Slimming Aids

There are numerous slimming aids marketed to attract us willing slimmers.  Let’s look at some of their claims and see if they do offer miraculous weight loss!

Stop taking the tablets:

Stop swallowing claims that lecithin helps to dissolve excess fat in your body.  Lecithin is important to you, it's chief body function is to help move fat around.  For example, it carries fat from the intestine into storage cells by breaking it up into tiny droplets.  What lecithin advocators don't point out is that your body makes all the lecithin it needs.  Even if you did need more in order to break up the fat into even tinier droplets, the fat would still stay inside the cells of your fatty tissue.  No convenient seepage takes place, if you were to lie down nude on a roll of kitchen paper, you wouldn't rise slimmer leaving a greasy mark behind!  You would still have some fat stores, even when you reach target weight.

Ignore the pineapple myth:

Pineapple is a perfectly good fruit, but it does not have any special slimming power.  No food does.  Pineapple does contain an enzyme that breaks up the molecules of protein so that it can be absorbed through the gut wall into the bloodstream.  However,  your gut is already well supplied with a whole range of such enzymes.  They cope well on your body's behalf even if you never swallow a single pineapple piece.  Extra enzymes won't slim you and pineapple is not endowed with magical slimming properties.

Grapefruit & boiled eggs:

Any idea that grapefruit has a special knack of breaking down fat by increasing metabolism is nonsense.  The Grapefruit diet works by cutting total calorie intake to a slimming level, not because grapefruit contains an anti-fat ingredient.  Yet grapefruit is still credited with some slimming magic.  Another misguided idea that crops up concerns hard-boiled eggs.  The theory that these are so difficult to digest that the process uses up more calories than the egg provides, is rubbish.  No food does this.

Stay clear of sweatsuits:

Claims that plastic sweat-inducing garments can help you lose extra inches should be ignored.  When you sweat you lose water, not fat, and you can't wear anything or take anything to reduce a specific area of the body.

Cider vinegar won’t burn fat:

Cider vinegar is widely claimed to have special healing values for arthritis and to help the body burn up unwanted fat, instead of storing it.  Let's take a close look at what cider vinegar actually is!  It begins as plain apple juice, which is allowed to ferment so that some of the sugar in it turns to alcohol and becomes apple cider.  This is then allowed to undergo a second fermentation whereby some of the alcohol turns into acetic acid, which is exactly the same as the acid in ordinary vinegar.  Meanwhile, the minerals in the original apple juice haven't changed, nor have most of the other constituents.  In fact, drinking this "unique medicine" is much the same as drinking ordinary apple juice or eating an apple.  Acetic acid does nothing at all for health.  So if cider vinegar did have a magical effect on surplus weight, arthritic joints, and so on, it follows that you'd get the same effect from eating apples.  But it doesn't and you won't!

You don't need glucose:

Glucose tablets could conceivably be useful to an athlete engaged in prolonged and really strenuous activity, e.g. a majrathon runner, because this exertion could allow the blood sugar level to become abnormally low.  Glucose is metabolised more quickly than other sugars but to take glucose tablets or a glucose drink for energy and to diet at the same time makes no sense at all.  Glucose has exactly the same calorific value as sugar and extra calories are just what the slimmer doesn't need. The whole idea is to get calories from the body's stores of surplus fat.

Leave Royal Jelly for the bees:

There's no doubt that royal jelly is good for baby bees.  The question is does it do anything for us?  The truth is that no one has yet demonstrated that humans benefit from eating royal jelly.  However, just suppose the special substance which turns an ordinary bee larva into a queen bee rather than a worker did have a similar booster effect on you - bracing you against stress, turning you into a power-house of energy, and so on!  It seems logical to expect that you would need to take it in proportions similar to the dose a baby bee is given.  That would work out to be around 10kg (22lb) a day!!

Capsules can't cure fat:

Sunflower seed oil capsules are widelyclaimed to break down body fat, keep down cholesterol levels and help reduce high blood pressure.  But here's a perfect example of a few facts being twisted into unreliable nonsense.  Let's follow the 'argument'.  It begins with the fatty cholesterol-containing deposits inside the arteries that may increase and possibly cause a heart attack.  Many research scientists believe that these deposits and subsequent heart attacks are more likely to occur if you eat lots of saturated fats (found especially in meats and butter) and less likely to occur if you eat polyunsaturated fats to be found especially in some vegetable oils, such as sunflower seed, maize or corn oils.

Now we come to the point where the argument gets illogical.  'Taking sunflower seed oil reduces the chances that fatty deposits will form in the arteries'  (which perhaps it may); 'so this means that the oil dissolves the fatty deposits' (which it doesn't).  'This means sunflower seed oil will disperse excessive fat anywhere in the body' (which it most certainly will not).  What is more, taking a small amount of sunflower seed oil without making other changes to the diet is unlikely to reduce cholesterol levels in blood and certainly won't do a thing for blood pressure!