What You Need to Know About Weight-Loss Supplements, Part 1

Well, my previous post touching on my own eating habits didn't go over so well. Deep breath, clear the decks. I'll take counsel whether to develop that thread as I'd intended. 
In this post, although I'm talking about weight loss, it's not my weight loss. I'm offering some background to Dr. Mercola's recent article about the allure, the myths, the dangers of weight-loss supplements, better known as "diet pills," as well as the important point that they risk contaminating important, effective supplements with their bad name.
As you can imagine, this is a subject I'm really knowledgeable about, and as a taker of supplements (vitamins and minerals, some amino acids, herbs) I also value consumers' free access to the full gamut of herbs, hormones, amino acids and other nutritive aids. Let me give you some useful information.
Foundations. So many important places to start. Let's start with this:
There's no such thing as a diet in a bottle. This should be obvious on the "if it sounds too good to be true, it's probably too good to be true" criterion. But people who resort to diet pills tend to feel emotionally desperate and as such are more likely to be swayed by hype.

from http://jamesdawsonmartin.com/blog/fat-burnerweight-loss-pills-scam-money/

Even the most unscrupulously hyperbolic bottles of weight loss have some very fine print somewhere saying, effectively, your mileage may vary, do not exceed the dose, and that this is not a substitute for a healthy diet and exercise plan.
In fact, I think some weight-loss supplements may have a sort of stealth placebo effect, either by providing an affirmation through their claims or by triggering the person taking them to adhere better to a diet plan because now they're taking action by taking the pill. Sometimes they trigger adherence to a diet plan less subtly. One supplement I've never tried is Alli, which blocks fat absorption, because I've read the horror stories about what can happen if you eat any fat while taking it. In other words, if you're taking this fat-blocking diet pill you can't eat any fat, so you might as well save your money and go on a fat-free diet!

Why do it? Before we go any further, it's important to say why someone might want to take a weight-loss supplement. Although "detox" is such a cliched and carelessly used term at the moment, the detox nuance here is crucially important.
Things may work differently if you're cutting non-excess weight, but if you have excess weight, both excess fat and excess fluid, it is protecting you. This may be true on an emotional level, and/or it is sequestering toxins. Fat binds toxins up away from your circulation; fluid holds soluble toxins in solution so that they don't concentrate to dangerous levels in the blood.
I can't emphasize enough how important it is to understand this, because when you start releasing the fat and the fluid, you're going to need some good hazardous-materials-collection strategies. Many diet pills, especially the loud and unsubtle ones, are basically laxatives and diuretics, often harsh ones. Mostly these will make you pee and poop a lot, with severe cramping, and with nothing to buffer your body from the toxins that were being held in solution. This can lead to dangerous electrolyte imbalances and dehydration.

from http://www.sullivanvitamins.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=5487

(Every grocery store carries some or several variations of this tea. In this case, the single ingredient is senna, about the harshest laxative in existence. Some other brands have a few other herbs, like mallow and wild rhubarb, to mellow it out a bit (pun not intended), but they all have senna, and some have cassia too.)

How do they work? Last point for this post--how do weight-loss supplements do what they claim to do?

from: http://www.123rf.com/stock-photo/fat_to_thin.html

Knowing the answer to this can help a person decide which kind of supplement might support them. In the right context, some of these supplements can support weight loss, but only in the right circumstances, correctly used, and with the right support.
I could think of eight basic categories/modalities of supplement. I'll line them out briefly here and give some examples in the next post.
(1) Laxatives and diuretics -- as discussed just above. Bad idea, may bring about transient fluid weight loss but usually with negative consequences. On the other hand, a really high-quality herbal cleanse, well supported by a good practitioner and accompanied by green juices, skin brushing, and perhaps colonics and saunas, can support weight loss as part of gentle and healthy removal of stored toxins.
(2) Stimulants. Yep -- a good many weight-loss supplements contain some or several forms of caffeine (straight-up caffeine, coffee or green or oolong tea extract, kola nut, cacao bean), often compounded with B vitamins, for quick stimulation. This may be helpful for a quick boost of focus, but it can also lead to an equal and opposite crash later. Ephedra (ma huang) and Bitter Orange Extract fall in the same category but, interestingly, green coffee bean extract is something different.
Laxatives and Stimulants are the sledgehammers; the other kinds of supplement work in subtler ways, and there are some overlaps between them.
(3) Supporters/activators of hormones, either stimulating the pancreas or the liver, or supporting the adrenals or thyroid, or affecting blood sugar balance. Many of these work by virtue of high antioxidant contents which are generally helpful in reducing inflammation.
(4) Creators of a sense of satiety, either by physically providing bulk or by working with leptin, the so-called satiety hormone.
(5) Binders that prevent absorption of nutrients in general (and also bind up toxins and escort them out), not the same as a laxative or a bulking agent.
(6) Blockers of absorption of a specific nutrient (carbohydrate or fat).
(7) Alternative sources of fuel for the brain for sustained energy and reduced cravings
(8) Neurotransmitter supporters to improve mood and reduce cravings.

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from http://www.whats4eats.com/beverages/sorrel-punch-recipe

That's it for this post! To recap: trust your b.s. meter, beware of letting go of fat and fluid too fast, and understand that there's a bunch of dross out there, but there are also many different types of supplement that may be helpful. All of the best ones are holistic--they're beneficial for other things than just weight loss--and often they're adaptogenic, which means they provide the support needed in the given environment, weight loss here, perhaps weight gain there.

In the next post, I'll give some examples of the eight categories outlined above and address the question of whether it's better to take a pill with a combination of contents, a single-herb pill, or go direct to the powder/leaf/bark/flower. The answer isn't as straightforward as you might guess.