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Weight Loss Products

Science or Snake Oil: is Garcinia cambogia the magic weight-loss pill it’s hyped up to be?

The burgeoning field of complementary medicines, including weight-loss products, is now a billion-dollar industry. Every year, more people are spending disposable income on complementary and alternative medicines that may prove to have no benefit for our health.

Garcinia Cambogia is one such example. Marketed as a weight-loss pill, it has had an exponential rise in sales since it was featured on the Doctor Oz show.

Garcinia cambogia is the former scientific name of a native Southeast Asian plant, belonging to the family Clusiaceae, that bears a pumpkin-shaped fruit. The skin of the fruit contains the active ingredient, hydroxycitric acid (HCA). HCA inhibits an enzyme that produces fatty acid, thus suppressing fatty acid and the processing of cholesterol.

But does this mode of action translate to the weight-loss claims associated with it? Or is it just clever marketing convincing us this product helps us lose weight?

An Australian advertisement for the weight-loss supplement Garcinia Cambogia.
Screenshot, http://www.garciniacambogiasave.com/, CC BY

Double-blinded, randomised controlled trials are the gold standard of clinical study and whenever possible should be conducted to test the effectiveness of a treatment compared to a placebo. Weight-loss products should be assessed for a minimum of six months, with a further six-month follow-up period (12 months total).

There has never been a long-term study investigating the efficacy of Garcinia Cambogia. Most of the studies have been conducted in animals.

In fact, the majority of well-designed trials investigating the effect of this product on weight loss have found no effect that is of clinical relevance. In a 12-week double-blind, placebo-controlled trial conducted in humans, people receiving 3000mg of Garcinia Cambogia extract (1500mg of the active component HCA) per day lost the same amount of weight as the control group.

Another 12-week study with a four-week follow-up (16 weeks total) also found no greater weight-loss effect than for a placebo control group. For those studies where a statistically significant effect was reported, the weight loss was around one kilogram more than for those receiving a placebo pill.

Positive and greater weight losses were found in some studies, but this effect is suppressed when looking at all of the studies combined.

The Garcinia Cambogia plant.
Livia Lacolare/Flickr, CC BY

With respect to other health benefits from taking this supplement, the evidence to suggest it can improve blood cholesterol levels is lacking.

Most importantly, the product safety profile of Garcinia Cambogia has been adequately tested and there appear to be no issues.

Some complementary medicines have been found to contribute to improved health outcomes, through increased efficacy and cost-effectiveness. However, if there is to be a role for such complementary and alternative weight-loss products and medicines, we must build upon the evidence to investigate whether these increasingly popular products are a viable treatment option.

A recent Obesity Australia and Price Waterhouse Coopers report found obesity cost Australia A$8.6 billion in 2011-2012, with the indirect costs far higher. We must establish whether complementary medicines have a role to play in preventing and treating obesity. If we take no action to reduce obesity rates, an additional 2.4 million people will become obese at a cost of $87.7 billion over 10 years.

Please visit this website if you’re interested in taking part in our clinical weight-loss trials on Garcinia Cambogia and other weight-loss supplements.

Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

Hardgainers guide to lifting weights

As a hardgainer you know how hard it is to put on muscle. The hours in the gym, the eating, the constant ing yourself on the scale, it is all very difficult to take but you keep trying to gain muscle anyway.

There are a few things that you can do to try to gain more muscle and I believe that if you have a plan even the toughest of hardgainers can still gain a few pounds in a couple of months. As you know most bodybuilders not on roids can only gain about two pounds a month but if you make radical changes then you can gain rather quickly for a short amount of time.

So here are some tips to get better gains in the gym:

Weightlifting Tips for Hardgainers

Hardgainers guide to lifting weights

Tips for hardgainers

1.    The key to gaining muscle is to conserve your energy in an almost slothlike style. When as a hardgainer you are doing your workout try to get the most muscle fibers working in the least number of sets and reps.

2.    Skip the cardio. Even though you know that you are trying to get yourself in better shape you still want to keep the cardio out of your workout. As you do cardio workouts your hard earned muscle is going to disappear as you lose your  fat¦but you do not have any fat to speak of do you?

3.    Hardgainers need to mix up the workouts still to confuse your muscles into jumping in strength and mass.

So now I am going to get into some detail. What kind of workouts should you try in order to gain some more muscle? The key I believe in making gains is to break up your workouts and do high low rep workouts that will really shock your muscles.

What you need to do is go to a two day split where you work chest, shoulders and triceps in one workout and legs, back and biceps on another day with two cycles of this a week. A total of four workouts a week is all that you really need.

One of the real problems that Muscle and Fitness as well as other magazines has is the idea that you need to do 20 sets per muscle group. This may be true for a steroid using pro but for normal mortals we can only get away with four to six sets per muscle group. Here is a sample of how you should do a chest workout.

  • 1 set of 12 reps of light flat bench to warm up
  • 2 sets of 6 reps of bench press at as close to max as possible
  • 2 sets of 6 reps of cable crossovers at max
  • 2 sets of 6 reps of incline flyes at max .

A few things to note about this is that after the workout you should feel sick from the amount of that you have lifted but at the same time you should not be exhausted as you did only a few reps. This kind of workout will tax your muscles with the minimum really of number of reps for muscle gain while at the same time you should stay away from overtraining with only a few reps and sets.

Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

Cold Medicine for kids

You may have heard that the FDA has cautioned gainst giving any kind of cold medicine to kids saying that it does not do any good anyway. I am not too sure about this as we have always given stuff to our kids to help them sleep at night when they have a cold or congestion but we have never bothered to give it to them during the day. I guess maybe we will have to research this a little better and thankfully both kids are quite healthy these days.

Anyway I grabbed the following tips from MSNBC that was attached to the article about this very subject.

With the safety and usefulness of cold medicines now in doubt for children under 6, what alternatives can parents try? Old-fashioned remedies are poised to make a comeback.

You have to wait out a cold; treating symptoms, at any age, doesn’t make the cold go away faster.

But to make stuffy tots feel better and help them rest, pediatric specialists recommend:

 

Plenty of liquids, from water to chicken soup.

Suction bulbs can gently clear infants’ clogged noses.

Saline nose drops loosen thick secretions so noses drain more easily.

A cool-mist humidifier in the child’s bedroom.

Some chest creams can ease stuffiness with menthol or other fragrances, but check labels for age restrictions.

Acetaminophen or ibuprofen, as recommended by your doctor, to alleviate pain or discomfort but check that they don’t contain extra ingredients like decongestants or antihistamines.