Controversy surrounds the popular hCG diet
Angie Marotto had never needed to be on a diet, but when the scale reached 140 pounds, the 5-foot-tall Marotto decided it was time to act.
She began to exercise more, taking a Pilates class for four months, four times a week.
I did not lose “one single pound after even going four times a week,” she said.
It was then that two friends recommended the hCG diet.
“The truth is that I don’t know how it works, but you do lose weight,” says Marotto, 51, who lost 15 pounds during the month she used a solution of homeopathic drops — bought at a vitamin store — containing human chorionic gonadotropin, better known as hCG, combined with a 500-calorie-a-day diet.
“I did not pass out even once, but I did avoid exercising during the diet,” says Marotto, who admits it was impossible for her to eat only 500 calories a day. “I ate a little bit more because, really, those are too few calories.”
Manuel Jiménez, 28, also lost 23 pounds in the four weeks that he received daily injections of 125 units of hCG. He strictly followed the instructions of not eating more than 540 calories per day given by the doctor who administered the injections. “It’s incredible, the pounds disappear from Day 1. The diet is tough, I felt bad a couple of times, but you hold up when you start seeing results,” he says.
Jiménez and Marotto are among millions of people in the United States who, lured by promises of fast weight loss, have subjected themselves to the hCG diet, ignoring the criticism from the medical community and the Food and Drug Administration, which on Dec. 7 banned the sale of seven homeopathic products with hCG after considering them “potentially dangerous even when taken in the prescribed way.”
The hCG hormone is extracted from the urine of pregnant women who secrete it in large quantities to promote the development of the fetus. It’s composed of 244 amino acids and is generally used in fertility treatments to induce ovulation in women and to treat low levels of testosterone in men.
The use of hCG in treating obesity problems was proposed for the first time in 1954 by British endocrinologist Albert T. W. Simeons. Based on studies of pregnant women in India who followed low-calorie diets and of adolescents in Rome with Frohlich’s syndrome, which affects the pituitary gland and causes abnormal weight gain in the limbs, the researcher concluded that in both cases the patients lost fat instead of muscle due to the hormone’s effect on the hypothalamus, the region of the brain that regulates the appetite.
After experimenting with variations of hCG levels and changes in the patient’s diet, the specialist proposed a new treatment of obesity in his book, Pounds and Inches, which includes daily injections of 125 units of the hormone and a diet low on carbohydrates and high in protein of 500 calories a day. After his death, the weight loss plan fell out of favor because most patients regained the lost weight and also because other researchers have not been able to replicate the results of the studies conducted by Simeons.
In 1976, the Federal Trade Commission ordered the clinics that promoted the use of hCG to include a warning to consumers that “there is no substantial evidence” that the use of the hormone offers weight-loss benefits. More recently, studies published in 2007 by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition dismissed the usefulness of the hormone, indicating that the weight loss in patients was due to the rigor of the 500-calories-a-day diet and not to the supposed effects of the substance.
Diet and Weight loss with Bill & Sheila
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