Millions of people confront themselves with the No. 1 threat to their health, namely obesity. Obesity has long been blamed for serious conditions such as high blood pressure, high levels of bad cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease, renal failure and even several types of cancer.

 

Losing weight is thus essential to improve all these conditions and being under a continuous threat, people make desperate choices. They often choose to lose weight by using weight loss products, not knowing that by doing so they are putting their health at risk because of some of these products’ ingredients.

 

The Food and Drug Administration in December warned about more than 25 weight loss products that contain undeclared, active pharmaceutical ingredients that may pose risks to people’s health.

 

The agency is now expanding that list to 72 illegal weight loss products, which contain high levels of ingredients which are a threat to human health. Moreover, these ingredients are not even written on the labels of the products, which makes the situation even worse. Not knowing what these products contain, people cannot make “smart” choices for their health.

 

Many of the products included in the FDA list, which you can find here, are marketed as “dietary supplements, claiming to be natural or contain only herbal ingredients. Generally, they can be found on Web sites and in some retail stores and beauty salons.

 

Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research said, “consumers have no way of knowing that these products contain dangerous drugs that could cause serious consequences to their health.”