Diets to Make Your Balls Shrivel

So, I blogged last week and within a few hours I had been sent a piece of stonkingly well disguised spam by a friend. I'm not entirely sure that his account hadn't been hacked to tell you the truth. The spam itself linked me to a web page (which has since been taken down). This page was a mocked up version of the BBC Health webpage. It even came with working links. The date, however said the 32nd January 2015, and not even the numpties in the BBC would make that mistake. Double checking by searching for the page from the BBC homepage naturally produced no results. 

Searching for the content, which I will come to in a moment, brought up a range of disgruntled women's magazines claiming their layout had been plagerised by the purveyors of said slimming aid, in order to give it legitimacy. It appears that the people who want you to buy this product regularly pretend to have been reviewed by trusted, mainstream media sites and given a glowing reference. They then spam links to their fake pages by hacking people's email. 

Even without doing any further research into this dietary fad, I would hardly want to put it in my mouth, knowing that the advertisers have to resort to imitation, fraud, hacking and spam to get their message across. Seriously, would you accept their claims? If so, what sort of a numpty are you? Please, just put all your spare cash in an envelope and mail it to me. I promise to redistribute the wealth of Nigeria to you upon receipt of a mere £40,000.

Anyway, on to the product. The spam page showed a clip from someone called Oz (of whom I've previously never heard) extolling the benefits of a bean called Garcinia cambogia. Oz, I later discovered, is a sensation salesman of the gutter press/Fox news variety, who cares little for the truth, preferring to increase his shows' ratings with drama and opinion, rather than fact. The bean itself is in fact a fruit also known as the Malabar tamarind. It grows on trees in South East Asia and looks like a small pumpkin.

On its own G. cambogia does nothing much to reduce weight. Heymsfield et al (1988) did a study using randomised trials with a placebo control. Weight loss occurs in rats, but not in humans. The fruit does contain a type of acid, though, called HCA. It is similar to citric acid and can temporarily block an enzyme that forms part of the metabolic chain turning excess sugar into stored fat. Just stopping this process temporarily will not make you lose weight unless you exercise alongside it, and I can see some of you sticking your hands up right now to point out that you could just do the exercise without taking the supplement. Yes, you could, and it would probably give similar results. A high fibre, low calorie diet would do you more good.

There is quite a reasonable overview here, on a body-building website. Bear in mind that they haven't mentioned some of the side effects: in 2005, Food and Chemical Toxicology published a study which showed large doses of HCA caused testicular toxicity in rats. I'd recommend reading the research here. It is possible that body-builders don't consider testicular atrophy to be a serious side effect, or maybe figure that most of their members would have already contracted (boom boom!) the effect from steroid overuse anyway.

One last point. HCA can stop you feeling hungry. It helps your liver pump out glucose into your blood ready for you to use during exercise. This is fab, just before you take part in a big sporting event, like a marathon or a football match, i.e. fab if you are going to use up that sugar. It is not fab if you suffer from high blood sugar (diabetes) as it works in the opposite way to insulin in many respects and could really cause some control problems. It is also not recommended for anyone with a liver problem.

Overall, in small doses, it is mostly harmless. It can only help use up stores of energy if you do the exercise to go with it. It is not a miracle weight loss product. It is not advised for diabetics, pregnant women, children, people with liver and kidney disease or the gullible.