, stop immediately! The FDA has issued a Hydroxycut recall due to reports that the weight loss pills may cause jaundice and liver failure. The FDA has received many complaints from consumers about serious health problems resulting from using Hydroxycut, including one death of a 19-year-old.

The FDA has gone ahead and issued the Hydroxycut recall, but researchers still haven't pinpointed the ingredient in Hydroxycut that causes jaundice and liver failure. This means there could be more diet products on the market that contain similar ingredients to those found in Hydroxycut, so it might be best to just avoid taking diet pills altogether for the time being.

The Hydroxycut recall isn't the first time that diet pills have been pulled from shelves. Remember Ripped Fuel, Diet Fuel, and Metabolife? These diet pills contained an "all natural" ingredient called ephedra that was supposed to help dieters have more energy and burn more calories (like these products, Hydroxycut claims that it contains all-natural ingredients that aid in weight loss, as well). These dangerous diet pills were popular with professional athletes and dieters alike, but it's the death of a pro athlete that really started making the FDA start looking at ephedra as something dangerous. Shortly after Orioles pitcher Steve Belcher died in 2003, the substance ephedra was banned. It was found that ephedra could cause heart attacks and strokes, even in healthy, young and athletic users, so as someone who tried it as a teen and experienced rapid heartbeats, mood swings, and altered sleep patterns, I'm glad products containing it were banned. You can still find Ripped Fuel, Diet Fuel, and Metabolife on shelves, however; they've cut out the ephedra, but like the many energy drinks on the market, they still contain way too much caffeine (which is also still probably not very healthy).

A medical journal recently reported on one of the ingredients in Hydroxycut, hydroxycitric acid, a substance derived from a fruit. The journal found that this substance could possibly cause liver damage, but these findings have not been confirmed by the FDA. Even Alli, the diet drug that claims to be the only approved by the FDA, has been linked to health problems, including breast cancer, inconvenient bowel movements, and preventing the body from absorbing all of the nutrients it needs to stay healthy.

So the moral of the story here is: just because these products make it on the market doesn't mean that they are safe, so it's best to diet the good ol' fashioned way, or try a diet that focuses on smaller portion sizes of food, like NutriSystem, not pills that contain potentially dangerous ingredients.

SOURCES: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124119585491077697.html%3Fmod%3Dgooglenews_wsj
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1486940/arod_and_americas_fling_with_ripped.html?cat=14